Dario Goes From SNL to White House, Some Personal Agent News, Mongo Got Zucked | Lo Toney, Zack London, Anish Acharya, Evan Conrad, Gstaad Guy

(00:46) - Dario Gets the SNL Treatment (09:24) - Dario's Private Dinner with Trump (12:15) - Cambridge Warns of AI Acceleration (16:59) - Anthropic Investor Fears AI? (21:57) - Inside Instinct's Rapid Rise/Some Personal Agent News (47:06) - Zuck Hires MongoDB CEO (58:32) - Lo Toney discusses his experience as the founding and managing partner of Plexo Capital, which he launched after serving as a partner at GV. He explains Plexo’s strategy of backing emerging venture fund managers, evaluating their technical expertise and investment perspectives, and using their networks to access promising companies, while also addressing AI’s impact, rapidly rising valuations, evolving fund strategies, and investments in controversial sectors. (01:30:15) - Zack London discusses his work as Gossip Goblin, creating dark, sardonic AI-generated science-fiction videos and building a transhumanist universe. He explains how years of experimentation led him to launch a studio and produce a feature-length film with writers, voice actors, musicians, Foley artists, and a full post-production team, emphasizing that AI filmmaking still requires significant human craft and authorship. (01:36:49) - Anish Acharya discusses how personal AI agents could benefit restaurants, streamline commerce, empower consumers, and eventually become independent economic actors. A general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he also examines challenges involving advertising models, bot restrictions, legal disputes, and high computing costs. (01:47:28) - Evan Conrad discusses San Francisco Compute’s mission to create independent, standardized compute markets that help new cloud providers build, finance, and sell GPU infrastructure. The co-founder and CEO explains how physically settled markets could reduce risk, improve utilization, and address potential AI infrastructure bubbles by establishing predictable future compute prices. (02:00:49) - Gstaad Guy discusses his satirical characters, Constance and Colton, which embody the competing worlds of understated old-money taste and status-driven luxury. He explores how wealthy consumers develop discernment, why family-owned hospitality often preserves authentic luxury, and how he builds content for a small but influential audience rather than chasing mass appeal. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, September 28th, 2026. We are live from the TBN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, say both these use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more. Let's check in on the road to Christmas. How many days we got? I think it's 87 days until Christmas. 87 days until.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  And you can feel it in your bones.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  You can. You can.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  You can.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  You can. Uh, well, thank you for tuning into TBN today. We have a great show. We have a bunch of great guests coming on.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  Been too long.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Get down. It has been too long. Uh, just a couple more sleeps, but good to have everyone here with us in the chat. Uh, anyway, um, the, uh, the, I, the, the most viral video I saw over the weekend was, uh, the, the parody of Dario Amade on SNL. That felt like it really took over the timeline. Uh, Martin Casado said, honestly, downplayed how ridiculous the rhetoric and broader situation is. Uh, it was a funny clip. There were a bunch of interesting nuance. I mean, first it's like, okay, clearly the, the, the AI rhetoric and the public discourse is getting to like a, a new height to the point where like a lab leader of a private company can be, can even be parodied on SNL because the audience understands who that is.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Uh, so it's interesting to see that like, okay, yes, like, uh, Dario's done enough on Oprah and CNN and, and NBC and, uh, ABC and all the major news networks to be relevant to the broader audience. Um, yeah. And, and because it only really works, like you can't, like they could never pair, there's a lot of people in tech that we know that could, wouldn't work as, uh, you know, SNL punching bags, but he's made it. He's made it.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  It says a lot that the, like the sweater vest thing is iconic enough.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  To be like a part of a character.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  I wonder if he'll stick with that or switch it up. Uh, cause it's not, it's not his leather jacket yet. It's not his Hawaiian t-shirt yet, but, uh, there is such value into leaning into like a consistent thing, but I don't know. We'll see. Um, the, the other, the interesting like wrinkle here is that while Dario is at the point where he is enough of a name that they can do this bit and, and make jokes and it's so, it's relevant to the SNL audience. Obviously it went way more viral on X than I, I think it probably did on YouTube, but, uh, when Michael Che is introducing the segment, he sort of stumbles over Dario's name a little bit, like he's reading it from the cue cards and he says like, and, uh, this is Dario.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  And then he pauses and it seems like maybe Dario Amade is not fully a household name in the SNL writers room yet, uh, in the sense that they were like, okay, who is this guy? Let's look him up. Okay. Get him on the cue cards. I don't know. Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but it felt like this was certainly like a crossing the chasm moment, like the first time everyone gets to know Dario. Uh, but very, very funny, and it really illuminates a little bit of like the, the complexity of the discourse, the irony of saying, you know, somebody's got to save me from me, basically. But let's play a little bit of it, see, see, see what you think.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  You know, you know, you know, uh, thanks for having me, Michael. Um, I may have been alarming in my recent interviews, but I want to assure you that if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Dario, can you just explain how your company isn't going to kill us?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  So, so, so, so, so.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  Not the most flattering depiction.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  That's a really hard question.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  It shouldn't be.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  So, you know, come on, Dario. Come on, Dario, you can do this.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Is that an explicit reference to like the ring?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Let's reassure them.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Like Gollum, like where the voice is in the head?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  AI is the devil and AI is maker.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  What? It seems like it, right?

• 3:57Speaker 02

  No, well, so, look.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Well, AI is the devil and AI is maker.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  All the major AI players, we have talked about this extensively and we are all on the same page here. We do not condone what we are doing.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Shouldn't you be talking about the pros of AI?

• 4:13John Coogan?

  It's very, very tough to thread the needle on this messaging.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Cure cancer?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Look, so put it this way, in 10 years, there is about a 10% chance that cancer won't be a problem for anyone.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  For anyone. I don't like the way you're saying that, buddy. I mean, how is this a good thing?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Look, um, so Che, it's simple. If you could drink a milk that made your life easier, but there was a 10% chance it killed you, would you drink the milk?

• 4:38John Coogan?

  No.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Really?

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Well, what if there's a button that when you push it, everyone dies? Would you push the button?

• 4:47John Coogan?

  No.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Really?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Dario, are you okay?

• 4:51Speaker 02

  I'm sort of blacking out every time I talk. Um, I'd love to start this interview over or better yet, uh, you know, my whole life.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  All right, Dario, just tell us, what are the pros of AI?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  All right. Land the plane, Dario. I can't. You can.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  We can hear you, Dario.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  No one can hear you, Dario. Say something reassuring. Like what? Try the milk thing. I already said that.

• 5:23John Coogan?

  Does milk a reference to something or is that just random?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  AI is not a weapon. It's a tool. A tool for building weapons and I urge you to urge me to stop.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Dario Amade, everybody.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  We dig this. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Uh, no, but yeah, budget downstream, uh, stuff from this. I mean, obviously, uh, getting pilloried by SNL, not the first time it's happened to a tech leader.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, write, write a passage.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. Uh, they've done this for all sorts of people. Also, there's a number of tech leaders that have actually hosted SNL.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, you know, going, going pretty hard on him in some ways. That being said, he's always like incredibly fascinating to listen to and he has incredible, uh, clarity of, of thought and he does, at times he'll like pause, you know, in a, in a way that would maybe scare normal people a little bit. Um, but the thing that I think he can do that will have the biggest impact is to stop.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Put on a suit. I agree.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, I actually like the, I like the, the, whatever kind of shawl sweater thing that is.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Isn't it, is it Brunello?

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  Prob, yeah.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  I think someone, I think someone talked it, right? It's Brunello. So, you know, it's nice, but it's quite a luxury. And I feel like a power tie, some shoulder padding would go a long way. Anyway.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  The biggest thing he can do is to stop, uh, smiling when he's talking about really bad devastating things.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so I'm sure that that's something.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's something to be learned from like, uh, the way like Fed chairmen speak or the way, uh, you know, the, the head of the FDA or the head of the military speaks. Like we've talked to some of these folks and like, they're very austere, very serious and our show's very lighthearted and we just kind of have to like click into a different mode when you're talking to somebody like, uh, like a Michael Kratzios or someone who's like dealing with the weight of something big and, and, and puts up a wall that is, it is a, it is a performance, but it serves a very valuable purpose, which is like, I take this very seriously. Um, or you can go the opposite way, the, the Mark Zuckerberg way and rip it and just be like, yeah, I'm having fun with AI, which is honestly like, it feels like people are

• 7:35John Coogan?

  like, yeah, I kind of want that energy a little bit. Just give me the white pill, but I don't know.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And again, I, I don't think that Zuck's approach is at all appealing to the people actually pushing the frontier.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 7:46Jordi Hays?

  Um, like no, no one's gonna, yeah, no one's gonna take, no, no one, no researchers like take.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, there are, there are some researchers.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  Dating, dating back to basically Demis being like, you know, at that moment where he realizes Zuck is just as excited about VR as he is AI, right? Um, anyways, um, I, I, I, I hope that, um.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Maybe VR will be bigger than AI, Jordy. Maybe.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't you like that?

• 8:17John Coogan?

  I would love that.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't you like that, John?

• 8:19John Coogan?

  I would love that. Uh, but yeah.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so, so from SNL headed straight into dinner.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  With the president.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Sunday. I mean, he wasn't actually at SNL, uh, but, uh, yeah, it's like you wake up to that on, on Sunday morning and you have to imagine that Trump sees it, but Trump has been both, he's hosted, he's hosted SNL multiple times and he's also been made fun of on SNL for years. Like when he gets elected, they basically hire an actor to come and be him for four years for the entire tenure, because they're going to be doing the cold open with him like basically every other week. Um, and so maybe there's a little bit of camaraderie. They're like, hey, we've both been through this, Dario, it's not so bad. It's actually kind of, kind of funny or, or maybe they're both like, yeah, the news really is fake.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  We got, we got.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, as, as, uh, as critical as it is, at the same time, I think it's something that all founders should aspire to, right? When you're starting your company and, and investors say, well, where do you, where do you see yourself, you know, where do you see yourself in the company and?

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Getting absolutely skewered on SNL. On the biggest stage. Perhaps, perhaps.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Andrew Curran says, uh, President Trump has personally invited Dario to a private dinner tonight. Uh, that was yesterday.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  What happened on Sunday night?

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  This will be the first time they've actually met one-on-one. Big chance to patch things up or crash the plane into the mountain.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  They're actually running it back tomorrow night, Tuesday night. There's a dinner in DC for all the AI leaders with the White House again. So, I mean, the pace of this stuff is really, really, really picking up. There's, there's meetings every, every week now, basically. And, uh, yeah, I mean, there's lots to work through and no one is going to get to put their, their head in the sand, not even the comedians at SNL. They will have to chime in as well as, uh, the politicians in the lab leaders. Uh, and so, yeah, despite, uh, Dario being excluded from, it seemed like he was excluded from that White House dinner with Xi Jinping, and, uh, and that basically every top tech leader was invited to. He was noticeably absent. President Trump, you know, followed up with a one-on-one dinner with Dario to hear his

• 10:23John Coogan?

  side of the story. And I wonder what type of leaks or reporting will come out of that? You would think that that would be going on today. Maybe there will be some news, or maybe they'll put out a joint statement. Maybe everything went really well, but, I mean, both-

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Or a joint. You could see Dario sign up for Truth Social.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Sure. Or UFC, courtside, or ringside.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  Ringside.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  UFC would be pretty electric.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  UFC with, with the Don.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  I could see it.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Nitro Circus.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  They'll be doing the Nitro Circus thing before UFC.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  I want to see Dana White, Dario, Trump.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Just squatted up.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  You think they'll be doing slapboxing before, too?

• 11:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  For sure. You gotta do the full suite if you, if you go all in. Uh, anyway, um, uh, so, uh, uh, there's also interesting timing that, I don't know if this, how timed up this was, but, uh, every day there's another proposal for how to manage AI safety. Uh, this one feels like the most formal concepting exercise from a group of top AI researchers. Uh, it's published through the University of Cambridge, and it's a good list that pulls from, uh, all over the industry. It doesn't feel like there's any lab that has, uh, like a finger on the scale. Not that that really matters. I feel like if Demis comes out with some great thing, and Anthropic and OpenAI sign on, and, you know, there,

• 11:45John Coogan?

  there's a lot of energy, like, people will just be like, this is great, we should take it seriously. But this one was, this one was interesting because it was notably, uh, like diverse in the researchers. I didn't even know that there were this many researchers that didn't look at, that didn't work at labs by now. Uh, but there in fact are a lot that signed on. Uh, so Jeffrey Hinton, uh, also a Nobel laureate, but touring award winner alongside Yashua, uh, Yashua Bengio, Andrew Barto, industry leader from OpenAI, Jacob, uh, the chief scientist from Microsoft, Eric Horvitz, the chief scientific officer, and Jack Clark from Anthropic. So, uh, this, you know, Sam was talking to, uh, it was, it wasn't Axios, it was, uh, he was, he was interviewed and he was saying that like,

• 12:29John Coogan?

  maybe we're gonna sit down and get beers, basically. You remember this whole thing? Why don't you guys just sit down and have some beers? That was the, that was the proposal. Uh, and he was like, I don't want to leak anything that's gonna happen, but we are thinking about, thinking about it. And, you know, he's like, you, you can't just-

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  Our personal agents are talking about getting together for a beer.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, but it was very funny framing, but this is like the start of that. It's start of more collaboration between the labs, between the academic community. And, uh, what's interesting is like, they go a little bit further. Uh, you know, Tyler over there's, his criticism has been like, everyone comes out with an AI safety proposal and it's basically always like, we gotta talk about it. And this is a little bit more concrete. So the first one is, uh, they want to set in place the ability to monitor the level of AI-enabled R and D at labs. So what percentage of the code, what percentage of the dollars, what pers- like, give us a, give us FER metrics on how much of the AI R and D is being done

• 13:30John Coogan?

  by artificial intelligence. Anthropic, OpenAI, they've all sort of like, mentioned this in blog posts, that it's happening. But there's also this like vague jockeying because it's better to be further along on the RSI curve for financial reasons. So there's not really an apples to, like, no one really feels like they have a strong handle on like, whether there's more RSI going on at OpenAI or Anthropic. Like, it feels like they both have very different metrics. Like, OpenAI says like, we have a intern level. And then, uh, and then, uh, Anthropic will say like, we had Claude spin up a thousand ideas and like, you can't really apples to apples those. The proposal's like, let's get some metrics

• 14:12John Coogan?

  in place so we can actually monitor this thing. Uh, then they also have, again, it's sort of like, we need to talk about it, but they want the government to create firm plans for responses to potential theoretical bad scenarios. So like, if there's a big cyber attack, and an agent goes rogue and brings down the internet and hacks into a bunch of stuff, like, what, what will the government do? What's the equivalent, like FEMA? Like, we have a response for like, there's a big hurricane, it's town, you bring in people, there's food, there's shelter, there's like, a plan. And we don't really have that for like, the internet went down because, like, an agent took it down. Uh, same thing for

• 14:52John Coogan?

  biosecurity. Uh, they have a couple others, even like, uh, economic dislocation, that type of thing. Uh, so they want, they want the gover- they're, they're not proposing the solutions to those, yet, but they're saying like, the gov- this is where the government should be prepared. So, I don't know. Uh, it's a good read. Uh, they have an executive summary you can read, and then the, the full paper, uh, is, uh, is pretty digestible. It's not-

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  Did you see that, uh, China has places you can go to, to simulate being in a disaster?

• 15:24John Coogan?

  No.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  Like, high, you know, super high winds and, and, um, uh-

• 15:30John Coogan?

  Flash floods?

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  Flash floods, things like that. Should we have, uh, like, AI disaster simulations where, you know, you can, uh, be, be in a data center that's going rogue and, and kind of work to, to shut it down with friends?

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Just to kind of like, live action roleplay through it?

• 15:50John Coogan?

  I like that. I like that. I, I'm kind of treating Modern Warfare 4 like that. I feel like that's getting me enough cycles of like, the simulation of, you know, you're already, play against bots, you're already shooting, shooting AI, basically. So, getting some drills in.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know, it's, it's a joke, but I, I wouldn't actually be surprised that a, a future first-person shooter, or like, one of these open world games is centered around the, the Terminator scenario.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  There was, there was a game, there was a game, I forget what it's called, but, uh, yeah, like, you drop in with three people and you're on this like, planet. There's one that's Starship Troopers themed, so it's like the bug planet. And then there's another planet that you can drop into that's like the Terminator planet. And you're going up against like, they basically like ripped Terminator's intellectual property. Like, they look exactly like T-

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  RX says, why is Tyler not back in school? He was doing the longest internship in history. He turned it down.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  I turned it down.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  He actually turned it down, just to grind for this.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, uh, the things will never be chill again. The doomers who shaped the AI safety freakout. The Wall Street Journal has an article here, uh, about some early Anthropic employees who are considering buying remote land in the United States to rok- to relocate to if AI goes seriously wrong. They're getting bunkies. They're going bunker mode. Yeah. Employees also trained doomsday scenarios and preparation plans in a private Slack, while Anthropic workers have their own office space inside Berkeley's Constellation AI Safety Community. The wider safety scene has discussed iodine pills, remote islands, and electromagnetically shielded desert bunkers. Uh, interesting that no one's trying to go to space. I, I would have thought that would have been, that was George Hotz's original

• 17:30John Coogan?

  pitch. He was like, if AI goes crazy, I want to be, I want to be on a- Put me on Starship. Spaceship, leaving the light cone as fast AI can't catch up to you. Blast shield behind you, and then you'll be, you'll be safe from the intelligence-

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  Could just say he's not very AGI pill, because obviously, the superintelligence would just figure out a way to just go faster than the speed of light and catch up.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if you, if you go the maximum speed, they can't catch up ever, right? So, then you are safe. But you gotta accelerate to exactly one C.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  This is like an interesting example of, like, actual answer to the, to the, uh, Teller Cowan question, which is like, if you're, if you really care about Doom, why aren't you making financial-

• 18:14John Coogan?

  This is a financial one.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  Decisions. Yeah, this is like-

• 18:16John Coogan?

  You want to lever up, get a lot of debt, and buy a, buy a bunker, buy remote land with a massive mortgage.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, because usually the answer to the, the Doomer thing is like, well, I'm not gonna be able to get to my bunker because the, you know, bio-terrorism will already have killed me or something. This is an interesting instantiation of this.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  The thing that always, the thing that always just like breaks down with these scenarios is like-

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  You know, every, every, every guy is like sort of played out the scenario in their head, right? And where are you going to be, where are you going to be best off in some like remote area where you don't know any people that actually live there, right? Let's pick a, let's pick Wyoming, right? You really think that the world is like falling apart and you're just going to head over to Wyoming and set up shop in a community that knows you've been building your bunkie there, right? And, and they're just going to be like, oh yeah, like there's a bunker over there. It has everything you need in it to survive.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  You know, you know what?

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but, you know, they paid us to set it up years ago and, and, and let's not, we shouldn't, we shouldn't just go occupy said bunker for ourselves.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  So the prepper community has a term for this. They say, don't be a loot drop.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a loot, it's a loot drop.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  You're a loot drop if you do this. If you go and set up a really luxurious bunker with a bunch of supplies, but you don't actually know the community, you're not integrated into like everyone else.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  The fabric of, of the-

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, the fabric. So ideally it's like you want your team and everyone else to all be in it together. And so that, you know, there's no, there's no squabbling. But yeah, you can just set up a loot drop and then everyone's like, oh yeah, I installed a crazy safe over there. Let's go get that as soon as the, the crisis happens. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of fun game theory that you can play through there. I would, I would personally, I think we need to regulate because I would personally, I would hate to be in a self-defense situation with, with a bunch of rogue agents. And imagine if all the Waymos went rogue and we were just forced because of self-defense reasons.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  You and all your best friends had to-

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Just drive around and just have to shoot them out of the windows of our cars like all day long. Like that would be, that'd be a nightmare.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  That'd be a nightmare. You would never, you've never even-

• 20:23John Coogan?

  If I was in a self-defense situation, I would do it, but it would, it would, it would pain me.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  Also a journal piece on-

• 20:44John Coogan?

  What else happened?

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  On Yan-

• 20:46John Coogan?

  Yan Tolan.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Tolan.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Skype founder.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  Skype founder.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Big investor.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Early investor in the labs.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  Take a wild guess where he's from.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Estonia?

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, Tolan. He's from Tolan.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, also the primary funder of all, I would say most of the sort of AI Doom theater movement.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  He also dances hip hop. I wonder what that, how'd they get that scoop? It's interesting.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  He warns about racing to build a technology that could end humanity. Yeah, there's, there's a funny, uh, there's a funny anecdote in here about champagne. I liked that part of this. I didn't like the doom part, but I did like this. So they debated machine consciousness at 40,000 feet over flutes of champagne. See? White pill. Anyway, that's enough of that article. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about some personal agents.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  Noah Shin jumped on, founder of Instinct, broke his silence finally with none other than our friend and legend Patrick O'Shaughnessy. I'm only, I was trying to listen on the way in to the gym this morning. I've got maybe 30 minutes through. Patrick pulled out the highlights. He, he summarized his own podcast before you could summarize it. He beat you to the punch. He said, a list of surprising and mind boggling stats from this conversation. One billion a year in transaction volume, still invite only. I can't remember if that's total, I think that's actually total volume to date. I don't think that's like run rate volume.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  It says a year, so that would be-

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what it says in here, but I, I just remember from the episode I was, I heard it as one.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, if it's, if, if it's to date, then it's higher.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. It could be, it could be like run rating higher. Uh, growing 10% a day.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  I read that as one billion dollars of annualized, that they are at one billion dollars of annualized transaction volume. But I guess it's maybe even higher? I don't know. Yeah. Interesting.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  Growing 10% a day, spend $0 on marketing. Uh, they have this, you know, pretty amazing flywheel where people post screenshots all the time. That's doing a lot of marketing.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  A lot of the, but a lot of the screenshots are like horrible accidents, but maybe those actually drive curiosity and like people being like, well, I'm not going to make that same stupid mistake and the service is probably getting better. You think those actually help?

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  I think those help.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, they probably do. People are curious and they're like, oh, I want to see it. And I'll be safe. I won't give it my login details, but I'll still-

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  No, and it, it can't be said enough. A lot of people within tech have experienced AI doing things for them, like making a product. Most people outside have not experienced that yet, and it's just a magical thing.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  40% of users shared a personal credit card with Instinct within three weeks. Compute demand is doubling roughly every week. Uh, at five to eight percent daily growth over the months it takes to bring new compute online, Instinct would reach about a hundred million users. On Instinct's own A/B test, it matches OPUS 5 performance at a fraction of the cost. Noah spends about 40% of his time on compute. Buying compute at the last minute costs three to four X more. Makes sense. Background work runs on setups that are three X, five X and eight X more efficient on the same compute. 50% of Instinct's transaction volume is travel.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  That's a crazy stat.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Instinct plans to take a cut of what users buy, take rates. Shopify is two and a half to 30%. Amazon is 15%. Apple is 30%. Noah's personal goal is to keep Instinct free for everyone for life. Some small businesses run their entire back office on Instinct. That's interesting. Uh, users who connect at least one piece of sensitive information retain at about 80%. Just give me one piece. Just one piece. Just give me one piece of sensitive-

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Tell me your darkest secret.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  Some users send more than 90% of their messages-

• 25:09John Coogan?

  What kind of skeletons do you have in your closet?

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  To Instinct by voice. Say an app makes 70% of its money from ads and 30% from actually selling you things. Agents could wipe out the 70%. But Noah thinks that 30% gets much bigger because people buy more when buying takes zero effort. Uh, this is a big question for me, right? Because already buying something on a Shopify store takes close to zero effort. Like the checkout is actually down to if I land on the website and I know what I want, I can check out within, and, and again, Shopify doesn't have an ads business, so that's fine.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  There are things that are not fun to shop for though. There's a lot of stuff, especially if it's like, I was thinking about like cable management. I wanted to get some cable management stuff for my desk and like, I don't really care about the brand. I don't care about the, the flow. I just want like, you know, a suite, I needed some like command strips maybe, like a little tray, like whatever like the modern solution is to like a couple of cables, a power brick, like just go and get something that's well reviewed and like a suite that will figure out. What kind of voice are you doing?

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Instinct launched to about 200 friends and family. Invites have sold on eBay for around $300. More than 50% of Instinct's traffic doesn't run on iMessage. Instinct has proactively called Noah three times. That's like when, when it's doing something and it, and it has like a deadline, it's like Noah gave the example of like, hey, you really have to sign this like within the next five minutes. Are you available? It'll just call you.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  Call you, okay.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Which is cool. Raised one on 10.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, less than a month after raising two and a half. So Noah is 23. So very, very good summary.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Also same colleges that I went to. He went to North Eastern.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Yeah, so, uh, I guess initial reactions, I, he, they, they talk about like remaking like the entire internet, right? And the example that they talk about is restaurant reservations. And Noah made an interesting point about how restaurant reservations to date are all effectively like first come, first served. So like if you just happen to be the first person to get there, you get the, the prime time slot, even if later someone else is making plans and it's like, you know, he gives the example of like an anniversary or like a special birthday.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  And he's making the point that like the restaurant should be optimizing for the person with the special event happening. And there should be more of like a basically a negotiation in some ways or like a, like the user should have an opportunity to sort of like make their, make their case-

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  For why they should get a table during a time where there's more demand than supply.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I think that, I think that that makes sense. That being said, I think when everyone has a personal agent that's calling and like hammering restaurants and like trying to, like, I think, I think it's very possible, like his argument is that the restaurant wants like the whole space to just be filled with people that are like, it's the most special moment of- Their life.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Twenty-five proposals, everyone clapping every five seconds at the restaurant.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  And, and it's been a while, I mean, it's been a very long, I mean, I worked, worked in a restaurant in, in a high school.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Um, and it's been a while, but, um, my, my read on that was that, uh, it would be insane if every single table was like, it was like the anniversary or the birthday, like restaurants are not generally like set up to like, give that, uh, so maybe, maybe it's like, maybe it's, maybe it's like a feature, not a bug that, that, um, that the reservation, some, at least some of the tables are like, hey, this person's a regular, like they're just

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 29:13Jordi Hays?

  planning, they're just like, they just plan ahead.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that's like actually like a, a, a higher quality customer on the average night than this somebody that's like coming in and this is like their special moment. So.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Okay. I got a question for you.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  If you're at a restaurant and it's someone's birthday and the host brings out a birthday cake and they're singing, how close do you have to be to join in on the singing? If you're at a table over, will you start singing happy birthday?

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I could be at the other end of the restaurant.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Oh, you're a birthday singer no matter what?

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Belting over.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Okay. I like this. I, I'm the same guy.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  I might be belting over four or five tables.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Trying to get them involved on, you don't necessarily need to be at the same table.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  So potentially this opens, this creates the opportunity for a restaurant that's just constantly singing happy birthday on repeat the whole time you're there, because everyone's having a birthday.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  The perpetual.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there are some restaurants that sort of lean into like, they're romantic. So they're the place where anniversaries and proposals happen. And then there's other ones where it's like, yeah, birthdays happen there. And there's like kids birthdays, like you go to a CPK, I'm sure there's like many more like kids birthdays than like proposals.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It is interesting though, because a lot of our, like so much of, like so much of being a, a consumer, like the, the benefits, the highest quality experiences typically go to the people that plan the farthest in advance, right? So like if you're booking a hotel right now for already for like the Christmas holiday, you're at a disadvantage, right? Cause there's some people that were booking like.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Hence why we tell you about the road to Christmas.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  Road to Christmas.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Start planning ahead. Yes.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, uh, it, it will be interesting if, if personal agents kind of rework that. I'm, I'm, I'm not, uh, I don't think it's sustainable for like every single basically reservation or booking to be like a, um, open to basically like negotiation, right?

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Completely disagree. I completely disagree.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Because I think that the reservation system will be an agent as well. And there might be, yes, a, a country of geniuses in a data center negotiating against another country of geniuses in data center. It sounds crazy, but I'm not, I'm, I'm not joking. Like I actually think this is what will happen every time. If you say, if you say, get me, I, I want to have dinner right now. I want to have dinner tonight with Jordy. Like there will be, it will spawn a bunch of agents, call a bunch of restaurants. It will be annoying for the restaurants that aren't on board, but very quickly all the restaurant, uh, you know, phone systems will be equipped to handle it on the other side. They will all share all the relevant information, negotiate, find the proper, answer any questions. Oh, food allergies. Oh, birthdays. How many birthdays are there? You want

• 32:06John Coogan?

  to go for your birthday, but you don't want that many birthdays to be there. Whatever your preferences are, all of that will get penciled out and it will be just more seamless matching. And I don't think that's a problem at all. The, the thing that I'm uncertain about is like, are we going to move into like a seat geek regime where it truly is like surge pricing and the rest, the, the best restaurants might wind up being like, oh yeah, you're sitting down, but you had to pay like two grand for that reservation. And then there are some that are like, it's, we're selling the food like one percent above cost because like there's no, we want to fill seats right now. Um, and this, this happens naturally.

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm just thinking about, I'm just thinking about like, uh, I'll use a, uh, uh, there's a restaurant near where I am that people will plan months and months and months and months out.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  For like special occasions.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  So like if you go there.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  You, there, there will be a lot of people that are like celebrating the anniversary or a birthday.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  And then there's maybe four or five tables every day.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  That the manager kind of just has on lock.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  And if you have a personal relationship with them, they're going to be offered up.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:11Jordi Hays?

  Those eight, those tables are never, in a restaurant that has way more demand for tables than supply, the restaurant is not going to ever take those tables and be like, hey, we're, we're just like handing these over to our, to our, to our AI agent.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  Send.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  But they were never going in the booking system anyway.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Like they were never going on open table or whatever.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  But, but I'm just saying like, in, in that case for that restaurant in particular, like the system is working as intended, which is like, if you want to, if you want to be with us for your special day, plan ahead.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  And we're, we also want to take care of like friends of the restaurant.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a good, this is a good, that's a good point. That's a good point.

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  And, and it's just like that, that, that extra inventory is not going to shift over just because you have an agent that can make your case. So.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  I think some of the, some of the friction in hospitality is designed to reward people that plan really far in advance.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  And people that develop a real relationship with the, with the business and the people that work there. And so

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm just wondering how this sort of like new dynamic fits in where everyone has a super negotiator.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  In the first case, I have my agent book my birthday dinner like six months in advance very easily because it knows when my birthday is and knows that I want to go out to dinner and gets me.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  No, and that, and that's, but that's, but that's using the existing.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  And then for the other one, it's, it's tracking the, the owner of the restaurant on Instagram, sending him cigars and champagne regularly and, and potentially hacking and blackmailing him if.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Needs to go there.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm, I'm very, I'm very, I'm very bullish on telling your agent, hey, I know that this special moment is coming up.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  Make sure that the second bookings open up.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Jordi Hays?

  But that, again, that's, that fits into the sort of like long-term planning category.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  And it's like my, but it's not reworking the fabric of hospitality.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Hmm. Sure.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  It's just sort of like reducing friction.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm just saying like Resy and OpenTable and Toast and all these things, they're going to, they're going to build this sort of like counter infrastructure for the onslaught of agent inbound.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  That is coming to every business owner.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. It will, it will quickly be resolved as soon as these things scale and they, and they are, and they are scaling. And I'm sure that, uh, there, yeah, I mean, I guess a good prediction is like, there will probably be, uh, several breathless, uh, uh, op-eds in the various newspapers about like AI agents are super annoying for my small business. You know, and it's like, now I have to get some tool to solve this.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  Which is kind of funny because.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  We've all been through this with phones.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  How much sympathy are people going to have that business owners being like, I'm being flooded with demand for my products

• 35:54John Coogan?

  But it's not demand. It'll be, it'll be like fake demand because, because the agents will be like checking and, and they'll be like, oh, well, there was nothing available at seven PM on Resy and via this API, but like, maybe if I call, I can get an extra thing. So they're going to call everyone all the time and it's going to be very annoying. Um, there, there, there will be like some frustration that is justified from this. Like any, anytime that there's a, a, a transition, like there will be, uh, frustration. Um, yeah, I, I, I, I think, I mean, a good, a good preview of this is like what we all went through with our phones where like you used to be able to have a cell phone and basically just pick up the phone when it rang. And now it's like, I have my phone in do not disturb 24/7. You can't call me unless I'm, you're already in

• 36:39John Coogan?

  my contacts. Like I can't just pick up the phone randomly because I get so many spam calls. And even Apple like clearly admitted that like the, the phone lines have fallen like because they have a, they have a separate tab in iMessage for like unknown now. And like it gets filtered off because they know that like the rails have truly broken, like the spammers have won unless you wrap it in a filter. And so there will be significant spam filtering that goes on, uh, at the, at the, at the phone level. And that's probably already happening with, uh, you know, just, there's so many services that are calling restaurants and saying like, hey, do you want to, do you, do you need more supplies? Do you want to switch to this

• 37:21John Coogan?

  point of sale system, right? And they don't want those to go through their, uh,

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  You don't want cold calls, uh, and sales calls going through the reservation system. So they probably filter those already. Anyway.

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Josh Constein.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Uh, oh yeah, please.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  Says, this is the whole Instinct pitch deck, by the way, and it's Christian Kyle saying, my three-month-old son is now twice as big as when he was born. He's on track to weigh seven and a half trillion pounds by age 10. Uh, very funny, but.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Such a viral post. This, this is like, this went super viral on Reddit. It goes viral like every couple of months on Reddit and stuff. It's a, it's a wild post. Um, but I did want to set some like, uh, some comps around the Instinct growth numbers that are interesting. So, uh, a billion dollars a year in transaction volume. We're not exactly sure if that's annualized or, or, or to date, but it's kind of the same. Um, for reference, it took Stripe around 18 months to hit one billion of annualized transaction volume, although Stripe also spent two years building in beta before launch. Instinct got to one billion transaction volume in closer to six months, but it's important to note that with Instinct,

• 38:33John Coogan?

  the transactions flow through third-party cards. So they're not making any money off of these transactions yet, but it's very clear to imagine where monetization might happen. Um.

• 38:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. At the very least they could just launch a credit, like their own card.

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Of course.

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  You sign up.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  And they are getting that interchange fee. And they don't need to get, they don't even, they don't even need to get anyone to opt in.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  And you might be able to.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's an easier pitch too, because you're, you're onboarding this AI agent. You're like, I've heard some really crazy stuff about this thing. Like, yeah, I'd, I'd actually like it if you used your card as opposed to like.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  It already has basically a computer, a phone number, email.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Yep. Give it a credit card.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Give it a credit card.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  And so I'm sure they're working on that. And when they do, they're not going to make three percent because you do have to pay Visa and Mastercard, like the underlying rails, but. Earning 1%, half a percent, quarter percent, even even 0.1% on, you know, they grew to a billion. You know, you're talking about getting into, you know, tens of millions of dollars of revenue pretty quickly. And the team's just 14 people. And so you can sort of see why they raised a billion at 10 billion from Benchmark, Sequoia, Co2. There's, you know, yes, you have to believe that that they won't be, you know, killed by Muse and that they will continue to scale. But if if, you know, any of the growth rates sustained for any even a limited amount of time,

• 39:54John Coogan?

  it's going to be a lot of transaction volume, great business, and you can underwrite it pretty safely. And then there's still the there's still the off the offshoot into Amazon world. I think because Amazon doesn't really have a strong play there, but could fit in very well.

• 40:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they have a lot of potential dance partners. And ultimately, things grow really fast because they don't just like grow really fast for no reason.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  No.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Right? So.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  No, good product. And people have and like people have been trying to do different personal agents for specific things. There's definitely been other pitches for, you know, doing commerce, doing flight booking. I'm shocked by that 50% travel. That number seems really, really high. What was the exact stat? 15%, he said, Patrick summarized it as 50% of the transaction volume is travel. Okay, so volume, because when you book a flight, you might be spending a grand. But when you book a restaurant, you're maybe putting down 10 bucks, 20 bucks, maybe 100 bucks. Like, you might not put down anything, right? And so travel, it's not that 50% of like prompts.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  Activity, economic activity.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  But that's where they're making money. And so, yeah, that's another way where they could build like an Expedia type business where they're earning fees on top of booking.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  We got to give a round of applause to Tate Hacker, who says, we're so early. Everyone will be using a full time assistant of compute like this within a year. And the reason I'm clapping is because it's a parking ticket, not just any car that Instinct took care of. It's for a blue R8.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  Blue R8.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  And I just thought this was a wonderful way to sort of share a wonderful car.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Potentially flags.

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, yeah, hopefully it's a V10 with a gated manual. But a very underrated underrated car.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  What is this? This is a very detailed parking ticket, but let's get taken to this. Paid 50% on your personal Visa. Pretty cool.

• 41:55Jordi Hays?

  Like, we get it, dude. We get it. You got a parking ticket and your R8. We get it.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. There's drama in MongoDB world because.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  We'll get to that.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Poaching. You want to get to that later?

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's get to that later. Let's just let's let's close this out. So apparently Adidas is running anti-bot software on their store. You ran into this like pretty recently, not even with with Muse or Instinct, but just researching with with Kodak. And you were thought it was pretty funny because you were actively trying to give a company.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Jordi Hays?

  Business. I think there's a bunch of historical reasons you would want anti-bot software.

• 42:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:48Jordi Hays?

  And then there's now a bunch of very real new reasons why you need to update that and figure out a way to to prevent sort of like bad bots.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:58Jordi Hays?

  But but support like actual consumer bots. So Gary Tan says anti-bot is for losers.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  Really got him.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  It's just slow.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  He really owned him right there.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  It's just slow. It's ridiculous.

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  Other people, the chief economist at Apollo is warning that mass adoption of AI agents could trigger a bank run as they optimize user investments. Gary Gensler spent his last few years as SEC Chair, warning that the exact same problem will hit the markets. The pursuit of algorithmic perfection at scale destroys system stability. Personal finance agents making simultaneous optimal decisions could potentially cause a massive flash crash.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  Agent, a causal coordination with no messages passed between them will show up in a lot of places. Markets will get the big headlines, but the huge number of clever advisors making very similar choices will impact all of human society.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  Human laws were not written for this. They were not written for a lot of what is coming.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  You have to apologize.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  It is. It is about to start happening very fast. Credit to Citrini for basically being the first.

• 44:15John Coogan?

  That was a different thing, but yeah.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. It's the exact.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  That's similar, but.

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just it's an idea of like, there's a lot of aspects of our economy that are that that currently like businesses that work because of friction.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  That friction in some ways will be removed when you have an always on agent that says, hey, you haven't touched this product in a very long time. Do you still want to be paying for this, et cetera, et cetera? I don't think this is, I don't know, like, my my banker will just hit me up and say, hey, I'm gonna, I'm just clearing this with you. I'm gonna sweep funds into.

• 44:52John Coogan?

  Money market.

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Money market account or or T bills. Like, it's not like like a good banking experience is already doing this proactively for you.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  Now, there's, of course, people that maybe they just are set up with like a simple checking account, and they could be moving those into a higher yield account of some sort that aren't doing it. And maybe the agent starts doing that, but like, great, like fundamentally, a great banking experience. They're like doing this on your behalf, like they are. They are aligned.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  To you.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  So I don't think it's I don't think it's as like.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  I would be very like hesitant about how fast this adoption can happen because.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  Wimsom says, dang it, if ordinary people get fair deals and aren't ripped off, it's the end of the economy.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, because I I wonder like the personal AI agents are taking off, but like, we're still in like single digit millions of people doing them. It's going to take time for people to adopt them. And then they need to actually authenticate and add these things, link their bank accounts. And then presumably, the first version of this will be the agent coming to you and saying like, hey, is it okay if I do this? Second order will be like, I just did this. I know it's okay. You trust me. And that relationship, that trust, I feel like that's going to take like years to build up and diffuse through. There there are still like, there's still plenty of friction in the economy. I think I think it's going to take a while for people to to onboard the onboard to this fully.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  I mean, people were, it's the same. It's the same idea of like when ChatGPT came out, people were like, Google search is dead. Like Google, no one will Google search. Google's search revenue is going to go to zero like next year. And it was like, yeah, it was a reasonable replacement, but it took a little bit longer, even though it was growing so fast, faster than any consumer product ever. Incredible revenues, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It still wasn't that fast. And so it's the same thing where it's like, okay, if this happens over like a couple of years, like banks adjust, money market funds adjust. Like, it's not the end of the world potentially, but we'll keep monitoring it. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. Well, Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  Zuck.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses. Meta already serves billions of people at scale and helps hundreds of millions of businesses reach customers. Today, we are starting the next major pillar of our business, Meta Enterprise Platform, to help businesses use AI to grow and transform in new ways as well. Meta Enterprise will use our strengths that few other companies have. Advanced models, leading agents, large scale infrastructure, and years of working closely with many businesses. Initially, we will focus on bringing our full technology stack, including the Muse Agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers to help them grow.

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  To lead this effort, I'm excited that Shuritan CJ Desai, former guest of the show, will join Meta as Chief Enterprise Platform Officer, reporting directly to Zuck. CJ is an experienced enterprise leader with a track record of building full stack software and delivering results in AI, infra, business applications, and security. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, uh, so here's how I think this is gonna go. I think that they created this new business unit. They still have a lot to prove on if they can.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Sorry, if you scroll down, there's some wild comments. Anyway, continue.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, they created this new business unit. They're talking about apps and agents and all this stuff. I think what's really gonna happen is they're gonna do a big compute deal. And then, and then it's gonna look like the, the, this sort of unit is doing. It, it'll quickly go from, let's say, zero to $10 billion a year of revenue. They can sort of use that. They don't have to necessarily break out initially all the, what, where that revenue is coming from, but they can say like, our enterprise platform is, is gone from zero to 10 billion in.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was like the jokes. I mean, analysis was, was sort of trolling with around like, oh, like all the growth in Google Cloud Platform is selling TPUs. It was like a little bit more nuanced than that, but, uh, but there's a bunch of ways to like, wrap up revenue into a, uh, into like an enterprise platform that could be tokens, could be doing inference, could be selling compute, raw bare metal deals, could be, could be actually selling services. Will be interesting to see where it goes. It's still an interesting off valve, uh, off gassing valve because, uh, there, there's some people and we're gonna have a, a niche from Andreessen Horowitz on the show. At 12:35 to talk about personal agents because there's been a lot of debate over like,

• 49:47John Coogan?

  how compute intensive is the average instinct user? Is the average Muse user? Is it like $10 a month? Is it $100 a month? Is it more? Obviously, everyone knows it's gonna get cheaper, but then people will be in an arms race for, oh, well, like this one gives you like the best possible intelligence, so it's more expensive. Um, and so there's a lot of business model considerations there, but, uh, it's interesting that if like, if Muse doesn't fully take off, then you do have the, the enterprise off take for that compute. So you have, so shareholders are maybe more, uh, reassured that, okay, we're really optimistic about Muse. Things seem to be going really well, but if it doesn't.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I think, I think it's important. I think, I think.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Cause there would be a tension, right?

• 50:30Jordi Hays?

  Finds it important to, to not, when, when he sort of capitulates and has to sell compute. He wants to be able to position it as like, yeah, we're, we have this massive enterprise AI business. Versus when SpaceX did it, it was like, oh, wow, they don't have demand for their models.

• 50:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  They have to do this.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Do compute deals.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  And I think that this positioning is smart. For, because even if he is selling compute.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  It's not like he's, doesn't have the same broader, long-term ambitions of like, actually building a, a durable, you know, AI business here with their own models, their own agents, et cetera.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  So I just think it's a better, you know, in SpaceX needed to make a lot of moves really quickly. To, to be in a good spot for the IPO. Had they not needed to move so quickly, they could have positioned it more like this, and I think it will sit better with people.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah, I agree with you on that. I just think, uh, there, there could be a tension like, uh, like imagine if they were like, hey, we're really good at video hosting from Instagram. Like, we're gonna start like a video hosting platform. Like, wouldn't the Instagram team be like, wait, like, we need all the resources we can for, you know, building out our.

• 51:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that was the same exact tension that, that SpaceX and Cursor have had with their own teams that are building models.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, but this is like injecting that tension, right? Unnecessarily potentially?

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  Not unnecessarily. I think.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Why is it necessary?

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  Why is doing this necessary at all?

• 52:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, why not pure play it? Why not say, yeah, we wanna have the whole company aligned behind Muse, behind the products? And yeah, we have a bunch of compute. We're not selling that at all because we're the best to monetize it. Why would we ever give it away?

• 52:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  But of course, if they're, if they're deep in the enterprise and, and, uh, and they have a product that flows through, the, the, the margin will be there. Makes a lot of sense, but, uh, you are, you are kicking off tension, you know, right? Like, uh, we've seen this with other companies. I don't know. We'll see.

• 52:33Jordi Hays?

  Poor MongoDB, down, uh, 16%.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  Oh, it popped. It was down 26% earlier, so.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it recovered a little bit. Uh, yeah, CJ hadn't been there.

• 52:44John Coogan?

  But that's a, that's a very great sign of respect, right?

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  26%.

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, again, we like to see the, the, the, you know, the new, the stock chart nuke as when a founder retires.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  End of an era, just, but, but you wanna see that recovery instantly.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  You don't like it when a hired gun CEO leaves before even investing into their grant. And get sucked.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  You don't like to see that.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, maybe, maybe Buco put it better than I did here. A very perplexing move by Meta. It took Google a decade plus to become an enterprise company. Can Meta even get there? Much muddier story that already includes an eye-popping level of capex and existential battle to be the front door to the new internet. So, yeah, it is a little bit complicated. Uh, at the same time, I mean, I liked semi analysis's breakdown of, hey, if you're buying from Meta, you're getting all of the meta data. Like the, there's a ton of meta engineers. They've been, you know, their keystrokes have been tracked. And so you're like, that's going in the training data. And so if you are trying to do something they might be good at, they might have a really good model for it, basically.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  That was, that, that was the idea, uh, at least as it was, uh, broken down in semi analysis. Uh, anyway.

• 53:57Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  What else is going on?

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of Meta, I wanna try to find that video that I sent to you.

• 54:06Jordi Hays?

  This guy, uh, investing in, in scale right now.

• 54:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's good. Well, while you were pulling it up, Sonnet 5.5 is out, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family. Clear upgrade over Sonnet 5, runs 30% faster, costs up to 30% less for most, most work. Did it make this video? Because they've been doing this thing where the, where the models have been actually responsible for assembling the video. It's always a good demo. But, uh, good results on agentic coating, obviously, uh, cheaper. And, uh, will be interesting to see what people build with it.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, big week, big week for all the labs. Uh, pull up this video of, uh, somebody pitching.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:50Jordi Hays?

  Scale AI.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Let's talk about scale. Raise your hand if you know about.

• 54:54Jordi Hays?

  Wait, and pause for a second.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so this is a group of investors getting pitched SPVs. Let's play this.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Let's talk about scale. Raise your hand if you know about Scale AI. Probably very few of you, is my guess. Okay, I didn't know about it. These guys, um, what makes them amazing is these are the folks that are training the AI models, right? So they provide software that helps train ChatGPT and Claude and Grok and the major, uh, apparently 90% of the world's leading generative AI models are using Scale AI. So Meta says, oh, my gosh, you know, remember if you're running Meta, your biggest problem right now is you don't got enough cash, right? We need hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in data centers and developing our own AI system.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  But they, they thought enough of this company to take $14 billion and put it into Scale a few months ago. And so that's about as good a sign as you're gonna see that sophisticated people on the AI scene believe in this business.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Lots of AI and technology companies use them. Meta, Frontier AI developers like Chat, uh, OpenAI, Microsoft, other major, major model builders, robotics companies are using it. Because remember, you build a robot, you gotta train the, the system that powers the robot how to operate, right? So they're using Scale to do that. Uh, lots of enterprise clients from the Mayo Clinic to.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  Jack, french fries with misinformation.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  I mean, we, we, we had the new CEO on. It is a real business. The Remain Co is, is, is still in business and, and, and, you know, continues to, uh, produce revenue and do deals and do all sorts of things. But, uh, very odd way to represent the Meta deal, which was, you know, a lot of the talent going over to Meta, obviously, the founder.

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, not to mention they, they, I think it instantly lost, like, most of the, they lost a lot of customers after that deal.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 57:04Jordi Hays?

  Because people were like, I don't.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  You have an exclusive deal with, with, uh, with Facebook or Meta, yeah.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  So, so, yeah, anyways, positioning a sort of regulatory arbitrage, right? Uh, Meta needed to buy, uh, Scale without, uh, setting off kind of alarm bells from a, from an antitrust standpoint. And so, uh, yeah, very, very concerning. There's gotta be, I mean, imagine early scale investors, somebody that's like, I have all this stock. What, what am I gonna do with it? I'll sell it, uh, at, at, at almost any price.

• 57:39John Coogan?

  Well, the early investors got paid out, right? That was the structure of the deal. They all got like a dividend, so, uh, you still own the shares.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  But you still own the share.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Okay, so you wanna move.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  But they're sitting there being like, this company has no future prospects if some guy in a hotel will, will buy them, I guess, maybe sell them, but.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Book me a Best Western conference room right now. I need to move these shares.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  They're probably not sitting there. Whoever is providing the shares is not exactly happy that he's putting those kind of videos.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  It is crazy that it's hitting the, hitting the Instagram reels. Did that just get served to you or is that like uniquely viral content?

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  I think it, I think it knows that I'm.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  You've interviewed the founder. Anyway, uh, we will talk about SpaceX and Starship 14 splashing down Pacific Ocean later in the show. In the meantime, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we'll bring in our first guest of the show, the founding and managing partner of Plexo Capital.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 58:40John Coogan?

  How you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 58:42Speaker 05

  Hey, doing well. Thanks for having me.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. Since this is the first time on the show, would love, uh, to give everyone an introduction on yourself and, uh, just break down a little bit of your background, a little bit of your day to day. And, uh, and then, I mean, we have so many questions about the firm and the strategy and we can go through all that.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  Sounds good. So I founded Plexo Capital while I was at GV, Google Ventures. So I was a partner on the investing team focused mainly on marketplaces and mobile. One of the things that we had done at GV was to identify GPs that were Fund One, micro VCs typically investing at the pre-seed, seed stage, that we could partner with. And what better way to partner with them than by kind of meeting one of their needs, which was helping them with their fundraise effort? So we invested into about five funds that were emerging managers with unique perspectives and access to deal flow. And it worked for us. And I looked at it and said, hey, I think

• 59:42Speaker 05

  I can build a strategy around this. So this was, I think about 2016.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  And I switched over to an entrepreneur and residence role, focused on building out the strategy.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Speaker 05

  Spun out in the spring of 2018, brought on Alphabet as our anchor investor for our Fund One, and also brought on some other big tech companies, Intel, Cisco, brought on some financial institutions like the Royal Bank of Canada, and some traditional institutional LPs like Ford Foundation and Mass Mutual.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  Can you explain the evolution of the relationship there with Alphabet? Because GV, formerly Google Ventures, was, had, it had all the benefits of a venture capital firm financially, but also a lot of the benefits of a corporate venture arm with partnerships and potential acquisitions. And that's always been something that corporate venture arms have sort of grappled with and evolved over time. But going from Alphabet to a fund of funds into emerging managers, is there any conversation of dialogue and value add there? Or is it purely, we think this is a great allocation of capital, this is purely financial investment?

• 1:01:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. So a couple of questions there. So first, I think it's important to just think about the corporate VC position within the ecosystem. Because there's, there's almost a spectrum, right? There's kind of at the far end, there are purely strategic.

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 05

  And then at the other end of the spectrum, there are purely financial. And GV was at the extreme end of the purely financial, so much so that it really operated as a separate unit, as part of the Other Bets umbrella.

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

  And the investors at GV invest for financial return, just like a traditional firm on Sandhill Road. So it's all about identifying amazing opportunities with the best entrepreneurs that are typically one of one, and then coming into those firms, companies as early as possible, and continuing to support them over time. If there is an opportunity to be able to do something within the broader Alphabet ecosystem or relationships, then GV will make those introductions. But first and foremost, the focus was on just identifying the best companies. I would even say so much so that GV doesn't really think of itself as a corporate VC.

• 1:02:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 05

  It thinks of itself just as a traditional financially focused VC.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Speaker 05

  And so then, leading to the second question that was in your, in your opening, the ability to be able to identify the best deals, you know, there's multiple paths to be able to, to get there. Obviously, there's the existing relationships with entrepreneurs, that's very helpful. There are folks that operate at GV that, you know, have good relationships based on prior working at Google. And so there's a lot of Googlers that do angel investing. They're great sources of deal flow. And then you also have, you know, these GPs that are on Fund Ones that usually bring some kind of unique angle or some edge that they have to allow them to see opportunities that other folks don't see. And the beauty of being

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  a Fund One GP is that you don't have to really do any fund management. You know, you've got your lawyers to do your LPA, you've probably raised your fund, you've got a back office, and you can just focus on investing. And that was the opportunity that we saw at GV was, hey, why don't we partner with some of these folks? And then it'll allow us to get access to some deals that we might not have seen on our radar.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  So walk me through the evolution of the thesis, the pitch, the, the sweet spot for emerging fund manager. Was there a background that you were looking for, whether it was entrepreneurial or spin out from a traditional venture capital firm? Were there sectors or sizing criteria? How did you think about narrowing who you were going to back?

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I love this question because the most important thing for me was having a perspective, having worked across a few different roles. And when I had conversations with people that were in the venture space for my own personal journey, the thing that I continued to hear was, hey, if there's an opportunity to get experience as a product manager, take it. And if you can do that at a company that's known for doing something with excellence within the ecosystem on the product side, where they have great engineers, where they have a history of, you know, identifying some of the best A talent that spins out and does great things, take that opportunity, take that role. Because a product manager

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

  is like a mini CEO within an organization and has ownership, and usually works across engineering, works across engineering to help identify features and functionality and how those should be prioritized, works with marketing to think about the positioning and how to get access to distribution, works with the finance team, thinking about what the business model is going to be and what's the best way to monetize this opportunity. So it's great training ground to both, I would say, be an entrepreneur, be a founder. Plus, that playbook for product management is very similar to early-stage venture capital. You know, what do VCs do at the early stage? Well, they think about what's the problem that's being solved, what's the existing solution set, what are the shortcomings of

• 1:05:21Speaker 05

  those solutions, what are people actually doing, is there an opportunity to kind of rip something out, or is this kind of people have solved the problem with duct tape and Excel? And what are the best ways to be able to get distribution? All of those things that a GP thinks about at the early stage, pre-seed, seed, it's kind of the same playbook as a product manager.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's interesting to think back on the 2010s, and it really felt like the, the sort of like star power that researchers have today, product managers really had in the 2010s, where you had somebody that could have been just coming out of college, landed at a company, but then five years later, they were like running a core business at one of these companies that, that again, they, they did their basically like tour of duty at a company that was, like you said, you know, excellent operations, excellent talent density. And then they were just in such an amazing position to understand what,

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  what great growth looks like, understand what like insane, you know, market pull and, and product quality and all these things. And then understanding like the tech stack at these companies at a deep level so that they would see all of these opportunities to invest in other software and infrastructure and things like that. And it feels like the, the humble product manager today is, is, has a lot less attention than like, let's say like the star researchers, right? You see the researcher spin outs that are getting kind of all the headlines. But it actually makes me think like, there's probably a lot of alpha right now and ignoring like the new Neo Labs and just focusing on like, who are the actual, you know, great, great product managers today at these, you know, high-growth

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  companies? Because...

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you balancing that transition?

• 1:07:15Speaker 05

  I gotta tell you, it's, it's really a fascinating question right now because what ends up happening is after you get a few funds under your belt, you move to this more operational focus as well, right? So the thing that people might not think about a lot as they decide to transition to being a fund manager as opposed to working inside of an organization, is that when I was at GV, it was amazing. All I had to do was focus on finding the best entrepreneurs. We had great finance people, we had great legal team, we had all this back office ops, we had marketing. I didn't have to think about anything. But when you are starting your own firm, now all of a sudden, that's on your plate. And so I think that's one of the most difficult things is balancing it.

• 1:07:59Speaker 05

  But I'm going to tell you, one of the most beautiful things that's happened, and the timing could not have been better, is AI. You now have the ability for a lot of these work, you know, things that I have on my plate that are really non-investing, it's amazing how much leverage I can actually get from AI, which is great because you're a limited budget when you're a startup firm. And so you don't really have the management fee to be able to build out a big team to give you that leverage. But the beauty of today is that, you know, AI gives that opportunity. I can remember talking to my LPs when we were looking at Anthropic back in the fall of '23, and it just opened my eyes to the

• 1:08:41Speaker 05

  fact that, my God, I told my LPs, I'll never forget the AGM where I said, hey, my objective is to use the AI tools that existed at that time. You gotta kind of rewind and take yourself back. But at that time, my goal was, hey, if I can just have AI do the work of one junior analyst, I'm going to be super happy. And now you can have AI do the work of a whole team.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense.

• 1:09:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just, just even just like the deep, as soon as we had deep research, that was like the same thing as throwing basically a project over to a junior analyst type and saying, hey, I want you to spend a week and really understand the evolution of this technology set, understand the market. And even if what you get back today is still like, has like some AI slop in the writing, at least it's still like, will communicate the ideas and get you, being able to get up to speed on something, you know, 10 times faster is, is amazing and such an advantage for, yeah, these emerging managers with smaller teams where it might be one or two partners and maybe no, no analyst or associate types.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, I mean, the, the teams can stay so much smaller. At the same time, we've seen, you know, the, the funding rounds get so much bigger. Can you walk me through how the knock-on effects of the, the ballooning seed, Series A, Series B valuations and actual funding round sizes has cascaded through to your strategy? Have you had to evolve? Has it just been, you're in the right place at the right time because you're growing your firm, so you're just growing into the new normal? Or have you actually had to step back and say, okay, things are structurally different, we need to evolve our strategy, how we think about?

• 1:10:23Jordi Hays?

  Maybe more tangibly, you know, we have friends that have funds that they raised in... 2024 where the strategy was like, we want to own five to 10% of companies at pre-seed, seed, and then follow on from there. And then almost all those folks are like now being like, we're happy to get 3% of this round, you know, before. And then the markups can be quite intense and the follow-on capital can come quickly, but it feels like even in the span of like one deployment period, managers needing to like fully update their strategy on ownership targets and things like that.

• 1:11:02Speaker 05

  And that, that was my answer. I mean, you hit the nail on the head because it's, you couldn't have spoken a better truth. I just had this conversation with one of our LPs and her question was, you know, what are you seeing as the changes and the challenges within the ecosystem? And I went back to a point I made earlier, which is these GPs that are the best, usually they have, especially in the age of AI, the thing that I really have noticed is that the GPs that are just getting started in their career, the best GPs are much more technical, even within the last 10 years. I think that's the biggest evolution that I've seen. And when I compare the profiles of not all GPs that are more

• 1:11:45Speaker 05

  experienced and deeper in their careers, but a significant number, when you just look at their backgrounds, they don't necessarily have the depth of the technical side. And when you look at the GPs that we see today with the smaller funds, these are folks that are coming in with a very unique perspective and the edge, I think, translates directly from their technical understanding of a problem they had to tackle within one of these technology companies. And so what that does is it opens their eyes to this really unique set of problems that they know can't be solved, but they understand the technical limitations of the current solutions as to why those problems can't be solved. And they kind of have a somewhat

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  of an idea about the perspective of, hey, this is how I think this problem could be solved, but maybe there's one aspect that's missing. So maybe it's the compute horsepower, or maybe there's a certain problem that hasn't been solved in an architecture side. There's something that's just missing. And so they know what to look for. And then when they see it, they can pounce on it immediately. And I think to your earlier point around being inside of a company, you understand two things that are really important. If you're in one of the big hyperscalers or you're in one side, one of the big tech companies that's, you know, really known for producing great employees, you know what excellence looks like in employees. You know what A teams look like. You also know what an A

• 1:13:11Speaker 05

  organization looks like and how that organization should scale and some of the challenges that it's going to get. So I think this new batch of GPs just has a really unique perspective that allows them to get in early. Now, the flip side is being able to scale and keep that ownership stake as the companies now move so quickly through the financing rounds. That's the biggest challenge that we've seen. The fact that they don't have the ability to hold on to that pro rata like they used to. And look, GPs were very creative even within the last 10 years, right? If I look back to some of the deals that we were doing pre-COVID, the GPs were doing things like going out and raising SPVs and getting existing

• 1:13:52Speaker 05

  LPs and new LPs to come on and help them keep as much of their pro rata as possible. Then they graduated to doing, you know, kind of these, you know, these massive funds that were just for kind of follow-on investments. But now that's much more difficult because you've got this combination of these rounds are increasing in size so fast, plus you've got the bigger shops that come down earlier and earlier. And so those big shops are kind of already there and ready to scale up. So this is the challenge that a lot of these firms have now.

• 1:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, for you, for you, the, the big question I have is like, how, how do you manage and prioritize your set of co-investment opportunities? Because you have this big base of managers that you've backed now. And I imagine every single month, you're, they're bringing you co-invest opportunities. And we're in this dynamic right now where, you know, you'll have the, the top five companies in a category getting marked up like crazy. And then even the five, five through 10 are still getting marked up and, and showing momentum and growth. And so I imagine it's like a massive headache, but also big opportunity of like sorting through those and, but also like managing expectations with the managers

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  on like when you'll actually lean in and, and make a, make a direct investment through their vehicles and when you have to sit stuff out.

• 1:15:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. Clearly I've been looking at our deck because you got, you understand it really well.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  The rule's simple. He only invests when it's anthropic. As long as it's a really good.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's just like, even on a personal level, being invested in some funds, it's like, I don't, you know, I do this like recre-, you know, recreationally to date. And it's like, well, I'm not going to just, you know, I can't possibly do every deal, even if they look like great.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, this is, this is the benefit of having that level of expertise where you can even apply it to a side hustle and you professionalize your side hustle because that's exactly the approach that we have to take, which is partnering with this amazing GP network that we've earned their trust. And the beauty of the GPs we work with is they invest so early, you know, an entrepreneur never forgets that first check or who took the bet on them. So that's the biggest thing for us is, you know, how do we go through all of these different opportunities? And I do go back to Anthropic because that's the one that really the light bulb went off on my head because you had a couple of dynamics that we've discussed. We, it was the first time we had done an SPV and this was the

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  Series D that closed in January of 24 that Mongo led. So it started to come together at the end of 23. One of our GPs brought us the deal, a GP we had worked with before on, on Reddit. Actually, we had worked with that GP on Reddit that worked out well. And so I was excited because I wanted to get more exposure into AI and had a chance to dive in deep. But the challenge was, I mean, this was like an $18 billion valuation and we had never come close to anything that expensive before. And so I think there was this combination of, you know, getting our arms around that and, you know, thinking, my God, for this thing to actually really come together to give the return, this has

• 1:17:11Speaker 05

  got to be like a one, two trillion dollar exit. And now here, here we are.

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  Here we are. That's amazing. You, you alluded to the emergence of tranched rounds of more complicated financings of a ton of capital marshalling at the very early stages of some of the new companies. And I'm interested in the dichotomy that's emerging between the, the company builders versus the financing partners, the inception rounds, and how GPs and emerging GPs are, are clarifying their position in the market. Do, are you seeing GPs have a good answer to where they sit in the market? Are they just starting to understand how to position themselves? And is it, how accepting, how acceptable do

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  you think a, like a wait and see approach, or, or maybe we'll do a little bit of one and a little bit of the other versus there are some firms right now that are positioning themselves as like, we are the company builder firm, we're in the inception round, don't come to us with the second or third tranche if you're an entrepreneur?

• 1:18:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I think that latter piece is where the, the GPs that we've seen really clarify their position. That's, I think, the level of granularity that's necessary today. That wasn't necessary, I would say, you know, five, 10 years ago. But today it is. Again, I just had this conversation with one of our LPs, an institutional LP that sits in a pretty unique seat. And that was part of our conversation when we started talking about how do GPs really kind of make their position within the industry? And, you know, now it is definitely being able to leverage some technical aspect that leads them to an edge they have in identifying an opportunity. But then even more over, really

• 1:18:59Speaker 05

  focusing in on exactly the profile of company that makes the most sense, where that company sits within product market fit and what I've even seen the specific needs of a company. So we've even got GPs that have a specialty of being able to have a network of product managers and they can tap into their product manager network when necessary. We've seen a GP that is, you know, has a partner, is a two-person operation, and the other GP has a history of working in PR and public relations and understanding how to position a company, which is increasingly important because, you know, one of the things I don't

• 1:19:39Speaker 05

  really think people understand is that one of the risks of the rapid acceleration that we see in companies achieving this incredible scale, I think I just saw Higgs Field is now the fastest company to a billion in revenues. You know, one of the things people don't talk about is when you look at the history of a lot of the entrepreneurs, you know, you look at the jobs, you even look more recently at the Larry and Serges, they had time to be able to develop that muscle memory of how to develop into the shoes of being a high-profile CEO and having to deal with a very, you know, persnickety board at times or having to deal with a state dinner with the President of the United States, you know?

• 1:20:21Speaker 05

  You, you never saw that need to understand how to enter those environments when you, you know, you had like maybe 10 years to get there. Now, you know, companies are getting there in 10 months.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  I'll give you, I'll give you the best example is Noah, Noah from Instinct going on Invest Like the Best to, to announce the new round. There was one question on security, you know, Patrick was basically saying like, look, like a lot of people just don't. You know, don't trust, aren't going to trust a new product like this with all, you know, their email and payment information, all this stuff. Um, and I, I thought his answer was fine, but it, it didn't, it didn't, it wasn't like, it wasn't like, it wasn't like he, he hit a, hit a home run. Uh, but I was like, I gotta, you gotta give him like some time. He's 23 years old, the company is like less than a year old.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Jordi Hays?

  It's a $10 billion company, but like, you know, give him like,

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:16Jordi Hays?

  10 more of those interviews and he'll probably answer wildly differently.

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  Now, now you don't get 10 years. You get three and then within three years of starting your company, you're getting made fun of on SNL while you're having dinner with the president. It's such a weird scenario, right?

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  How, uh,

• 1:21:29Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  How do you, VCs love to talk about taste and how taste is important, but how quickly do you clock a man, like how many, can you clock a manager's taste in companies over the fund cycle? Because every manager comes out and they say, we want to back the most important companies in the world and, you know, back visionary founders, right? It all sort of like blends together. But then my manager friends, you can just tell usually maybe it takes me a few years, but I have a friend who like loves to back all the hyper controversial founders on X. Like almost every single one he's in, if you can think of somebody that like went viral for doing something crazy or saying something weird, he's in all those companies. And then I have like other, you know, another set of friends that are, that are managers

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  and they love to back the like super earnest,

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Jordi Hays?

  really kind.

• 1:22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Jordi Hays?

  And they're both saying the same thing to, when they're doing their fundraises, right? They're like, we want to back visionary founders. And yet they sort of self-select into these like very key.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  What kind of visionary are you talking about?

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Visionary.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Key archetypes.

• 1:22:31Speaker 05

  Well, I, I love that because it also comes back to the personality of the GP and kind of the, the type of dynamic that's going to be most interesting for them. So kind of intellectually, cause like, you know, everyone, I think the best GPs that I've met, they're just so smart and they're so intellectually curious. And I think when you really break it down, birds of a feather flock together. And so you see like the most interesting pairings with GPs and founders. And you really know it holds true when you start to look at the deal flow that they're getting. So it's like, people kind of can immediately identify, oh my God, this is like the perfect company for GP X over here, right? And I think that's another piece that speaks to the edge and how a company, um, or how

• 1:23:15Speaker 05

  a GP can, should position their firm within the ecosystem. And you do start to see part of the, the taste, as you call it. I think that's a great way to describe it. I work with my son and you know, we kind of track and monitor GPs. And one of the things that's a telltale sign is, hey, are these GPs just kind of chasing the next hot thing? Or is there some consistency in the approach that they're taking, not only within a certain sector or a certain problem that's being solved, but also with the, the personality of the founder that's going after this on, this, uh, opportunity. And you can definitely start to see that certain GPs kind of always go after a certain profile of founder.

• 1:23:58Speaker 05

  And to be honest, for us at least, those are the GPs that we like the best because it means that they're, they're consistent.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you don't want to, like, especially if you're evaluating new managers, if you, if there's a persona, if you think they're going to be going after a certain personality type, that, and then that personality type is not represented in the, in the portfolio, in your portfolio already, then it actually starts to be interesting because you're not just going to get sort of an average of everything else you already have, going to have exposure to.

• 1:24:30Speaker 05

  No, see, that's exactly right because our objective is to cast as wide a net as possible. And the best way to do that is to have unique approaches within the GP network that we've developed, which now allows us to have this great source of deal flow that's not very overlapping. So we see more unique opportunities.

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, uh, how are you processing? If, if a manager comes to you and, uh, like, how are you processing like Vice specifically right now or managers that are like principled about not touching certain categories? Because over the last five years, it seems like every major platform VC has made investments in gambling and, and, uh, maybe multiple forms of gambling.

• 1:25:16John Coogan?

  But also some of those companies don't look like gambling at all when they start. It's like, oh, crypto.

• 1:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:25:21John Coogan?

  Predict the election.

• 1:25:22Jordi Hays?

  But there's been billions of dollars, billions of dollars deployed from a bunch of firms that historically wouldn't have touched these sort of

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  more, more vice like categories. And so I'm imagining a, a manager that comes to you and says like, hey, I want to invest in the best companies in the world, but there's going to be some companies that their financial performance will be amazing, but based on my values, I don't want to touch them.

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  That in some ways could be not good for LPs because you theoretically should back every company that's going to generate a great return that's operating within the general laws of the United States.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  Just imagining the worst possible managers, like, I'm morally opposed to AI. I sat about for ethical reasons. Like, that's why I passed on everything now.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  But

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  It'd be insane.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, so I'm sort of rambling, but I, I think you get the general idea.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  How do you deal with the LPA and the, and the vice clauses and what?

• 1:26:13Speaker 05

  Well, that's, that was the first place I was going to start, which is the first thing is to always go back and, and, you know, check the LPA. Cause usually there are some vice clauses in the LPA and you want to start as broad as possible, but there's always going to be an LP or two that you kind of are balancing. Do I, I really want this LP, but they've got these vice clauses and so you have to balance that. If you're balancing that correctly, and we can put that aside, I have seen a couple of GPs that actually focus on vice. Like their, their whole point of view

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Speaker 05

  and their whole approach is to go after the vice opportunities, particularly because there's not a lot of capital chasing them. They're often really good businesses and the, with the limited number, you keep the valuations much more reasonable. And then that preserves a lot of the upside. And I think there's another thing that just naturally happens is we evolve as a, you know, as a, when you think about the United States and where we've been historically over the past hundred years, we've almost had a little bit of a pendulum swing for certain things

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:19Speaker 05

  that are considered vice and now they're not considered vice anymore.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Speaker 05

  And then it also kind of just depends on the general mood, I think. You know, when the economy is doing well, you know, you kind of have a little more leeway with some of the things that could be a little bit more in the vice category. When things get a little more restricted or when there's, you know, a certain administration that could be in, then you could see things kind of moving in the other direction. You know, I think one of the things that I've looked at right now, I don't, I wouldn't consider it a vice per se, although if you go into certain gyms in, you know, Southern California, it could probably be a vice, which is peptides.

• 1:27:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:54Speaker 05

  Right? So when I start to think about peptides and how the pendulum is swinging with peptides, you know, we've got the GLP ones, which are peptides.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Speaker 05

  People may not know they're peptides, but they are.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:03Speaker 05

  And now we've gotten, we're getting a little more open to thinking about having peptides, um, be a little bit more regulated, but regulated in the right way so that we can get the research necessary so that people can now buy these on the regular market as opposed to the gray market.

• 1:28:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:28:21Speaker 05

  So that's one where I think, you know, the pendulum is swinging in the right direction, partially because of the administration, you know, it's RFK junior, who was really a proponent of peptides. So, you know, I think there's opportunities there and you just have to, I think as a, as a, if I'm sitting with my LP hat on, right? I've got to think about what parameter I want to put around the LPA and how restrictive do I want to be? Because there's some great opportunities that, you know, I, I don't really think of them as vice anymore in, you know, in, in the 2020s.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. The other, the other thing is like, if you're, uh, if a VC invests in a vice company and loses money on it, then they're, they're going to, like, if you're going to do it,

• 1:29:04Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  at least, at least put up good returns. So that's the other thing that's been driving more LP probably friendliness around, um, a lot of this stuff, just because a lot of these companies have been performing, uh, performing quite well. But anyways, this was great.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was fantastic.

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  It's great to meet you. Thanks for coming on.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:29:21Speaker 05

  Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Great conversation.

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  All right. Take care.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds. Online, in-store, mobile, on social.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  First time reading that, John?

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  Now with AI agents. I don't know, I got too much going on today. We have a few more guests joining in just a minute. We'll see who's here next. We can give you the high level on the SpaceX launch for Starship's first orbital mission while we wait for our next guest to join. Elon Musk.

• 1:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Next time there's a launch.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  And we know that Starship's going to be landing in the Pacific. I say we try to get Tyler out in the splash zone.

• 1:30:03John Coogan?

  In the splash zone.

• 1:30:04Jordi Hays?

  With a GoPro.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  The GoPro.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  GoPro.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  What does that do? They already film these.

• 1:30:08Jordi Hays?

  No, but it would be, it would hit way harder if it was Tyler behind the camera. If my life is at stake.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it would be a way to, yeah, put anybody who thinks it's fake, thinks it's AI video. But we filmed it ourselves. We know it's real. Anyway, speaking of AI video, we have Zack London from Gossip Goblin with us.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:30:30Speaker 06

  How's it going?

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:30:32Jordi Hays?

  Where, where in the world are you?

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:35Speaker 06

  I'm in, I'm in Sweden.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:30:37Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry for telling you up so late. Thank you for staying up so late. Please introduce yourself and what you're working on specifically. It's fascinating.

• 1:30:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Zack, better known online as Gossip Goblin. I make, I make some AI videos that you guys hopefully have seen.

• 1:30:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I have a feature-length film coming out in a little over two months.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the process for making the feature-length film? What do you, like, I imagine there's AI tooling that can help at every step of the way, but it feels like there's still an incredible amount of human involvement. What, did you start with a title? Did you start with a concept, a genre, a logline? Like, what was your process?

• 1:31:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, so contrary to popular belief, you're not yet able to just type and make me a movie into a box. Although there's plenty of people trying to make that happen. No, I mean, depending on how you look at it, this is like four years in the making, maybe. I mean, I've been making AI videos since that was really a possibility, like four years ago. And at first, you know, it looked pretty terrible, but I thought there was a there, there. That there was like actual potential to do narrative storytelling beyond just like Will Smith spaghetti memes or, you know, just Twitter clickbait. And I'd say about a year and a half ago is when the tools really hit this inflection point where it became clear

• 1:32:10Speaker 06

  that you can actually make stuff that people want to watch beyond just like the shock value of, you know, this new taboo technology. So, yeah, I've been kind of building out this sci-fi universe for several years now, you know, in public, on social media. And it's garnered enough, you know, interest that I was able to quit my day job, start a little studio, hire a team. And for the last eight months, nine months, we've been working on this feature film, which has been a

• 1:32:42Jordi Hays?

  And it's coming out, it's premiering in two months.

• 1:32:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, December 4th.

• 1:32:48Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty good. Pretty good timeline relative to, but, but talk about, talk, what can you share about the movie? Like, concept and general story?

• 1:32:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, you know, everything I do, it's like, I would say, leaning on pretty dark, sardonic, twisted sci-fi stuff. And there's, you know, there's a bit of like an allegory edge to it. It's not just like wild, out-there sci-fi. Hopefully, it's not too on the nose, but I think one of the fun parts about AI is the actual, like, I still write the script, or myself and a co-writer writes the script. We use a dozen voice actors in the film. We have musicians scoring the film. We use fully artists for the sound effects. We have a whole post-production crew. So it's not just me in my dark basement in Sweden. There's like a full crew of people. And so I'd like to believe there's still that level of like craft and detail and authorship involved.

• 1:33:43Speaker 06

  We haven't just, you know, relegated this to, you know, pipeline of tools to just render the shit out. But it's been a pretty arduous process to put it all together. But even with that said, the actual production time is still pretty fast and lean relative to like how you would make a sci-fi epic of this scope in the past. So I'd like to believe that the topics are like a lot timelier and more tuned to the present. And that's all paired with like, we put out 10 minutes of short-form content a week. So that's not quite the same caliber, but that keeps us kind of, you know, relevant and front and center. And now we've caught Elon's attention recently with, you know, some videos that may or may not have to do with

• 1:34:28Speaker 06

  Klob's wet lab in San Francisco.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  No, to me, to me, like, the, one of the biggest opportunities at the moment is like, taking something like a very timely topic and then applying something that, creating something that looks like it took months and months and months to produce.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:46Jordi Hays?

  And I mean, South Park, like, part of why South Park always was like taught, super topical and would become part of the conversation. It was like the first thing out of Hollywood that was like scripted, that was commentating on what was happening in the, in the relative near term.

• 1:35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's remarkable.

• 1:35:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. So, I mean, I kind of break out the content into like the ultra-short form. So it's those three-minute clips. And the goal there is like, it's part of this kind of sci-fi, transhumanist universe we're building out. But, you know, I feel like San Francisco like writes the plots for me at this point. Like, the shit I come up with is not even sci-fi by next week. So it makes it pretty easy for me.

• 1:35:30Jordi Hays?

  Are you a doomer or a techno optimist?

• 1:35:33Speaker 06

  You know what?

• 1:35:34Jordi Hays?

  Or a transhumanist?

• 1:35:36Speaker 06

  I can, I can be both. I can say, look, I think there's a 90% chance we survive.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:43Jordi Hays?

  That gets me fired up. Way more fired up than 10% extension.

• 1:35:48Speaker 06

  I'm not a doomer. I'm not a doomer, but I'm also not like

• 1:35:51Jordi Hays?

  But you're calling from a bunkie.

• 1:35:52John Coogan?

  Not Pollyannaish.

• 1:35:53Jordi Hays?

  Are you calling in from a bunkie?

• 1:35:56Speaker 06

  I mean, Sweden's kind of a bunker on its own. It's just, it's so off the grid, like, who's going to bother wiping it out? You know?

• 1:36:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:05Jordi Hays?

  Where does the name from?

• 1:36:08Speaker 06

  Um, it's just always been around. I don't know. I, I've had the same handle online forever. I think like 10 years ago, Sticker Mule had a really good deal on vinyl stickers. And I just, I needed to come up with the username quickly before the sale went away. So I committed to the Gossip Goblin, and I had such like a huge investment in the stickers that I, it's too late to pivot.

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, come back on as you get closer to the, to the release. And I'm excited for, for our audience to follow the shorts along as well.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Congratulations on the progress.

• 1:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for staying on.

• 1:36:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Get some sleep. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Pigma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Pigma files with Design System Context. Our next guest is Anish from Andreessen Horowitz, who's a general partner, coming back on the show here with us to discuss all things AI, personal agents. How you doing, Anish?

• 1:37:08Speaker 07

  We got the squawking.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  What was that?

• 1:37:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's the eagle. The eagle. Your audio, maybe get a little closer to your mic. The, you sounded a little

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  Can you do a little sound check for us?

• 1:37:20Speaker 07

  Test, test.

• 1:37:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we can hear you.

• 1:37:23John Coogan?

  So, personal AI agents, the biggest debate point was, is it going to destroy the restaurant industry? Is it going to gum up the restaurant industry? If you run a restaurant, is it the worst time or the best time? Are you going to be flooded with thousands of phone calls every day trying to book special occasions every five seconds? Or is there a white bill here? Is there a good solution where the humble restaurateur sees a modest increase to their bottom line?

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  That was our debate. That we spent too much time talking about.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  I want to know where you land.

• 1:37:56Speaker 07

  I think this would be great. I mean, look, I think the last gen of supporters were maybe not amazing for the restaurant industry. But you think about the GM of Carbone, what does she want? You know, she wants to have the highest AOV people in the restaurant with the highest frequency and have a high fill rate and have some sort of entropy so new people can try the restaurant and might be future high spenders. Their ability to fill the restaurant in a way that sort of globally, ultimately is way higher. It's not just who clicked the website fast enough. That's one. And then two, I think for the long-tail restaurateur, you know, they don't have to be amazing at marketing game or the kind of, you know, sort of marketing to the intermediary suppliers like Resy. So I actually think you're going to get this like long-tail effect where more people will visit more restaurants.

• 1:38:41Speaker 07

  And for the restaurants that are in the part of the power law, they should actually get the best customer. I think it's very, very good.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's maybe start with, I'm curious how you think that the

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  The tension right now between users who have personal agents that want them to be able to do anything are running into the wall on places like amazon.com. We saw somebody today that that got blocked from just buying something on adidas.com with with Muse, which again feels like a sort of casualty, like that, that, you know, something they have a system in place to block more nefarious style bots, maybe like it, maybe it's sneaker bots or something like that. Who knows, right? But it feels like inevitable that users will be able to get their agents to operate on their behalf everywhere in the fullness of time. But the question is like, how long do we have that sort of tension between? I

• 1:39:39Jordi Hays?

  think it's really just going to come down. I expect the Adidas's of the world to adapt, but it's the it's the ad plat places that are monetizing with ads. How quickly will they fall or figure out alternative solutions?

• 1:39:51Speaker 07

  I think pretty quickly. I mean, we'll have to see how it plays out. I like what Noah said on the pod this morning, which is there's going to be a portion of your revenue that is driven by attention and a portion of your revenue that's driven by fulfilling transactions. And then every, you know, e-commerce retailer, they're going to know, like, you know, Amazon is disproportionately advertising, perhaps, or high margin advertising. They're going to want to focus on protecting the destination. Whereas Adidas, if they're more of a sort of transaction fulfillment business versus a destination cost of a business, I think they want to quickly get the intruders out of the way. I think the distance is going to be a lot of CEOs wants want to think of themselves as destination businesses, when in reality, they're sort of transaction fulfillment businesses.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:40:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34John Coogan?

  Are you getting pitches for we solve the problem created by instinct and Muse yet? Because there in one way, there's already been, you know, business phone trees and transcription services and things that turn text message inbound into CRM stuff. There's AI customer support companies. But at the same time, like, this does feel like a slightly new twist, a slightly new tool relevant. But how are you dealing with that that question in the era of personal agents, like the secondary businesses, or maybe the the secondary businesses are just instinct for business, Muse for business, that, you know, the other side of it?

• 1:41:15Speaker 07

  We haven't seen as many yet. I mean, the question is, what's the most extreme form of an adversarial relationship with your customer? And there's actually a fun little story about Brazil, which has the most lawsuits per capita of any country. And the reason for that is you can sue anyone digitally and sort of trivially. What happens is when your door to Ash is late, you just fire off a lawsuit like one time.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:41:38Speaker 07

  That is a very adversarial relationship, and the merchants need to buy specialized software to fend off all the lawsuits. So I think things like that will happen, you know, demand for refunds and protesting payments and all of these areas where merchants benefit from kind of customer apathy or being fully informed. We haven't.

• 1:41:58John Coogan?

  I like this future. Like, if I, you know, you asked me to order you a coffee the other day, you wanted regular milk instead of almond milk, I got you the almond milk one, you could have sued me for like 50 cents right then.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sue a friend.

• 1:42:09John Coogan?

  Just instantly.

• 1:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, instantly, you know? That's really, yeah, that's really crazy. If some if if some of these systems get abused, then they have to just remove the policy, at which point, as a consumer, you would have to actually press, like, take like a legal, like, some type of legal action to get the thing that used to be offered out of the box. Like, that's kind of like the the darker.

• 1:42:31Speaker 07

  An opportunity, Jordi. Actually, I take the opposite view. Like, think of every person, certainly in their lifetime, but maybe once a year, has this just bureaucratic weight placed on them. You know, maybe you move and you have to change schools for your kid, you know, God forbid, maybe you get cancer or have a DUI. Like, there's just so much bureaucratic and administrative work that the consumer has to do. And I don't know that they actually have equal access to the legal system. It's hard to get an attorney, and it's hard to go to small claims court. So I kind of like this vision of the consumer being extraordinarily empowered with these things you used to have to have to die for.

• 1:43:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, it's a good point.

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about compute intensivity in the era of personal AI agents? I've seen some, like, you know, wild speculation rumors, but we've all been through the the realization that going from LLMs to reasoning systems to agentic coding, like, everyone was an exponential. We started producing 10 times the tokens, 10 times the energy, 10 times the cost, of course, 10 times the capability. So the adoption happened. But personal AI agents, do you have a feeling for how much it costs to serve someone? Or do you have any idea for how to even think about this? Or even does it require a new mode of thinking? Or is it just the same old?

• 1:43:51Speaker 07

  I think right now, our best estimates are $1,000 per user per year, which is obviously prohibitive if you're running. I think the couple of reasons to be optimistic if you're running startups.

• 1:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Pause, pause for one second, too, because when you think about making that back on transaction fees, like, the average person is not going to be spent, the average person just simply doesn't spend $100,000 a year on, like, hotels and flights and things like that. And so there there is, like, the cost has to drop meaningfully if you want to be able to make up, if you want to be able to keep the services free and make it up with, like, 3%, 3% or 5% fees.

• 1:44:31Speaker 07

  If the average American just, you know, spends $5,000 to $6,000 on travel plus commerce, online travel plus commerce a year.

• 1:44:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:39Speaker 07

  That's a very high take rate. Look, the number one thing that needs to happen is costs need to deflate, and they will.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:45Speaker 07

  Right? We just over again, like, right now, Astra is kick ass, like, computer use, it's very expensive, it will get cheap very quickly. Actually, the most exciting thing I saw in the last two weeks was Jeb.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55Speaker 07

  With computers, like, Jeb, the computer use is 100x cheaper and faster today.

• 1:45:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:00Speaker 07

  So I think these kind of dark horse opportunities that it could deflate costs faster. Otherwise, you're kind of fighting a two front war on customer acquisition and compute capacity.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, last, last question I had, we were just purely speculating earlier that it feels very natural, like, agents now have a phone number and a computer. It feels very natural for them to have, like, their own dedicated sort of, this is the first time that I've got, I've heard a bunch of pitches for, like, why agents are going to use stable coins and this and that. And I wasn't ever fully sold. But this feels like, like, you could imagine an instinct being like, hey, we're just gonna, here's a credit card that you can use. It has some of these these benefits and maybe, and it just feels like that's an easy way to, like, start monetizing all this volume without having to go get the opt-in

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  from every single long tail retailer and service provider that you're driving a bunch of traffic to.

• 1:46:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's, that's absolutely right. Like, unfortunately, just the take rate on those things is not high enough to still sustain. It's a good idea. I think the question, Jordi, is what happens when agents are independent economic actors, and they can go look for work and get paid for doing work on your behalf, and teach them your specialized knowledge and skills, like, the whole agent economy thing is definitely coming, and it's going to be wild.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  That will be wild.

• 1:46:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because right now, there's millions of people reaching out to businesses, for example, offering to effectively be a meat proxy for them to just do work that the models can already do, and then just give it back to them. And then at what point, you know, I'm sure there's people out there that have just scaled up outbound to the degree that they're effectively doing this already, just as a company. But at what point can you have an, yeah, something more like an independent agent? It's fascinating. But anyways, great to, great to catch up on this.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  Very helpful points of view and come back on soon.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. There's a Tesla Roadster update. It's been delayed to October 15. It was supposed to be October 7. They've been tracking the weather closely, but the severe conditions predicted, and because this event can only be held outdoors, they rescheduled it. So we will have to wait until October 15 to get the update on the new Tesla Roadster. Anyway, our next guest is already with us in the waiting room. We have Evan Conrad from San Francisco Compute. He's a co-founder and CEO.

• 1:47:37Jordi Hays?

  What's up?

• 1:47:38John Coogan?

  Long overdue. So happy.

• 1:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, way overdue. Only about a year overdue.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. But thank you so much for coming on. I already know what we're going to talk about, but please introduce yourself and the company a little bit to give everyone some lay of the land.

• 1:47:50Speaker 08

  Hey, I'm Evan. We make a company called San Francisco Compute, or the inventor of compute markets.

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  Okay. And what is the current state of compute markets? How mature are they? Where do you want these to go? Break us down for the status quo, and then we can start talking about the the future.

• 1:48:09Speaker 08

  So our impression is that.

• 1:48:13Speaker 08

  Right now, compute kind of looks like the early days before there was a power grid. And when that happened, every factory ran its own generator and they had to schedule that generator to exist for peak capacity. And then during idle hours, they would just sort of burn that money. And so what happened in the power markets is that utilities came in and they pooled demand between all of these different factories. And then by doing that, you made the economics of all the factories better. And this is how we scaled up electrification of the country. This is what people are trying to do with compute markets. It's what we try are trying to do with compute markets. But I think at the moment, there's a whole bunch of folks who are entering the space.

• 1:48:55Speaker 08

  And the way that they're trying to do it is they're typically trying to create some sort of index price. And then you can create a cash flow future on top of this. Our impression is that by doing this, you're divorcing it from the actual technology under the hood because the index isn't connected to anything. Like you're not actually buying the compute, you're sort of trading on this like magical number.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Is there a solution here where you look at the semi-analysis Cluster Max 3, you view that more like a Moody's credit rating and you assign different tranches of compute? Because maybe we're not in a fully homogeneous market for compute yet, but it's actually reasonable to trade CoreWeave for Nebius, which both earned the top, the top ranking in Cluster Max 3. And then you go down the list and maybe there's a little bit of a delta in value between compute, but within a particular tranche, if they're all rated AAA or BBB, it's okay

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  to actually treat those as fungible. How close are we to that?

• 1:50:08Speaker 08

  I think the real problem is that you just don't have very many people at the top of that ladder.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:13Speaker 08

  And so one of the things that needs to happen before we get to compute markets is you need to sort of level up the whole market. Right now, the folks that are easiest able to enter the market are the people with lots of capital, lots of land, lots of power, but not necessarily a lot of like supercomputing expertise. And so I think that's why we're in the current stage of the market where you have a few excellent players like CoreWeave or like Nebius.

• 1:50:40Speaker 08

  But you don't really have enough actual participants

• 1:50:45Speaker 08

  that know what they're doing in order to make it possible to have a market.

• 1:50:49John Coogan?

  And what is the, the key unlock to, to raise the floor here? Is it the actual chipsets, the networking technology, the software that's installed? Because I know that there's variation across basically every dimension and that feels like the enemy of, of commoditization. But at the same time, there's, you know, a huge amount of companies that are saying like, you're not going to commoditize without, you know, me AMD having a say or me, you know, another, another networking provider having a say. Everyone wants to bring something to bear.

• 1:51:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, so our impression or our view as San Francisco compute is that you need a market operator that has to be independent from the other, sort of other clowns. Otherwise, if it's not independent, Wall Street won't trust it.

• 1:51:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:39Speaker 08

  That market operator also needs to do what's called physical settlement. And in this case, physical settlement, we think means running the whole damn thing.

• 1:51:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:48Speaker 08

  You've got to run it all the way down to the, the data center itself. That includes even building the data centers in some cases.

• 1:51:55Speaker 08

  And if you do that, then you can standardize because you can make the whole operator be the same thing. And then you can plug in capacity, you can plug in land and power and other assets into it. And you get lots of different market participants, but that's the way the grid works. There's a grid operator and they sort of run and manage things. That allows it to standardize. Right now, we're in the world where people are, you're like trading capacity. And imagine if we did this in the power market where I traded you a coal plant for a nuclear power plant. That's basically what we're doing right now.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Interesting. I mean, at the same time, like there are, there are, you know, plenty of heterogeneity in the, in the oil refinery business, but then once the oil gets to be a standard crude and it's graded, then it can be traded as a commodity. Is there not, is there not some, like, doesn't, isn't that a prerequisite that basically the vast majority of compute comes online in some homogeneous market to really, really create like the commodity vision that people are seeing in the future as opposed to just more standardization within individual Neo clouds or, or compute providers? Doesn't something have to happen at a higher level of abstraction?

• 1:53:13Speaker 08

  So to some extent, yeah. So this is what we think of ourselves as doing.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:17Speaker 08

  Is by making that refinery exist.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:20Speaker 08

  On the other hand, it's just way more nuanced than that. These are supercomputers, not soybeans.

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:25Speaker 08

  And so there's just like, yeah, it is just frankly more complicated.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Make it easier, if only. So yeah, what is your, what is your plan right now? What, what's the stage of the company? I mean, you've raised money, but how close are you to, do you think to acquiring power, building a data center? Is that, is that the plan in the near term?

• 1:53:47Speaker 08

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:53:52Speaker 08

  Can't say that much, but.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  It's in the works.

• 1:53:55Speaker 08

  We're doing pretty well.

• 1:53:57Jordi Hays?

  The biggest computer ever.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, we're, we're shooting for the biggest computer ever.

• 1:54:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and is it, is it not viable to, I mean, should I think of the, the hyperscalers as sort of building a, like a, a fungible layer on top of all the Neo clouds? Because you, when you, when you look at the Neo clouds, so many of them have partnerships with AWS, GCP, the big AI labs. And in some ways, you could imagine some commodity, some commoditization happening like in the AWS console. But, but do you think it's viable to try and come over the top and, and create a new platform that marshals compute across all the different Neo clouds? Or will there be like Neo cloud revolt for that or organ rejection?

• 1:54:44John Coogan?

  Because they will only do that if it's Amazon and they have to play nice.

• 1:54:50Speaker 08

  So our impression is that there's a missing utility. We think of like the hyperscalers as kind of the old school factories. And they've got these sort of generators or power companies that are working with them. And they totally, they've sort of abstracted over the, the power companies, this case of the Neo clouds, is sort of that analogy. And now they're producing goods from their factory. The problem is, if you want to really scale everything up, you need to figure out how to make a market that can secure the risk for other people to scale things up as well. And if you do that, that's great for the existing participants. Like that's going to be great for the hyperscalers. It's also going to be great for the Neo clouds. But that market needs to be independent in order to exist.

• 1:55:34Speaker 08

  And the operation of the market, the technology needs to be co-designed with the order book itself. Otherwise, you can't actually do this.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, congrats on the progress. Good luck. I'm excited for the next announcement. Come back when it's live. We'd love to.

• 1:55:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anytime you have hot takes.

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, anytime, anytime.

• 1:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Last, last, last question.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  There's someone on X that's been posting about, I'm not just gonna keep posting through this infrastructure build out. I'm getting in, in the action. I'm levering up personally to get compute to be able to participate in this.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:13Jordi Hays?

  What are your, what are your thoughts on the, on the humble, on the humble home supercomputer operator that wants, that wants to get into the token flow? Is it, should they just be buying Nvidia, you know, and be like levered long there and just sit back and do nothing? Or should they have their own rack at home, a little bit of power and be, be feeding the, the token stream?

• 1:56:36Speaker 08

  So I think I know who you're talking about. And I would say they are, they are doing more than just, you know, a rack in your, your house.

• 1:56:44Speaker 08

  What, what we do as San Francisco compute is we help people become clouds. And then we help them sell those clouds on the market. We're like a supercomputer developer. And we think, well, we know, we've seen this, that all the money and all the capital and all the power is sort of trying to figure out how to turn itself into GPUs. Because there's a really strong economic reason to do that right now. And so we're seeing this happen across the market. Our gist as a company is we're going to help them do that and help make it possible that there's a large amount of new Neo clouds, new NCPs in the Nvidia terminology. And then we're going to help them get financed by building a market that makes it possible to de-risk them.

• 1:57:28John Coogan?

  That makes a lot of sense. Well, thanks for.

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  I have one, my second last question. And, and sorry, sorry for keeping you a little bit over, but you, you clearly love to use these different historical analogies. And I'm wondering when, when people build up, bring up sort of like railroad build out and, and overbuild and, and try to comp it to this present moment, there are certainly variety of, of strong comparisons that you can make. What, what's your reaction to that? Where do you think that sort of analogy falls short? I would say one, one of them is like, if you just build a railroad effectively to nowhere and there's not a lot of economic activity there and you invest all this money into it, and then there's no, not that much value creation, it's obvious why those kinds of

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  things can blow up. Whereas with compute, if you can build a bunch of compute, the, the current state of things is like the compute will, the, the demand will find it one way or another. Even if you're a tier three, four, or five operator, if you have fundamentally, if you have power and GPUs, like someone will find you and, and sort of force you into being competent and economically viable, one way or another.

• 1:58:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I think kind of what you're getting at is, is there an AI bubble? Are we out overbuilding like crazy?

• 1:58:48Speaker 08

  This is, this is the, um, this is the problem we're trying to solve. Right now, it's important to understand where that bubble is.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  He's solving the bubble.

• 1:58:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, so it, it, the bubble itself.

• 1:59:02Jordi Hays?

  Someone had to do it.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:04Speaker 08

  It works like this, there's, um, uh, the cloud itself doesn't deploy, um, the GPU cluster until they have the contract in hand from the customer. And then they force the customer to pay them a massive deposit upfront so that they can give it to the OEM, who then gives it off to Nvidia. But the, like, the AI lab itself doesn't have that capital yet because they need it for the future. And so they go off and they raise money at massive valuations. And all the UVCs look around and say, shit, this AI lab, it's, um, it's asking for a crazy valuation. And is that, is that okay, guys? Like, is everyone cool with that? And they all look around and say, well, I guess we missed out on OpenAI and Anthropic.

• 1:59:49Speaker 08

  And so maybe these people will be OpenAI and Anthropic too. And so we'll go with the, the big, uh, valuation. But then the venture capitalist owns the risk. So if you're looking for a bubble, it's held currently by the venture capitalists. And we're, we're trying to solve that problem by, uh, de-risking compute in the future, by basically making it possible to know, like, what the price of GPUs will be off into the future. And that reduces a lot of this problem because then you don't have to have the big deposit upfront from the customer, which then means you don't have to have the big giant valuation that's probably maybe a little overvalued from where it should be.

• 2:00:27Speaker 08

  But.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  And then you're the king in the castle, king in the castle.

• 2:00:32Jordi Hays?

  John's out of control.

• 2:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great points, Evan. Would love to do this again soon and we'll, we'll make sure to get more time next time.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a good one. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Hank.

• 2:00:43John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is here live with us in the TVP and Ultra Dome. Here, Shotgun, welcome to the show. How you doing? Good to see you.

• 2:01:03Speaker 09

  Made it.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for coming on down to Hollywood, to the TVP and Ultra Dome.

• 2:01:09Speaker 09

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:01:10John Coogan?

  Why don't you introduce yourself for those who maybe are living under a data center?

• 2:01:14Speaker 09

  Uh, I'm the Stad guy.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:01:16Speaker 09

  I make, uh, videos, sometimes in character.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:20Speaker 09

  Um, satirizing some of the absurd lifestyles that exist around the world.

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  You're no longer a creator, you're the CEO of a media company, is that? How, how do you think about yourself now?

• 2:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Talent and operator.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  Operator, right? Cause you have a team, I assume, at this point?

• 2:01:37Speaker 09

  I do. I think that's the case for many creators right now. And I think the reason why people started using the media company term is because they felt insulted by the term creator. I actually feel celebrated by it, so.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Well, creator was an upturn.

• 2:01:54Speaker 09

  Influencer was like a slur at one point.

• 2:01:56John Coogan?

  Exactly. And then they're like, okay, creator's a little bit nicer, being creative's good, but, yeah, what, what is this?

• 2:02:01Jordi Hays?

  No, it, it, it's an important point because I know creators that, like, they desperately, they're like, I don't want to be seen as a creator, I want to be seen as a CEO, I want to be seen as a business owner.

• 2:02:11John Coogan?

  Founder.

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then there's actually the level above that, which is like, no, I actually enjoy, um, I think we both experienced this having run companies and then doing this.

• 2:02:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Like, just being, being talent and being the host is the thing that I feel like I'm best at.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm, I'm pretty okay at, at building companies and running companies and managing people. But it's not the thing that I enjoy as much as just hanging out and talking with John and the people in our network. And so I think a lot of those people, hopefully they'll get to come around and be like, actually, no, I, I like just making the thing that is the business.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:45Speaker 09

  All of it.

• 2:02:45Jordi Hays?

  One of the thing, yeah, one of the reasons I was excited to have you on the show is that, um, in the same way that you use humor to talk about these sort of like lifestyles and consumption and travel, um, basically like we started doing this in character, like, in the most like, sort of insane version of, in, in the case of, of, for us, it was like tech bros, right? Or we started the show, it was called Technology Brothers, before we realized like, hey, maybe there's something bigger here. But we were being like, like, at, at times, like, maybe too humorous about a bunch of different.

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  It was satire on the quiet luxury trend in Silicon Valley. We called it loud opulence. We wanted to be as loud and over the top as possible and sort of like poke fun at the fact that there's so many people in San Francisco that are extremely wealthy and they're like, I drive a Prius. And it's like, okay, what do you drive on the weekend? No, you got a Koenigsegg in the.

• 2:03:39Jordi Hays?

  But, but sometimes it takes, sometimes it takes somebody willing to just, uh, lean into humor and, and, uh, to actually tell the truth about certain things.

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:50Speaker 09

  Thank you. Appreciate the, the compliments. Yeah, it's fun.

• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I think, I think, um, yeah, where should we start? Uh, let, maybe a review of, uh, Euro Summer.

• 2:04:04Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you, how do you rate, how do you rate, how do you rate, how do you rate the last quarter?

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  Is it overblown at this point?

• 2:04:10Speaker 09

  I, I think Euro Summer's still on for, for those, for those of, who can, can be in that position to have it still be on, but Euro Summer, I think, ends in October.

• 2:04:18John Coogan?

  Okay. So we'll have to have you back.

• 2:04:22Speaker 09

  You can have me back for the fall, the fall.

• 2:04:24Jordi Hays?

  The final days.

• 2:04:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, we're in, we're in the final days. I think mid, mid-October starts to slow down. I mean, don't forget, many people who live in Europe are professional consumers.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:35Speaker 09

  They, they don't work much and they've learned the ways of summering.

• 2:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:42Speaker 09

  Through generations.

• 2:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Speaker 09

  It's not a, uh, it's not a, oh, I'll do this when I make it. It's actually a, I grew up doing this.

• 2:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:48Speaker 09

  And that's, I think, where a lot of the humor comes from and a lot of the judgment comes from.

• 2:04:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:53Speaker 09

  Where some of the people that you interview or even poke fun at on the show, that's who they feel judged by because they make a lot of money, they go to Europe for the first time, they sometimes make the wrong spending decisions as what they thought was cool is maybe not so cool.

• 2:05:07Jordi Hays?

  No, that's the thing, when you, when you, if you're in a family that has been very successful for generations, the, the next gen, the younger generation is effectively judging each other based on how they are consuming. That, that is, here, at least in, within, within our networks, it's like, the judgment is like, well, what company are you building? Are you, are you the category, are you the category leader? How much money have you raised? How big is your team? Like, specifically with like, you know, the people that are on the show. In Europe, it's like, you know, it's, it's, what watch are you wearing? But not, not like, how much money did you spend on it? But how unique is it? And what is like the history behind it? And do you know the watchmaker? And how much time have you spent here or there?

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  And where, you know, not just, I mean, I mean, it just goes on and on and on and I appreciate it. I was, I was, um, I took a, a driving trip to, to Austria recently and like, there's, I feel like I'm getting better at, at spending money and I've always liked, uh,

• 2:06:14Jordi Hays?

  no, I'm just saying, I've always, I've always liked, I've always liked consumption.

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:17Jordi Hays?

  I, I've always, I've just always enjoyed it.

• 2:06:19Speaker 09

  Like most of us.

• 2:06:20Jordi Hays?

  And I, I've always liked.

• 2:06:21John Coogan?

  You think you were bad at it?

• 2:06:23Jordi Hays?

  I certainly have been bad at.

• 2:06:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Like, I, when I, when I talk about being bad at consumption, it's like you buy something and you regret the purchase.

• 2:06:29John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:30Jordi Hays?

  Because your, maybe your taste level.

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Increased, like, I've had times where I've like.

• 2:06:34John Coogan?

  Expensive.

• 2:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even as a kid, I bought like a certain, like, piece of snowboarding gear. And then I realized like a month later, well, I shouldn't have bought that because this other thing is actually like the thing that you really want.

• 2:06:44Speaker 09

  I mean, listen, I think that's generally a good thing.

• 2:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:47Speaker 09

  In the category of people who can afford to do so, I think those who aren't very good at consuming, aren't very good because they're busy producing.

• 2:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:55Speaker 09

  And that's, like, macroeconomically, it's kind of what's happening right now.

• 2:06:58Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:06:58Speaker 09

  It's like, the people in the US are making a whole lot more than most in Europe. And when they take their 14 days off, or for some, let's say slightly more, they ball out and they, they make a big splash. And then these resorts like Saint-Tropez, for example, actually rely on the US consumer who comes in for 14 days and goes crazy. Meanwhile, a European consumer gets averaged 28 days off a year.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:23Speaker 09

  So literally twice as much.

• 2:07:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:24Speaker 09

  And they're making at least half as much.

• 2:07:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:26Speaker 09

  So they actually need to make the dollar go a lot further.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:30Speaker 09

  While you, you're in Austria, you're, you can ball out.

• 2:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but what I, what I appreciate is, like, the friends that I was with were, like, going to the hole in the wall place that they'd been for, going to for 20 years at this point. And it's not, for them, it's not at all about how much money can you spend, even if they could theoretically spend just as much as the sort of like, you know, American, uh, going crazy for two weeks. But it's about.

• 2:07:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, how, how do businesses in Saint-Tropez actually price discriminate? Is it like, okay, we know this is when American summer will be here, so let's raise prices? Is it just there are more expensive things on the menus? And so we know that the Americans will grad, will, uh, gravitate towards that? Like, what, what strategies do you see where you're like, oh, this is a sharp business operator? They're both keeping the European clientele happy when they're in town, but then they're also extracting max value from the Americans who are there?

• 2:08:29Speaker 09

  I think for the most part, a great case study for this is hotels.

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:33Speaker 09

  Cause I think if restaurants play with prices, it's usually not a very good restaurant.

• 2:08:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:37Speaker 09

  It's usually very gimmicky.

• 2:08:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:39Speaker 09

  Or more like a club or like a beach club.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:41Speaker 09

  Which no one, I think, goes to consistently.

• 2:08:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:43Speaker 09

  I think anyone who goes to like a party setting beach club and sprays champagne.

• 2:08:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:48Speaker 09

  Does it once or twice as like a festive occasion, like to celebrate the moment. But then when they go back, they go with their fiance or their wife and it's more modest and they're drinking wine instead of spraying champagne. So I think.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:01Speaker 09

  Those occasion based restaurants that actually forget them in this conversation.

• 2:09:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:06Speaker 09

  For hotels, I think it's just pure supply and demand. I think there's a few hotels that offer exceptional experiences and every year there's more people generating insane amounts of wealth and wanting to vacation there for a few years and they just raise their prices as much as they can.

• 2:09:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23Speaker 09

  Uh, some hotels though, stay very loyal to the consumer you were talking about that has been staying with them for years.

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:31Speaker 09

  And that values the substance more than the status.

• 2:09:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:35Speaker 09

  Of that place and the hotel loves that and they may not be necessarily owned by a big group or a publicly traded hospitality group where they actually need to have crazy growth every year, they can just sustain.

• 2:09:46Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. Yeah. How do you? It feels like one of the ways that you select for the more discerning generational client is like, you make things like less Instagram friendly than they maybe could, right? So you could have a hotel that has incredible service level, but it looks like kind of something more casual and country, right? Versus the new hotel build that where every single moment is designed to like, look really good on camera and there's good lighting and it, and it feels like very, like it has the aesthetics of being like very luxurious, but the service quality might actually be far worse.

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like, like certain establishments now, they need to actually like not lean into that sort of generic global Instagram aesthetic.

• 2:10:34Speaker 09

  I, I think it's, it's um, less of an intention and more of an outcome of actually something a little deeper. I think that the deeper thing is family owned versus massive hospitality group owned.

• 2:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:49Speaker 09

  And these massive groups need to justify their existence and they need to keep growing and growing and growing. And that's at the expense often of quality and through the, the method of painting things gold and having this sort of status element and making things Instagrammable. So they can market and justify their higher and higher prices. These family owned hotels, they don't care about that. They don't need the Instagram. They're sold out months in advance, sometimes years in advance, and they're just happy to exist and survive. And they can focus on the substance elements with the ingredients in the kitchen and they don't need to have the flashy things that attract people.

• 2:11:33Speaker 09

  Ultimately, I really think that luxury consumers, and this is what I actually talk about in my content, sometimes out of character on my podcast or in character in my satire, but I think luxury consumption exists as a journey and it's a journey from people jumping into this world and feeling judged and making the wrong consumption decisions and buying the wrong things and dining at the wrong places and acting the wrong way. And slowly becoming more and more discerning. And that can happen over five years or 50 years, but I think it always happens.

• 2:12:06Jordi Hays?

  It always happens.

• 2:12:07Speaker 09

  I think it always happens. I, I don't, I don't really know anyone who's had the financial power to consume and travel to these beautiful places for their entire life and act silly the entire time. I think they, they get better and better as time goes on. And with knowledge and some judgment, they often improve faster than you expect.

• 2:12:27John Coogan?

  Saying there's a chance I could be the first, first person to never develop taste.

• 2:12:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. And it's funny because it expresses, it expresses itself in different ways. Like, I think like in the Alps, like a Lamborghini Urus is like, actually if it's specced properly can be like an incredible car. And when I see them in that context, I think, wow, I really wish I, I like, I should get one of those. But the problem is you, you put it in LA context and it's just like the, the sort of, the whole thing just doesn't work, right? Just because of the, the sort of local context.

• 2:12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, how do you, what, um, how do you see like wellness as a hospitality trend? It feels like we're still at peak wellness and maybe there's room to grow, but at the same time, I personally, you know, I've had saunas and cold plunges for like probably six years now, like at, at home. And so for me, when I'm traveling somewhere, like I'm not even really, that's not, maybe it's like on the list of things that I think are, maybe it's cool if you have a sauna at the property, but that's not like why I'm sort of like moving around the world to experience these things. And it feels like a lot of people say they want those things, but when they're traveling, they

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  sometimes like, there's a bunch of other things that are maybe more worth their time, but where do you see it sort of trending?

• 2:13:46Speaker 09

  I, I feel like the health and wellness thing is now nearly like the final boss.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:13:51Speaker 09

  Um, stage of consumption where stage one, people focus on that status I was talking about. When they first make money, they want to celebrate, it's festive. They're like, I made it. I want to go party and, and, and show people I made it.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:14:04Speaker 09

  Stage two, I think is indulgence. They go on a lot of wine tours, make a ton of wine, eat a lot of caviar. And it's like, still somewhat statusy, but they think it's more understated, but it's still highly indulgent. And then eventually they get over it and they say, you know what? I bought all the cars. I got the watches. I'm over all of this. What really matters? And they dive deeper into health and wellness and all the people I know eventually, to be honest, that have been spending for a long time, who go from flashy to understated, eventually also go to sporty and that's the final boss.

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:39Speaker 09

  They go from cashmere to athleisure. Still, still in cashmere.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  And then what's their marathon time?

• 2:14:44Speaker 09

  And then exactly.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's their? And they do triathlon or cycling because they want to live forever.

• 2:14:49Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 2:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. This is, we were having a conversation.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Brian Johnson.

• 2:14:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We were talking about, um, uh, for an interview that hasn't been released yet about, uh, like this sort of like tech, uh,

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  We're a live show.

• 2:15:04Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. It wasn't. Someone was interviewing us.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  And they were asking like, who we look up to. And it's actually like, we look up to the CEOs that don't just like, have a cool car collection, but they're actually like doing motorsports at the, at a high level, like Pro-Am level. Where they're going and they're doing like.

• 2:15:22Speaker 09

  It's cool.

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Endurance racing and things like that, where it's not like, they can buy any car in the world, but it's like, if you can buy any car in the world, what are you, what are you doing with that ability, right? It's like, can you keep it on the track? Can you be, um, at these sort of iconic races and actually be fast enough to not embarrass yourself? And that's really, that's like rising up to that, to that next level.

• 2:15:42Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:15:42Jordi Hays?

  You're talking about.

• 2:15:43Speaker 09

  I think so too.

• 2:15:45John Coogan?

  I want to talk about the characters.

• 2:15:46Speaker 09

  Sure. Please.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. The, the dividing line, like, um, how do you think about building the portfolio of characters? You have two now.

• 2:15:54Speaker 09

  I have two.

• 2:15:55John Coogan?

  Is there going to be a third? Is this something you're considering or are, are you, do you even think about it that way? And then is there, how harsh is the line between you're not in character? Uh, like we, we, we have loose characters that we slip into here and there, but, uh, do you slip in and out of them ever? Or is it like, okay, I am producing a piece of content in this character. There's a hard line and then I'm going to do an interview out of character and there's a hard line.

• 2:16:22Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 2:16:23Jordi Hays?

  I think it's like in real life, you're like, who am I right now?

• 2:16:25Speaker 09

  Exactly. That's what I asked myself this morning.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, no. We actually had our team like text you and be like, does he want to do it in character? Cause that's fine, but we just don't want to be like throwing questions at you and not be on the same page a little bit, but you could have ambushed us. Maybe you still will.

• 2:16:40Speaker 09

  That's true. I might. I might jump in. Um, I'll walk you through the.

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Explain the characters.

• 2:16:45Speaker 09

  Explain the whole thing. So, so characters, I have three characters.

• 2:16:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:49Speaker 09

  The third is just me, myself, which is here. So we'll ignore that for now.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:53Speaker 09

  The two main characters are Constance and Colton.

• 2:16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:56Speaker 09

  Constance is everything heritage. He's a constant. He's been there a hundred years ago. He'll be there a hundred years in the future. He's the ambassador of excellence, the old world of luxury, the old world of Europe. He is old money, taste, tact, manners.

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:12Speaker 09

  He is who your grandparents wants you to be when you visit Constance. Exactly. That's Constance. He's head to toe in the finest Laura Piana cashmere. He's wearing the best watches. He drives understated cars.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:24Speaker 09

  He hikes, he sails.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:17:26Speaker 09

  He's chic.

• 2:17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:27Speaker 09

  Constance. His cousin Colton.

• 2:17:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:30Speaker 09

  Is the anti Constance. Sorry to say it.

• 2:17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:34Speaker 09

  Colton is everything hype.

• 2:17:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:36Speaker 09

  Colton is everything status.

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:37Speaker 09

  While Constance is substance.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:39Speaker 09

  Colton wants to follow every trend.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:42Jordi Hays?

  Colton bought the Louis Vuitton singer collab.

• 2:17:47Speaker 09

  I thought that was actually pretty cool. And, and Colton is basically the anti Constance.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17:54Speaker 09

  And I use them to.

• 2:17:56John Coogan?

  Show both sides of the world.

• 2:17:58Jordi Hays?

  Cause they're occupying the same spaces.

• 2:18:00Speaker 09

  I think they're actually occupying the same mind.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:18:03Speaker 09

  And that's where I was going with the account. I think there's no pure play.

• 2:18:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:07Speaker 09

  I mean, the no is a big word. There, there's very few pure Constance.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:18:10Speaker 09

  Very few pure Colton.

• 2:18:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:12Speaker 09

  What I see happening is on a Friday night, people want to be Colton.

• 2:18:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:16Speaker 09

  Sunday morning, they want to play some golf and they want to be Constance.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:19Speaker 09

  And actually it's a push and pull of an internal dilemma.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:22Speaker 09

  Of a wealthy consumer.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:24Speaker 09

  And that's where I started going with the account.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  And so there's not like, there's not a uniform judgment on both of them. Like you, you, there might be uh, ones more to aspire to, but there's a reality there between both of them.

• 2:18:36Speaker 09

  It's actually a fluid emotion. It's like the angel and devil on your shoulder.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:41Speaker 09

  Uh, to exaggerate it. And, um, I used the characters to really storytell.

• 2:18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:46Speaker 09

  The what?

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:47Speaker 09

  What is driving this world? What matters in this Stadgai world?

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:52Speaker 09

  Through the voices of satire of Constance and Colton, the how is the manners.

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:57Speaker 09

  The tact. You don't just buy a Laura Piana cashmere sweater. There's a way to wear it. There's a way to celebrate it. You don't just go to Chateau La Coste in Provence. You appreciate the art a certain way. You drink the wine a certain way. That's the how. The final step, which I noticed my audience going through is actually the why. Everyone who would eventually enjoy these beautiful experiences would sit there and wonder, why am I even here?

• 2:19:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:23Speaker 09

  Why do these clothes matter? Why do these watches matter? And that felt disrespectful to do in character.

• 2:19:28John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:19:29Speaker 09

  Cause I'm talking to hoteliers and restaurateurs and craftsmen and people really putting their life and passion into ultimately luxuries, but with so much serious love, I had to do it as myself.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:19:42Speaker 09

  So I broke character for the why. So the what and the how, Constance and Colton in character.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:48Speaker 09

  The why is just me here.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  If you want an even more insufferable term beyond influencer creator, world builder is the one that really gets people going these days. But it is true that Stadguy is a world and it's fascinating hearing you how they play with each other. How much are the two characters in dialogue with each other? How do you think about if there is an event, a trend, a topic that you need to give both sides? Or is there a moment when you say, no, this is the right tool for the job. I'm going to pull this character off the shelf for this moment. How do you think about building that world in more fullness?

• 2:20:26Speaker 09

  I rarely use Colton now.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:28Speaker 09

  Cause I think the world is exhausted of Colton.

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:20:30Speaker 09

  Like people, when they see Colton on the screen, they're like, I just scrolled past five Coltons.

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  They get it.

• 2:20:34Speaker 09

  I'm tired of this guy.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:20:35Speaker 09

  I don't want to hear from him. I don't want to see him. Constance is still quite novel because seeing the frown and seeing Stad.

• 2:20:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's novel because the Constance does not post their lifestyle on social media.

• 2:20:49Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 2:20:49Jordi Hays?

  To nearly the same degree.

• 2:20:51Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:20:51Jordi Hays?

  Right? So using the humor and being like adopting the character, most of the people I know that fit that archetype are like incredibly private.

• 2:20:58Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 2:20:59Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they have a social media account, but they'll, they'll post, if they were just posting at constantly, it would just seem like they were just flexing on the world constantly, right? And so there's this weird awkwardness where there are certain types of people, this sort of like full-time consumer, that it would be very distasteful if they were just documenting their life in the same way as like a Austin-based wellness influencer.

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Because it'd be like, okay, we get it. You're at another hotel. We get it. You're at dinner.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have a friend who was like, I had to stop using social media because he learned how to fly helicopters and planes. And like, he was doing all this like insane stuff. And he was like, yeah, if I just post this, it looks like I'm flexing.

• 2:21:34Jordi Hays?

  No, and I think that's why, that's why the character resonates so deeply with like the next gen.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Because they're like, okay, I'm able to see something in myself on social media. And even though it's through satire, it's still like real.

• 2:21:48Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah. And they, and they never got offended because ultimately it's, even though it's poking fun.

• 2:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:54Speaker 09

  It's poking fun up. So it's celebratory. I'm poking fun at people's privilege.

• 2:21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:59Speaker 09

  And by design, that can never be offensive because it's privilege. So.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  How much do you think about formats and testing new formats? I mean, ultimately you're uploading a video file in MP4. It can be shot on a phone. It can be shot on cinema camera. You can edit a hype reel. You can do a lot of different things within the medium of Instagram reels, within the medium of Instagram as a platform. How, how often do you get the itch to, to scratch some other format to take the character into a more cinematic world or a more casual world? How much do you want to, do you want to branch out? Because I know the default is like, you will be punished by the algorithm if you do that. But I think every creator feels the urge every once in a while to say, I want to, I

• 2:22:46John Coogan?

  just want the experience of doing something at, at 20 minutes or two hours or, or shorter or whatever.

• 2:22:56Speaker 09

  I run the account, I think, in quite a unique way. And I started Stadguy eight years ago now. So this is pre Reels feature.

• 2:23:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:03Speaker 09

  Actually, when Reels was pre-launch, they were reaching out to certain video-native creators, creators and creatives online and paying them to start using Reels instead of IGTV, which was the past video feature.

• 2:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, I forgot about that.

• 2:23:18Speaker 09

  And I was one of those early creators. So I had never, the reason why I say that is I had never been led by the algorithm.

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:28Speaker 09

  I'd actually been led by my audience.

• 2:23:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:29Speaker 09

  And that's why I started the account. The way the account started was I filmed a video privately that went viral on WhatsApp. People sent it to each other.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:38Speaker 09

  And then someone stopped me on the street and said, hey, I got a video of you on WhatsApp.

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  That's crazy to get recognized from WhatsApp video.

• 2:23:46Speaker 09

  Yeah. And then I thought, okay, I should create an account.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:48Speaker 09

  There should be something here.

• 2:23:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:50Speaker 09

  And I really felt at service to that first person who stopped me.

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:55Speaker 09

  And those initial followers who happened to be incredibly private, as you mentioned, and incredibly wealthy and hadn't engaged with this sort of content before. Now I have millions of followers, which I'm very grateful for, but before I post, I'm still trying to service that initial niche audience. And it seems strange and novel online, but the way I like to think about it is actually a bit more like a restaurant. And no one questions this in restaurants, but they question it online where, what's a better business model in quotes? Is it a fast food chain that sells a lot of products at a very low price? Or is it a fine dining restaurant that sells very few products at a high price?

• 2:24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:36Speaker 09

  And the answer is whatever is right for the restaurateur.

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:39Speaker 09

  There's no right or wrong. It's all up to them.

• 2:24:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:41Speaker 09

  And I happen to take the path of, I don't actually care about the masses. They're crowding around the restaurant and there's lots of people there and lots of views. That's great. But really what I care about is the few people in the room that I really care on servicing

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:56Speaker 09

  with this very unique product. And, and that's why these brands work with me.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:00Speaker 09

  The brands I work with could work with people that have far greater reach and far greater eyeballs, but instead they work with me because of the fact that I have a few that they are struggling to reach.

• 2:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Hard to reach. That's the exact approach we took. Like early on, now we have million and a half followers on X, something like that. But I still stand by our original, like intuition was that there's 200,000 people in the whole world that we really make content for. And every single show is developed for them. And you can imagine people joining the show, like listening to a minute, just being like, I don't know what these guys are talking about or like, it doesn't seem important. Like it's super boring and then leave forever. But then every day there's people that find the show and they're like, wow, I didn't know there was something that was like this curated around my set of interests and what I care

• 2:25:55Jordi Hays?

  about in business and markets and, and some of the other topics that we touch. And it's like, the best possible thing that you can do is just not chase, like every single creator that is just doing the thing that gets them the most views on the next video. Almost universally, those audiences are not valuable. And, and it's actually like only, only, I would say Mr. Beast is sort of doing that in a way where he's actually being like, what is the next thing that I can do that will be bigger than the last thing?

• 2:26:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:23Jordi Hays?

  And that works for him because his whole sort of thing is like scale and how do I entertain a billion people? But for almost every other kind of like niche and category of creator, if you're just optimizing for going viral on the next video, you just lose the thing that made it great in the first place.

• 2:26:39Speaker 09

  I'm generally not an optimizer or like an engagement driven person, but there is one feature that I love on Instagram and that is see shared activity. I don't know if X has this. It's an amazing feature. Basically it allows you to go to someone's profile and see how they've engaged with your account since the moment they followed you.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:27:00Speaker 09

  The reason why that's important to me is because I have a table of archetypes.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:27:05Speaker 09

  And I have the finance bro.

• 2:27:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:07Speaker 09

  I have the second generation art collector and all these different archetypes of that I, the wine aficionado, people that I talk to my advertisers about.

• 2:27:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:27:19Speaker 09

  And I track how they're engaging with my content. And if I made a specific video for that archetype and that person did not engage with it, I failed.

• 2:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:30Speaker 09

  Even if it has millions of views.

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:32Speaker 09

  Cause my priority was never to entertain.

• 2:27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:34Speaker 09

  My priority was to engage.

• 2:27:35John Coogan?

  It also feels like the, the, the characters and the brand, it would be so easy to slip into rage bait and have the entire audience be like, we hate this guy. Right? Because like, there's just a natural inclination for, oh, this is wealth stuff. Like let's just, or even just completely fake, like aspirational stuff for people that would never book a trip ever, but they're just scrolling it and they're like kids that, you know, would, would never have the opportunity or, or maybe in, you know, years. But yeah, dialing in that audience.

• 2:28:05Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you think that AI will impact luxury and hospitality in some of these categories? Cause I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and I think it's like very, almost like invincible to a lot of technology.

• 2:28:20John Coogan?

  If you operate a hotel in Saint-Tropez, get ready for a thousand AI agents to call you every day.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, that's one way, but that's, that's one way. But, but, but even then it's like those kind of properties already have protections in place, a management team and a style of working with clients that is impervious to, like in many, hopefully like impervious to the internet if, if, but, but anyways, I've spent a bunch of time thinking of it and I'm coming up blank. When you think about categories like watchmaking, it's like, I could not care less if the holy trinity is like using AI, right? It's like, I don't, I, I can imagine a way that like robotics could impact that, but hopefully it would allow them to do something that they've never been able to do before. And being driven by the actual watchmakers themselves in a way that feels like they're

• 2:29:12Jordi Hays?

  carrying the brand forward. But when you think about like hotels, you can imagine AI agents that like you can text at all hours of the day and you get an instant response. But again, you're still going to be wanting to stay at a hotel where like there's a manager that you can talk to, that you can pass by in the hallway and they can support you and your stay and make it like excellent, right? And so, and you do the same thing with like fashion, right? It still comes down to like, what is the vision of the creative director and the people involved with the brands and the designers and all these different things. And like, again, you can imagine them using AI, but I don't even, I can't see it ever

• 2:29:54Jordi Hays?

  becoming like at the forefront or really imagining it like changing the way that like Bottega approaches like collections. Like it feels like some of these things are just like enduring and will just, and remain the same way. But what's your view?

• 2:30:10Speaker 09

  I think we have to answer this question quite specifically. The reason why I think is because there's true luxury in craftsmanship.

• 2:30:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:18Speaker 09

  And there's true scale and optimization.

• 2:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:21Speaker 09

  And then there's the reality of the world, which exists fluidly somewhere in between with many hyper optimized businesses pretending to be craftsmen first.

• 2:30:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:35Speaker 09

  And true luxury businesses. And I think AI kind of acts like a steroid in the sense that if someone wants to be optimized, they can be more optimized than ever. But a hole in the wall French restaurant, if they wanted to optimize their booking process with open table or seven rooms, they would have.

• 2:30:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:55Speaker 09

  So it's not like they've been waiting for this AI optimization. They've resented everything anyway. They still have a corded phone.

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That like the hotel has been resisting like.

• 2:31:05Speaker 09

  Everything.

• 2:31:06Jordi Hays?

  All this stuff for so long.

• 2:31:08Speaker 09

  They even resist air conditioning, some of this. So like, I think really it's the optimized will become more optimized and therefore less luxurious.

• 2:31:17Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:31:18Speaker 09

  Therefore, these two poles we're talking about become more polarized. And the exclusive becomes more exclusive. So all the agents knocking on the door, what does that mean? The door becomes thicker.

• 2:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:31:30Speaker 09

  And they only allow the pre-AI guests to join. And I actually love a hotel. It's called Il San Pietro in Positano. It's a very special family owned hotel, farm to table. Over seventy percent of the guests are people that have stayed at the hotel for over ten years. And over fifty percent are over twenty years. So this is like a members' club without a membership. This is a true home, a vacation home, really. And the new people who'd like to go there are by referral only. And that's why this whole new members' club thing actually kind of bugs me. Because I think it's all just marketing. It's all kind of junk where if you can just, if the only barrier to joining a club and

• 2:32:13Speaker 09

  becoming a member is financial, it's not a real club.

• 2:32:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:32:16Speaker 09

  It should be based on values and knowledge and time and connection or something.

• 2:32:20Jordi Hays?

  And some of these clubs like try to put on this like idea that that it's not like the second you hit the form on the website, they send you the.

• 2:32:27Speaker 09

  By invite only, if you pay a thousand dollars.

• 2:32:30Jordi Hays?

  They sort of intentionally, they clearly, they have an automation that's like, okay, new user applies in two months, send them the sort of like.

• 2:32:41Speaker 09

  It's a, I think, I think the whole members' club thing is also another topic that needs, needs cracking. But it's a, I think the, those who have not optimized will not be optimized.

• 2:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:55Speaker 09

  It will be.

• 2:32:55John Coogan?

  How much are you traveling?

• 2:32:57Speaker 09

  A lot.

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  Okay. Do you have a home base? Do you have multi-home base? How much time do you spend in Europe versus America? Like, how would you even describe a normal year?

• 2:33:08Jordi Hays?

  He's got to be on the circuit.

• 2:33:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, I'm on the circuit a lot. This is kind of funny because the lifestyle I poked fun at is now the lifestyle I live.

• 2:33:14John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:33:15Speaker 09

  I do it kind of differently.

• 2:33:16John Coogan?

  This is, yeah.

• 2:33:16Speaker 09

  Where I, I'm like, it's, I'm working, so although I'm posting videos of these beautiful hotels.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:24Speaker 09

  I'm usually working at those beautiful hotels and not indulging the entire time.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:33:27Speaker 09

  But I'm not complaining here. I'm also very blessed that I get, manage to indulge.

• 2:33:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:31Speaker 09

  In between. I'm staying at hotels around the world, probably eight months of the year.

• 2:33:36John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Two hundred nights or something, yeah.

• 2:33:39Speaker 09

  I'm always on the move.

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:33:41Speaker 09

  It's a, it's a blessing though, it's cool.

• 2:33:43John Coogan?

  Are you getting pulled away from Europe as your platform grows? Is there demand for what you've done for Europe? Let's see, we should get him to bring his audience to Asia. So it's worth us paying up, or the Middle East. I could see there being a lot of things where that clientele, it's almost hire LTV to get one of your audience members to visit a new territory. And so maybe there's more pressure or incentive for you to branch out. But I'm sure there's a trade off there for you.

• 2:34:18Speaker 09

  I mean, what's funny is that I storytell a lot in Europe.

• 2:34:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:21Speaker 09

  But most of my audience is in the US.

• 2:34:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:24Speaker 09

  And that's the same way that the nicest hotels in Saint-Tropez, their biggest spending customer base are Americans.

• 2:34:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:34:32Speaker 09

  And that's exactly what's happened to my page. It's actually this incredible US curiosity.

• 2:34:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:34:37Speaker 09

  Of Europe and wanting to consume in Europe.

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:34:39Speaker 09

  That has allowed my page to grow as fast as it has. So the biggest pull right now business wise is actually in the US.

• 2:34:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:34:47Speaker 09

  Of US businesses wanting to be affiliated with this US way of, sorry, European way of consuming.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:34:55Speaker 09

  And doing things, particularly in Switzerland and even Italy. I think luxury in Switzerland and luxury in Italy are unique to quality and craft and substance.

• 2:35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:08Speaker 09

  While in France, for example, historically luxury in French has had opulence tied to it. If you walk through a museum in France and these hallways, you have these beautiful gold and art and even the food, you have this foam and cream and presentation. Meanwhile, you go an hour away to Milan or Switzerland and everything is incredibly simple. And it's all about the ingredients and the craft. And there's actually, there's none of that gold hallway. It's actually a pretty empty, simple, all about the substance.

• 2:35:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:39Speaker 09

  And a lot of the brands that are approaching me in the US, wanting to work with me in the US, want me to bring that touch and that storytelling to their own businesses here.

• 2:35:51Jordi Hays?

  So it's so key. I mean, my biggest frustration with like, sort of like commercial US hospitality is you have these properties that are worth like a billion dollars on paper and the actual, there's no substance at all. Like every restaurant has terrible ingredients, right? And so there's all these like pockets of the US where like the actual, like the natural landscape is incredible, even the, the sort of like infrastructure that they have is incredible, but then the actual experience is like sort of Disneyland, quality, you know, food.

• 2:36:25Speaker 09

  I see a lot of exceptions and they're usually all family owned.

• 2:36:29Jordi Hays?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:36:30Speaker 09

  Like I recently went to San Isidro Ranch.

• 2:36:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:36:33Speaker 09

  A beautiful property in Santa Barbara.

• 2:36:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 2:36:36Speaker 09

  And you feel like you're, you're traveling because nothing seems optimized.

• 2:36:40Jordi Hays?

  You mean like you feel like you're traveling outside of the country?

• 2:36:42Speaker 09

  Outside the country. You're traveling outside the country. Because nothing feels optimized.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:47Speaker 09

  And you know, like back to your AI question.

• 2:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Wait, and you'll, you'll appreciate this because I saw, I saw a video that was somebody saying there's thousands of, of European, small European hotels that are, that need to change hands in the next ten years because.

• 2:37:05John Coogan?

  Private equity.

• 2:37:05Jordi Hays?

  There's no, there's no, yeah, it was basically like somebody should make, it was like an American.

• 2:37:09John Coogan?

  Let's ruin this.

• 2:37:09Jordi Hays?

  There was an American guy being like, we got to roll up all these hotels because there's no one to inherit them. And, and this whole, because like the kids moved away and whatever. And I'm like, yeah, so let's just like ruin the thing that made them great in the first place, which is that they were family owned and they were designed to make enough money to stay in business, but not to just like extract and scale and, and.

• 2:37:31Speaker 09

  Unfortunately, private equity usually ruins luxury and doesn't actually create value and save jobs. It's usually too much optimization. And AI will ruin a lot of luxury too.

• 2:37:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:45Speaker 09

  And this is real luxury, I think. If you have to optimize it, then it's kind of defeats the purpose. The whole point of luxury is that it's unoptimized. It's a luxury.

• 2:37:53Jordi Hays?

  So you have a very American audience. Do you think Americans need to romanticize America more?

• 2:37:59John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Because I think the funny dynamic of like Euro summer is you'll have an American go over there and they'll just be like at some little hole in the wall restaurant. And to them, it's like the most amazing like thing. And they're like, look, you get this just like espresso, blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever it is. But you could actually find that like in a small town in like Idaho, you know? Like if you really went looking.

• 2:38:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:23Jordi Hays?

  You could find it and you'd be like, wow, we're sitting here by this lake and there's this amazing little family owned sandwich shop. But it feels like people are only thinking in that way when they're outside of the country. But maybe that's just like a permanent truth you can't appreciate within your backyard.

• 2:38:38Speaker 09

  I think saying all Americans is a stretch because this is a massive country.

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:43Speaker 09

  I think saying the very wealthy city people in the US, let's take Miami, LA and New York.

• 2:38:49John Coogan?

  Extremely online as well.

• 2:38:49Speaker 09

  And the extremely online who are extremely exposed.

• 2:38:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:52Speaker 09

  I think they should really enjoy what this country has to offer before leaving every chance they get.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:58Speaker 09

  There's so much to see and do in this country.

• 2:39:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:00Speaker 09

  Especially if you like outdoors and being active. And I think the best people to learn from are actually the Swiss. What I love about the Swiss is that they really use everything around them.

• 2:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:11Speaker 09

  A Swiss person who lives in a city or in the mountain, they ski every slope around them, they hike every trail, they sit on every bench, they try every cafe, they go to every weekend market. The Swiss really enjoy Switzerland.

• 2:39:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:25Speaker 09

  And they know they have no reason to leave Switzerland. And I think Americans should enjoy America because you could literally like spend ten years not leaving this country and.

• 2:39:37Speaker 09

  Really change the way you think and there's so much to see and do here.

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Easier to do in Switzerland because the whole country.

• 2:39:43Speaker 09

  It's much smaller.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's small. No, I just remember I have some like sort of multi generational family friends that are based in Switzerland. And so my, my family has been hanging out with that family across like grandparents, parents, and now my generation and going there the first time. You're exactly right. It's like, one, the whole, the whole country is like, when I, when I was a kid visiting for the first time, I was like, that's a golf course, right? And they were like, no, that's just like a random hillside. But like the American, the American mind can't, can't comprehend like a perfectly like sort of naturally manicured like hillside, right? You just assume like, oh, it's clearly a golf course. But then it's like, yeah, they, they go hiking straight out of their backyard.

• 2:40:27Speaker 09

  It's amazing.

• 2:40:28Jordi Hays?

  Straight up the mountain. And then when you go around, driving around, they're like, oh, yeah, that's where I like paraglide. And that's where, you know, whatever, that's where our bread's made. It's like, but finding your own version of Switzerland in America is possible.

• 2:40:41Speaker 09

  It is for sure. I recently went to Montana.

• 2:40:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:44Speaker 09

  That was incredible.

• 2:40:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:46Speaker 09

  It's, I think Montana is a lot bigger than Switzerland as a state.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  There are plenty of places in America where it's like, that's where I do donuts in my Hellcat.

• 2:40:55John Coogan?

  This happens.

• 2:40:57Jordi Hays?

  What does it, what does it take to get a new, a new kind of like spot on, on your schedule? You're competing like, I think like the, the challenge that you have, I'm sure is like,

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  for every event that you go to, there's maybe like 10 or 20 others that you could probably use that, that time for. And then some of it is like set in place. But like Montana, for example, like, will you be at the ice race in Montana this coming year? Does that, can that earn a spot? Or is there some?

• 2:41:25Speaker 09

  I actually don't know what that is. Sounds cool.

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, they do, this company FAT, which is actually an old, old company based out of Europe that is now adapted into, they do a couple of ice races, one in Europe and one, one in Big Sky. But it's like, it's amazing. It's, it's Montana at its best with a little European flavor.

• 2:41:49Speaker 09

  That, that sort of thing I'd love to do. I, really what I like to do is, and what serves my business, is to do what those core archetypes that I really value are either doing or seeking to do. I think a great example of this is 10 to 15 years ago, the ultra high net worth jet set really loved fashion weeks and they really wanted to go to fashion weeks. And now they all avoid fashion weeks. And in fact, if they live in a city where a fashion week is happening, they leave. And that's because it became too online and too influencer pushed, which is kind of ironic that I'm going there. But, you know, it's something happens where they actually don't like those things.

• 2:42:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:35Speaker 09

  And now they, for example, avoid fashion weeks. They avoid a lot of the art events. They go to far more niche art moments. Like, for example, they used to go to Art Basel Miami. Most art people I know avoid Art Basel Miami at all costs. Instead, they're in Venice, let's say, or Art Basel in Basel.

• 2:42:53John Coogan?

  I always wonder if I have a bachelor party. Not kidding about that.

• 2:42:56Speaker 09

  See, I mean, this, this bachelor party is happening there, you know, it's, you know, it's not about art. It has nothing to do with art anymore. Most people who go to, I think most people who go to Art Basel don't even realize there's a town called Basel in Switzerland.

• 2:43:11John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:43:11Speaker 09

  They think it's a party in Miami.

• 2:43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:13Speaker 09

  And that's what makes these people kind of turned off by the whole thing.

• 2:43:16John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:43:17Speaker 09

  So I, the circuit is not a fixed circuit.

• 2:43:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:22Speaker 09

  It's an ever changing thing that I.

• 2:43:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically, as soon, as soon as it's established as a circuit, it's already, it's already open.

• 2:43:29Speaker 09

  It's too late. It's done. Yeah, it's too late. I think a good example of that is Mykonos.

• 2:43:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:43:34Speaker 09

  Which is, yeah, over.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:38Speaker 09

  I mean, people are still.

• 2:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Last question I'm curious about. You obviously work with a bunch of different brands and help them not only from an attention standpoint, but thinking through like their strategy to, to actually improve their brands and reach the right people, et cetera. But how, have you spent any time working with, let's say, like a newly minted tech billionaire or AI researcher type that, that's just like, hey, I want to accelerate my consumption from, you know, the silly years one to five where they're just doing stupid stuff, buying stupid cars and staying at the wrong places and helping them achieve, you know, the, the next level of the ladder?

• 2:44:21Speaker 09

  I am that friend to many people. It's not at all a side of my business. People can watch my content and kind of grasp some of that.

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:29Speaker 09

  But I have a lot of friends who text me and say, hey, I'm about to book this trip here.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:33Speaker 09

  Is this cool?

• 2:44:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:35Speaker 09

  And I say, if you're asking if it's cool, you already know that you're going to have a bad time. You shouldn't be going anywhere.

• 2:44:41John Coogan?

  That's a good point.

• 2:44:42Speaker 09

  Because it's cool. Go and explore and have a good time with your family, whatever. So I get a lot of inbound like that. I love to help friends out. Maybe I should turn it into.

• 2:44:51Jordi Hays?

  I think, no, I think you, because, because I'm just thinking of it as like, there's people that are like, better or worse, they're like, I'm going to spend $5 million.

• 2:45:00Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Over the next five years on all these different things. And if you, you can probably, I, I think you, you know, not to turn you into a course, bro, but I think there's a high ticket offering where you basically say like, yeah, you have to pay me like 200 grand or something like that. But I'm going to help you actually design your life and your consumption in a way that, that basically, they'll make, they'll basically save the money, right? That they would have spent on dumb things. So.

• 2:45:25John Coogan?

  You could also go down market, do a new character, sort of more like the average American, like, look, Nitro Circus is coming to Reno. It's on a circuit. Get out there.

• 2:45:36Jordi Hays?

  I think you need to do that.

• 2:45:38John Coogan?

  There's a monster truck rally coming around. Bam Margera is going to appear. You gotta be there. It is cool. Get ready.

• 2:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, that's a good place to end it.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for coming to them.

• 2:45:51Speaker 09

  Thank you guys so much.

• 2:45:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can, we can close out the show.

• 2:45:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:53Speaker 09

  Thank you.

• 2:45:53John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, sign up for newsletter, tbpin.com. We'll see you tomorrow for a big event. Goodbye.

• 2:46:00Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.