Hereticon, Blood Boys, Hypercar Suggestions, What really is ESG?

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordan and I just got back from Hereticon in Miami. We want to do a, an overview, a deep dive. When did you actually get in to Miami?

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  Got in Monday, got back yesterday.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Pretty short.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  There was, apparently the World Series happened.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  There was 100,000 people on the streets outside of the studio today.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Not even they could stop us from recording today.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Nothing can stop us.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Too much to talk about.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  It was like a crazy time for stuff happening and I was completely disconnected from it. Like I didn't see anything about the World Series.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know the World Series.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Did you see what happened in the stock market while we were there? Like everything ripped, Bitcoin went above 70K. And then as soon as Hereticon was over, everything crashed.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Classic.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  It was like the vibes. We were just like summoning all the capital allocators together in Miami, partying.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What does that say when people just get offline, like good things happen?

• 0:51John Coogan?

  No one can sell.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  All the biggest hitters were there and they were all drinking and partying, so they couldn't sell.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  So the market just ripped.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  And then they got back and they were hung over and they were like, actually I need to hedge.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  Hedge, hedge, hedge.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Worst, worst, worst. What was your favorite like moment?

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Or did you come away like with any like interesting takes? The main thing for me was that at the first Hereticon, that we, there were some aliens stuff and I didn't really buy it. I'm buddies with Jesse Michaels, who's like the, the main aliens guy and he hosted a talk with this guy Carl Nell, who I think is going to be like really, really big soon, like DeRogan soon. And it materially updated my, my like expected value of aliens being real.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Now, I probably went from like 3% to 10%, but it was good, mostly just because the guy that Jesse brought, this guy Carl Nell, he speaks, he's not like the strung out hippie burner guy being like, oh yeah, I saw some stuff. And it's like, okay, you were probably on drugs and that happened. He's like, straight up, they test for, in, in the government, like in his like.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  In his like world, they test even for like ibuprofen because it's like you have the button, you have the, you have your finger on the button, like the nuclear button. So like they, they need to know everything. So these people aren't on drugs. And then he puts things in terms that I think tech people and skeptics like me can understand and actually open things up. Cause like the classic like tech person defense of like aliens aren't real is just like, well, we're listening. We have the SETI project and it's quiet. Like there's no one's broadcasting and we've, and we're broadcasting, right? But his point is that actually the SETI program does not broadcast.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  We assume that we would broadcast because we broadcast television, like I love Lucy. I love Lucy. Once we got to like the fifties, I think we started broadcasting with these really high powered satellites or these dishes. They go out and they should be findable in deep space. And so you would assume that, you know, aliens really far away. They got I love Lucy, you know, a million years ago, and we should be able to get this. But his point is that we have actually, humans on earth have stopped broadcasting because we switched to using fiber.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  Technology brothers. That's a perfect show to send up.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we, we should broadcast.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  We should do that.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  Even though everyone gets it over the internet, which is fiber and Starlink and satellite internet.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I want to send it into deep space.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  That'd be so traumatizing.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, we need to propaganda.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  They're like, what about the timeline?

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was, he was good at like bridging from like the dark forest and then providing a bunch of evidence. And so Jesse is like very convinced now and I, I think it's good. And he's also like super straight edge now. So I'm, that makes me believe it more.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that I feel like we, we were trying to be cognizant of that with our talk of like dressing nicely.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  You know, our, anybody that wasn't there, our talk was on, you know, the case for performance drug use in Silicon Valley. And so doing any type of talk about drugs, we wanted to make sure that we like looked, you know, presentable.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and I think we did.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  I think we were probably the best dressed people that day.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  I mean, the whole thesis was like, we need to go back to the madman era of the 1950s where there were an intense amount of nootropics consumed. Alcohol was drank at work.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  One way to.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Caffeine was drank at work. They were smoking, using nicotine constantly in the office. And now we've turned, like, all of technology has turned into like, oh, like, you need like some stack. It's a nootropic. It's like, no, it's just a drug and it's cool to use it at work.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you basically want to short the companies where the founder is like even thinking about what their stack is. Versus the founder that's just like flow state ingesting. But yeah, I guess two things that stood out that were interesting. The talk that most stood out to me was, I mean, there was a lot. I wouldn't say it was the one that stood out the most, but it was the one that um that I think would be interesting to listeners. So Brian Johnson gave his like, don't die speech and talk. I think the thing for me was

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  realizing that he puts so much content out there about like his, you know, basically his like penis, right? Because it's like the perfect like lead gen.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Viral thing.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  Viral thing.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  But there is an extreme level of depth to death. No, extreme level.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  Extreme level of depth to what he's talking about. And I think it's a lot more interesting than just the surface level like billionaire spending money on his health.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  One thing that I think the audience reaction that was interesting, I think like 50% of people were like, this is super cool. I'm going to download the app. 50% of people were, this is a death cult. Like of the 20, you know, of the 21st century. Like this guy, every single person that's ever had a death cult was like this sort of like charismatic figure who's promising. We're on the precipice of something very significant, which in this case is AI. And you need to figure out how to learn, live forever and we're all going to live forever together. And his example from the talk was that he he said something to the tune of, of like, what I took away is like, basically he's creating an algorithm that tells you exactly what to do all day long.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  And his big pitch to the audience was like, would you use the algorithm? And some people were like, well, what if I want to like, I'm hanging out with my friends and having fun and the algorithm says, go to sleep.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  He's like, would you do that? And he was really just like, sort of trying to find this common

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Are you willing to do that? Yeah.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  Cultural ground. And then the other thing that was funny is Wearing a Make America Great Again hat was like the most non contrarian thing you could do.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  I was thinking about this.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  Where I I shouldn't give a blanket statement, but it felt like most of the the most normie people there were wearing the Make America Great Again hats and Delian was not.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  And Delian's the guy who like three years ago was getting horrifically like.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  More than that, that was like, it was like six years ago.

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  Six years ago, yeah.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, he got canceled on Twitter for wearing it.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Horrifically canceled.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Just as like, and he didn't even endorse Trump at the time. It was like, it was like a performance art piece just to see what would happen in San Francisco. And there was a big backlash.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  In fact, the most, the most heretical talk that I heard on politics was the case for Kamala Harris. Which is very interesting and it was presented this kind of trollish way.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, the most, the most.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  But it, but it there actually was in that talk like very serious criticism and very like like a deeper level of analysis around the flaws of Donald Trump than I'd seen elsewhere, certainly in like the media, which I think was cool.

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, the most triggered I saw anybody was maybe Max Myers after the D cell talk where this guy was basically saying.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  And he was just like, like, like basically rattled.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  We do have to respect Chatham House rules to some degree, but.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, another favorite moment, like David Senra would show up and then like every two hours he'd be like, all right, I gotta go home and like edit the podcast. And I like never knew if he was just like, this is getting like too crazy, or he actually just had to get home and edit the podcast.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think he just likes, you know, hanging out with a small group of people.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  And when you have like 500 people packed in a place, he's just like, what's the point?

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the real Heretic on was on the 14th floor.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's how it always is. I mean, last, last time I met Will, which is the reason I met you was because of Heretic on. And it was all just because we just sat at a dinner table together.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  Will is who injured us.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  That's so funny.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Will introduced us and I met him at Heretic on and, and he had, he was telling me like, oh yeah, I quit smoking with Lucy and, and, and afterwards we were just like, yeah, we were like, got along really well, really well. And we just had a really good time and got putting a couple of like group chats together and stuff. And then it just kind of like continued from there.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Rest is history.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  But yeah. There's always, like, that type of connection is like much more valuable. In general, I mean, all the talks, it's so odd because of like the vibe shift. There's not that much stuff that it's like, oh, if this were to leak, like, it would be, it would be career ending for them. Like, most people have kind of sorted into organizations. It's not like they're like middle manager at some like tech company that is actually gonna like have HR and compliance be like, hey, you can't be out there. Most of the people that are attending are like either running their own company or aligned with venture capital firms that would support them. Or like, they have a big following on X.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  The interesting thing was, there wasn't that many people that had to put in like a PTO request to be there, is what I would say. Like, there was a handful of people that had to put in a PTO request and were on like a vacation in Miami.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  But then most of the people were just like, that was work.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Oh, 100%, some of the most productive, exactly.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  Ever, and we were very much working.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  100% working.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  The entire time.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But yes, because of the vibe shift, like, there, there aren't that many things that are like, oh, this person like said some, something that like, if, if it got out, it'd be really bad. It's more just like, there's somebody putting something out there and they're laying out a little bit more of a rigorous case for aliens or something like that. And it's, it's on you as the viewer to just kind of say like, okay, I'm, I'm getting another, like, another ball is being thrown at me. Am I gonna swing at this one? Like, do I believe this a little bit more, a little bit less? And so, the, the ideas are not controversial in like the you can't say them realm, as much as controversial in the sense of like, 50% of the audience is like, I'm not really into this, or whatever.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Like, you made the case for, like, Brian's thing is like, it's somewhat authoritarian, like, there's a lot of libertarians. Like, that is, that is kind of like a debate point for people, even if it's like, he could talk about it publicly and it's fine. Because it's not that controversial to talk about, it's just like, it's an idea that not everyone is down, and that's why it was split 50/50. And that's like the ideal scenario is you go into every talk and, and people come away. Like, even at our talk, people, there were multiple people that came up with, with, after us and were like, no psychedelics are great. And our, basically, our pitch was like, no psychedelics are terrible.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Um, and it's just, it's just like, I think that that's, that's kind of like what heretical meant this time around. As opposed to, last time, it was very much just the only place in the world that you could go at that moment and say whatever you wanted because Elon didn't own Twitter yet, and there was still like massive like kids and culture and stuff.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Interesting how. I mean, if it was the most unique event that I've ever been to.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  And truly, yeah, an amazing product.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  Thinking of it as like a product of like, and it, you know. But, um, but it's, it's one, it's interesting, like, would it ever have existed if, if Twitter wasn't where we all were having conversations, but couldn't say the things that we wanted to say?

• 11:08John Coogan?

  And, and COVID. I mean, I know Mike was planning it before, uh, before COVID hit, but once COVID got really bad, that really like amplified it and made it like, it was the first conference that 90% of attendees had been to since the lockdown started. And it, because it was just like, there was, everything was canceled.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  And Hereticon still got pushed a few times the first time, but then

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  eventually happened. And it was like this big celebration of like,

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Okay. And, and the vaccines had actually dropped, so it wasn't that dangerous for people who were down with that. And so it was a little easier, but still companies weren't like, all, all of the big tech conferences were still virtual.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One of the things that was cool and maybe under discussed to date is that there was this really good combination of intellectuals and people that were focused on theory.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  And people that are technologists, business leaders, investors that are much more pragmatic.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  And so I went to the talk on terraforming.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  And ended up talking with the guy that hosted it afterward. And I was like, cool. You know, his, his, his high level point was there's these point, there's these depressions around earth which are below sea level. So if you just get water to them, you can make these huge lakes or seas or whatever.

• 12:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  And I went to him and I was like, okay, cool. What's the next step? And he's like, I don't know. Like, I just sort of like talk about this, like terraforming is like my thing. So I just talk about it. I'm not the guy to actually go and do it.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  So I very quickly like came up with a strategy for one of those depressions, which we can talk about off air.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  Which was basically like to buy up a ton of land around that specific area.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  For nothing, because it's worthless right now.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  And then go spend like 10 times more money lobbying to get water to that place.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  And there's like a really interesting arbitrage where like you could turn like a hundred million dollars into billions of dollars

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Just through this like weird mechanic. So

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  we're gonna keep talking and like, see if there's

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Cool, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the water rates thing is fascinating. It goes back to like, Chinatown, like fascinating movie, like how LA wound up with water rights. But I remember there was a politician was saying like, like we, like all of Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona could have like way, way more water if there is actually like a technological solution, which is nuclear powered desalination in California.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  So you have the ocean, unlimited water.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Nuclear, unlimited energy. You put those two together, desalination is really energy intensive, so it doesn't make economic sense now, but if you can do that, then you can reroute the Colorado River back to like kind of where it should be, basically. And then, and then all of a sudden, the, the Southwest becomes not like a desert anymore. It just becomes like lovely because there's just water everywhere.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  And there's just like so many other little plans like that. Obviously, it's a long time, but like with the right combination of like technology, lobbying, economic incentives, and

• 13:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  And like academic type influencers.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  You, you did come away from it feeling like the biggest plays in the world right now from a business standpoint, combine technology with lobbying.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  It's interesting, the

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  Cause like, the biggest opportunities in SaaS.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  Like even AI is like lobbying driven right now.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, just the fact that like, a lot of these are like, like, there's at least one idea there and you kind of got to hunt for it that like will become consensus. Like this is the whole idea of like contrarianism, which is kind of Hereticon, just like a different, a synonym.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Is that like, the attendees for this one will just be like the entrepreneurs for the next like two decades. And, and everyone will be like, oh, like, why is that guy here? His thing's not contrarian anymore. And it's like, well, yeah, but you're not just gonna stop working on it. Like last Hereticon, I gave a talk on nicotine is good for you, right? And this, and this year, like, I was like, I'm not just gonna run that back because like everyone knows about that. Like, that's like super normie at this point. And same with like the Andorol guys, like, if they were just set up, they were like, we should build a defense company. Like, it's like, okay, dude, we get it. But at the same time, you don't want the Andorol guys being like, oh, I'm moving on to the next hot thing because I just care about doing contrarian stuff. It's like, it's okay that they've gotten, that they, that they, they did the contrarian thing. They, they, they took the bet, they were correct. But now they have to go live that life for basically ever.

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  And that's good, and that's the way it should be. But it lends itself to this like, give me a newer hot take. And it's like, okay, like you can, I'm sure they have good ideas, but it's not always gonna be as big as like the one thing that they, that becomes the life work, right?

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  The contrarian.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Thing from this event that will become mainstream is goo.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Goo?

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  Theo's goo.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Is that?

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  Volta.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, John Theo from the Fiorentini family.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Fiorentino family.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Fiorentino family. They made their money in hospitality, right?

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. And he, I mean, we talked about his prolific hiking regimen.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Six to fourteeners.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  Basically, a lot of people were starting to skip the coffee.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  They were.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Espresso and go for the goo.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  A lot of people.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  And there would be people running around really wired, three, four AM.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  On, off the goo and you could just see this crazy look in their.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  He needs a new work.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  It was almost like, it was almost like a divine spark.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  In their eyes.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  Yes. Is it the collagen, the colostrum, the caffeine?

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we don't know what it is.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  The combination.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  Sacred combination. And he talks about something that is interesting is like, there's no difference between invention or discovery. And so this, it's this thing of like, did he create goo? Or did he invent goo? Did he discover it? Are they all the same thing? But by next Hereticon, well, I think we'll have figured that out.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Interesting. I'm bummed that Packy couldn't make it. But did you see his tweet?

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  Was he having a child? How on earth did he not make it?

• 16:46John Coogan?

  I think so, something like that. But he, he said, I sadly didn't make it to Hereticon, so here's my talk. We should flip these lines. And it's the amount of venture capital investment, year over year. And then the amount of charitable giving and the charitable giving line is much higher than the venture capital.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that, that by itself is like, we probably shouldn't even talk about it. Cause it should just be a talk at Hereticon.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  That just becomes like a normie, like, thing that, you know, if it, if it ends up being, you know, world positive.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the fascinating thing about all of the, like, climate funds. Not even, even the climate VC funds didn't do that well. There was a big, I think it was Kleiner Perkins had a big push. They had a fund that was, what, what was the term back in the day?

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  That almost like destroyed their brand for like a decade.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  It was, it was tough. I mean, Al Gore became a partner there. Isn't that crazy? He's like hanging out there. But I forget what it was called. There was some, there was some term for this, like, green. Or something like that that was like really popular, but Tesla was not considered in that category.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but if you bundle Tesla and

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Then the returns go great. Exactly. And so it's like, there's almost like this misclassification of like, the thing that solves the problem might not even look like it's in that category. Just like, you know, if you were like, starting like, okay, we're, we're, we're an internet, we're an internet infrastructure fund. Like, do you get into the seed round of SpaceX?

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  No.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the, um.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  But you should.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  I do think that VCs that are not there, that are feeling FOMO, should probably feel in order of magnitude more FOMO. Like, I'm not, I'm not kidding. Like, there, when the event was very expensive.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  But I guarantee you, it will result in a massive return from founders fund and the other VCs that were there. It's like, there's people there. I wish the missed opportunity was getting a photo of the entire group.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  Because it would have just looked like the, it's the most eclectic group ever. Like, a lot of like, kind of strange, you know, a strange mix of people.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  And you could look at that picture 30 years from now and be like, this guy like annexed Cuba. Like, this guy like, uh, this guy did a hostile takeover of SpaceX.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  I liked Palmer's tweet. What was that? What did Palmer say? He said, Hereticon was so good. Banger after banger, hit after hit, as if all the best threads on 4chan came to life. But with a level of mutual respect and discourse lifted from the best stereotypes of Victorian explorers.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  No, it was one, there was a conversation that was being had and Sendra kept saying like, what does that mean? Like, what does that mean?

• 19:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  And they were all like 4chan slang.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  And he was just like, what? Like, what's going on right now?

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Sendra's so delightfully offline with his like book reading.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  That's why, that's why founders is what it is, is because

• 19:45John Coogan?

  He does the reading for you.

• 19:46Jordi Hays?

  He's not, well, yeah, he's focused on things that were written mostly in the 20th century.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  And that's why there's so much alpha in the podcast. If he was extremely online, like refreshing the timeline, like the podcast would not be, he would not be who he is.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  And so I think that that was a cool thing. Like, everybody there is like authentically themselves.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  And I didn't feel like, most people weren't there. The only time that I got offended was a guy like Trying to be heretical, not actually being.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  Um, and it was for like a very like political topic that we didn't need to talk about because we don't, we don't talk about politics on this podcast.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  Um, but yeah, everybody was there being them authentically themselves and the combination of all of that just made it amazing.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I liked Gabby's tweet. Overheard at Heretic Con, the real new trope is being on a mission.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm kind of, I'm kind of mad she didn't credit me for that.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Did you say this?

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  That was my line.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  That was your line?

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Wait, did you say that in the, in our talk or just randomly?

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  No, during the talk.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was at, it was at the end. I think we were honestly, uh, talking about a, a certain presidential candidate who, who clearly does all the wrong things, like crazy schedule, overworked, Diet Coke, McDonald's, like eating terribly. And the argument there was that there's no, the real, the most powerful drug on the earth is the human spirit and being on a mission.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Yeah. Um, I liked Daniel, I don't know how to spell his last, pronounce his last name, Tenreiro.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  Is he at Teal Capital?

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Uh, he worked at Teal Capital for a while, but now he's independent. I hold my own private version of Heretic Con every day on the inside of my brain.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  That's like really, that's like really true because I think it is a place where you can say the things that like, like that's kind of the point of it.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Schizo energy.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. You're just like saying things that aren't normally said.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, but there was, there was like a, when I did, I didn't really go on Twitter during the conference, but there was a little bit of like, uh, pushback, like Rune tweeted, like when people go from SF to Heretic Con Miami, the average IQ of both cities go up, which is this like copy pasta of this like incredible tweet by, uh, product manager, Raul.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:58John Coogan?

  Um, but it's just, it's just like oddly written.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's funny. I saw another, I saw another tweet that was like, come on, sweetie. It's time for your quarterly beef with founders fund.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  And he's like, okay.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, yeah, Rune, Rune's like a prolific hater, but, you know, I think you should put your journalist hat on for a minute, like your traditional tech journalist and just like follow the money. Think about it. Like Rune works at OpenAI.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Peter co-founded OpenAI. He's invested in OpenAI. Like, he needs an enemy. He needs someone to beef. Because you don't want to be at the top. You don't want to have no enemies. That's, that's the worst. You need someone taking you down.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if we didn't have the working, if we weren't fighting against the working class.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  There would be no podcast.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, a similar thing happened with Sequoia. Like, Sequoia was like, you know, the untouchable firm, no enemies. And then Sean McGuire, you know, decided to wage a holy war against Islam. And so now they have an enemy. And, and now they're not just this like untouchable brand. They need, you know, it's, again, it's David and Goliath all over again, which is the ideal scenario. You always want to be the underdog. And so even if you have to pay someone to talk trash about you, it's totally worth it. That's the summary.

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely. Thanks for the clicks, Rune.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I do think it's funny because our talk was closer to a comedy sketch than a real talk. And I realized that like midway through, where we would say a line and if we didn't get a laugh, it's like, ah, rework that.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  But you know that the, that somebody came away from that not realizing that it was like a more comedic sketch than anything else.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  And they're just, they were probably like, these guys are fucking crazy. You guys are awesome.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  This is the craziest talk I've heard.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Uh, but I mean, a lot of it was like, you know, comedy shrouding around like a true idea or like teasing a true idea. But just like amplifying things to like, help it stick in people's mind and become like memes. And then our boy Theo got destroyed by some IV or something. He said, "The cost of admission to Hereticon was expensive this year, but it was worth it because he became a blood boy." Which of course is another joke. There are no real blood boys there, unfortunately, but.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  Not in any of the rooms you were in.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  No, not, not in the rooms. Anything else to talk about Hereticon?

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure it'll come up later.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. What should we move on to next? I think it's time to tell you about today's highlight, Sotheby's. Since 1744, Sotheby's has been the premier destination for art connoisseurs, collectors, and enthusiasts alike, offering an unparalleled platform for buying and selling fine art, jewelry, rare books, and collectibles. From classic masterpieces to contemporary works, Sotheby's brings together world-class expertise and global reach, connecting treasures with those who truly appreciate them. So whether you're looking to acquire a timeless piece or explore the vibrant world of modern art, Sotheby's is where extraordinary finds a home. Tell a story about a piece of fine art.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  I really like this Peter Paul Rubens, David and Goliath, have you seen this?

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  It's currently kept at the Norton Simon, hopefully it'll be at Sotheby's in a few years.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  You can pick it up.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  But it's iconic because Rubens was like, he really explored the human form and musculature. It's this jacked David about to behead Goliath. It's a very, very aggressive piece.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  But it's interesting because when I first heard the story of David Goliath, you think about David as this tiny little underling and Goliath as this massive, massive

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like you and me.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  But in this painting, David is actually very powerful and jacked. Yes, he's smaller, but he's still put in the work. And I think that there's actually a good metaphor there. Where it's like, you can't just be like, "Oh, I'm some startup and I'm going against the big company and they're huge and I'm small, therefore it's a David and Goliath situation, I'm gonna win by throwing the stone." It's like, no, David clearly put in the work, at least in this telling of it. And I like that.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  And that's another thing with Sotheby's, they're not afraid to put in the work. They, in addition to the art that they have listed and some of the private catalog, you can go to them and get their help finding specific works that you feel something about.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  You recently had luck here, right?

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we were looking for basically a lost copy of the Wealth of Nations. We have a copy there just, you know, for sentimental value.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  And for daily reference.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  The Technology Brothers, you know, collector division was looking for a copy that, you know, a lot of people thought was, you know, completely lost. So the beast was able to help us get it. Took about three weeks, but basically no lift on our side and it's now safely in the vault.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of like the Holy Grail of capitalism.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  In some ways.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  Just go put your hand out and absorb the energy.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the primary inspiration for this podcast.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, thank you to Sotheby's.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Uh, should we move on to some tweets or should we do brother of the week?

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  We can just jump into the brother.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  The brother of the week.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna have to go to the mansion section.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, so in the Wall Street Journal today, in the mansion section, there's someone that we have to highlight. So his name, where is his name?

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Famed LA.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  George Ruane, R U A N, is that Ruane, Ruane? So this is the co-founder of Honey, sold the company to PayPal for $4 billion. And he essentially got a free $44 million house, which has now been profiled. It's 16,000 square feet, nine bedrooms in Los Angeles. The coupon king buys again. So how he got this house for $44 million, effectively for free, this is real, like, he, uh, so in, uh, in 2020, he paid $60 million for a 21,000 square foot house in Bel Air. And then just two years later, when the market was ripping, he top ticks it and puts it on the market for 150 million, almost three times the price.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  And he, he actually gets the deal done, sells it for 112. So that's a $52 million gain, pays a little tax maybe.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Gets the $44 million house for free.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  Rolls it in. Yeah, I think this is the real story from this is that if you're a founder out there building something like a Chrome extension, which everybody says Chrome extension, this is silly. Like, this is not a real business. If he had, if this guy had never built a Chrome extension, that he never would have had gotten a free $44 million house. So don't ever let anybody tell you that your idea is small or not worth doing. That brings up, I saw that Grammarly is at like basically 300 million of ARR.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this?

• 28:45John Coogan?

  No.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, so Chrome extensions.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you're at Heretic, if you're at the Heretic on that didn't happen in 2012.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  It was, it would have been all about Chrome extensions.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Probably. Something, something weird about that. I mean, there.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels fake.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the honey and the, and the Grammarly, those companies like, uh, people love to say, oh, AI is gonna like destroy this, or like, there's gonna be some new thing that's like, it's not gonna work. But people seriously underrate, this is like a Nikita beer point, but people seriously underrate like, just like, good management and good, like, and a well-run company being valuable, even in, even in like, a little bit of an odd industry that might feel a little fragile. And so I, I think the Duolingo stock hasn't fallen at all, even though everyone's like, oh, of course, you just learn how to speak a different language by talking to ChatGPT. And it's like, maybe.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  Part of it's just a distribution thing. Like, I actually am more bullish on, much more bullish on Duolingo than Grammarly, when Grammarly feels like, okay, you're built on top of this browser that actively wants to roll out features that differentiate it from

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  all these other browsers.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But who knows? I mean, maybe Google gets it wrong and there's just like, it's never properly, uh, it's never properly rolled out. But, uh, congratulations to this week's brother of the week.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's move on. We almost should get a, something in here that's like, just like.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  Employee of the month, brother of the week.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Handwritten line.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Image. Um, that, I, there is a good tweet in here that I wanna, I wanna pull up, but we should just go through them in like somewhat reverse order, I guess, since we have a whole stack here.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  So let's start with this one by Andreas Larson. He just posted a meme. I bet he saw it somewhere else. But oh, wait, this is a, I know, I follow this account on Instagram, QS. I forget what it is. It's like Quant Strategies or something.

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 30:30John Coogan?

  It's some meme page. It's good. What people think ESG is, we must save the planet. Invest in my fund. Here's my money. What ESG actually is, I have created a synthetic securitization so that BlackRock can buy mezzanine tranches of forests in Zimbabwe. Nobody planned to cut and large mining groups can declare themselves carbon neutral while using child labor. Great, great riff on ESG.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If that's what ESG is, what is the, just kidding.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  I mean, actually, there's a great, like, economic analysis of the problems with ESG from Aswath Damodaran, this finance professor at NYU. And he kind of laid out the, like, the bear case for ESG and just how it was, like, kind of misaligned. It had been abused by capitalists, which, but the question is, like, now with this, since it's making everyone so much money, are the capitalists going to come around and, like, should we be supporting ESG?

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  We should be like, actually, ESG is amazing.

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, ESG.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  I feel like it never worked its way into startups, like, but like, I feel like there were, it was never really...

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine if term sheets were getting issued with, like, ESG baggage attached to them, like, if, if somehow...

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Or vice versa.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  The funds had gotten...

• 31:41John Coogan?

  Some sort of ESG kicker where, like, oh, if it became a meme, like, you know, everyone knows that you can attach, like, .ai to your...

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it's the big...

• 31:49John Coogan?

  B2B SaaS company and double your valuation.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  That never really happened in ESG, just because I think the money that was actually flowing was mostly in the public markets from these funds that, like, needed to flow and through the ESG scores and stuff, and it was heavily gamed.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  But couldn't you imagine if, if, if big LPs had gotten pressure from various groups and were, like, telling their, the VCs that they invest in, hey, if you can get your companies to follow these principles and track it? Like, that's a very dystopian sort of like thing to imagine. But what if they were like, well, we'll give you 25% carry if you can get on any deals that have ESG attached to it. Like, it's scary that it's not that difficult to imagine that actually being the case. And then there would have been this whole dynamic of like, oh, don't work with this fund because like they're gonna force you to like follow like ESG.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  At the same time, like, how hard is it if you're like doing some B2B SaaS company to be like, yeah, we're carbon neutral?

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  But like, the whole gundo is like being like, yeah, we're putting up solar panels. Like, you have to spend like at the office because like, like, what's his name? Isiah from from Valor is like being like, yeah, like, we're working on this nuclear thing, but like, we have to put up solar panels.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  In the meantime.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in the meantime.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Or no, even worse, just like, we have to spend like 10% of our fund raise on like carbon credits.

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  You know, the, you know, the thing that actually going back to Hereticon, I didn't, I didn't talk to her, but you remember that girl like four years ago who was going viral for making nuclear energy cool?

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Isadope. She was the last one, yeah.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  No, she was, she was at this one apparently. I didn't get to chance to talk to her, but it was so funny. That's like a perfect example of something that was contrarian, like less than

• 33:29John Coogan?

  She was on stage at the first one.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  Less than four years ago.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. And now there's like a whole suite of companies.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  There was a bunch of nuclear energy like founders there.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  So I just thought that was cool.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Next week, I'm going to like emcee a whole like nuclear conference and it's like the least heretical thing. It's all like government people and like companies and DCs and like there's whole funds around this and stuff.

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  She wasn't giving a talk?

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Because like

• 33:51John Coogan?

  She didn't need to. She accomplished her mission.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:54John Coogan?

  And she can just kind of like move on.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  And that's why we're oriented around capitalism, which is the only... So if capitalism stopped being a thing, we would have nothing to talk about and we would retire the show and commit seppuku. But, so anyways.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  That's great. Let's move on to the next one. Rico's Revenge says, "Being broke at the book fair as a kid turned me into a monster."

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Why was this personal for you?

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  I just remember that.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was one of the first.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  I just remember the book fairs and like honestly, so the topic of Halloween, this is cool. So Halloween, every single year, my entire childhood, as early as I can remember, my parents, I would go regular trick or treating. And then my parents would say, pick your 20 favorite pieces of candy, you can keep those. And the rest of them were gonna take and give away in exchange for you going to be able to buy a new book. So my parents were very into the library, so we rarely bought books. But that would be the moment where I would buy like a fresh, brand new book. And it was just like the best thing in the world. So thank you to my parents for doing that. But I do remember being at like the book fair and to be honest, like with our kids now, you can imagine a book fair is happening. You'd be like, yeah, like go, like ball out.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  Like buy whatever you want, like because like parents are just willing to spend money on like education, but it just wasn't a part of my like family.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  And there's also that meme that like.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  Money is just so emotional, right? And so like any, you have these sort of like intense blood memories around money. And like this tweet brought back that.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was also that like meme or like study that like the, the like educational achievement in children is correlated with like the number of books in a house.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Growing up, which is clearly just correlated with like wealth and like a million other things.

• 35:39Jordi Hays?

  Interest and learning.

• 35:40John Coogan?

  But yeah, but, but, but then, but then people kind of took that and kind of flipped the correlation around. They were like, oh, if I just buy a bunch of books, then my kid will do well, which is also probably true. But it's just like, it became like.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Cause you're absorbing, just like, why would we spend seven figures on the wealth of nations?

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  And it's because you want to absorb that energy.

• 35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, you want to have that in your house.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  Even if you're not gonna read it, you want to be able to absorb it.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  I actually have read The Wealth of Nations.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  It's a classic.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  It's a classic.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  A classic. If, it's one of those things like.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  It's so dry.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  If you had to, if you could only have three books.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  It would be. The Bible, Wealth of Nations, and then the book that Justin Maris will eventually write on health, just to support the boys.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah. It is, it is, it is a fascinating read in that it's, you're watching someone work through the discovery of capitalism, essentially. And that's, and that's fascinating. But most of the actual takeaways you can get much more concisely from just like an Econ 101 textbook. But it is very cool. Okay, so let's talk about the Arc browser situation. There was actually someone from Arc there at the, at the party. There's a company called the Arc Browser Company. They've raised a fair amount of money, over a hundred million dollars, is that right?

• 36:59Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was 150.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, they've raised a lot of money and they have a very, like, you know, hipster kind of aesthetic. They post these high production value videos, updating the community on what they're building. And they've built a new browser, so it's a replacement for Chrome or Safari. And they've applied a number of different design, you know, elements to that. So, pinned tabs, vertical sidebar, spaces. And they recently announced that they're essentially pivoting, launching a new product. They're gonna leave their existing Arc browser in kind of maintenance mode, so they're not gonna like piss off their existing community, and then they're gonna launch some new things. Sounds like a lot of stuff is gonna be AI-based, and they're trying to like get through that

• 37:41John Coogan?

  transition of being like, okay, we're gonna pivot to AI, but let's not make it like too dramatic. And so, Astral Wave Andrick writes, "I don't fully buy the reason that pinned tabs, vertical sidebar, and spaces are too complicated for normies. We live in a world where even mainstream browsers, Safari and Edge, have sidebar tabs, collections, synced tabs, pinned tabs. Heck, Chrome has had pinned tabs since a decade ago. I use pinned tabs in Chrome, it's fine. I think the reason Arc feels complicated, honestly, is that they're a bit too focused on that circa 2010s hipster aesthetic and gaudy visual design that gets in the way of usability." Did you, so do you buy this? Is it a good take?

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  Generally, I'm extremely pro Arc in the browser company because I'm not an investor, but I'm generally like in favor of people taking on these sort of like commoditized products and categories and saying like, let's try to reinvent it.

• 38:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  I think what they ultimately found is that the browser is like pretty well optimized. And the other thing is that it's really difficult to compete with platform companies that are trillion dollar companies that are giving away the product for free.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  And pre installing it.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, pre installing it. So they have the distribution. Google doesn't care if Chrome loses money forever, right? They'll spend billions of dollars on it. Apple, on the other hand, like needs to have like an installed browser. And they don't care how much it costs to run and they're pretty, pretty good products. I think like them trying to solve, they basically were trying to solve like the tabs issue, like everybody has too many tabs open. And for me, I actually, this, this sounds, it's gonna sound bad, but I've never, I never installed Arc. Because I got fatigue around these sort of like new note taking type things where I'm just like, no, like Chrome's pretty good.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  I even think Safari is pretty good. I alternate between the two on my phone. It's just like, I don't really think about it. But I think like the thing, the thing that's more real here is that they uh got really interested in AI. As everybody did, realized that there's much more ability to create like a viral consumer product with hundreds of millions or hopefully billions of users doing that. And they are really well suited to like go try to tackle that problem. Now, the hard thing is that they're like a really big company now, which like most VCs, you know, I would say like contrarian VCs would say like, companies over 10 people can't innovate or whatever. And like, do they need this like really massive team?

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  But I think the issue that they ran into is they create a product that a small group of people really, really love. And they're in this position where they cannot, they can't just, they really should kill the product probably, or like spin it out. But then it puts them in a position where they say like, well, why do we, why do, why are we worth $500 million if we only, if we don't have a product yet? Or we don't have a live product? And so I think it would have been cool if they like spun it out and made it open source and like let the community keep building on it or something like that. But, uh, but yeah, now they're kind of in this weird position, but I'm super excited for their like the product coming up. Devin, Devin gave me like a little bit of a preview on, on what it is. It's gonna be awesome.

• 40:53Jordi Hays?

  They, they, they like clearly build great products. Now it's finding that like, they do, there are, they, they, they raised money like with the understanding that they needed to build something with like 100 million plus users. Otherwise they weren't gonna like live up to the expectations that they set.

• 41:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Tough to sell a browser.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just saying.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  Not a lot of hyperscalers need one. They all have one.

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I'm just saying, give it away to the community.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  That might be better. Yeah.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Or just, yeah, like spin it out as in like, hey, we're not, cause now the thing is like, they have, they're, they're gonna have this like competing thing where their power users that love the brand are gonna be like, why aren't you maintaining this? Or like, why aren't you adding to it? And like, there's like the, I don't know, some amount of entropy that is gonna happen naturally when like the whole team is focused on the new thing. And then like, it's like, one designer and like a few engineers that are running a browser. And the tough thing is like.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  Do you want to be on that team?

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tough thing is this is coming off them having like a pretty big security vulnerability from like a month ago that like they got a lot of heat for. But I think the heart, that what this comes down to is if you do a lot of things really well and you have a lot of attention.

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  And you're relevant to a lot of people, which a browser is, everybody has an opinion. A lot of people like see like a really well-produced video and are just like, I wanna like hate on this, right? And so anyways. I'm rooting for the browser company, I'm rooting for Arc and uh, well I guess I'm not, I'm not, I'm not rooting for Arc anymore because I don't, you know.

• 42:24John Coogan?

  This doesn't, they don't even want to take it anywhere.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Arc's gonna, Arc.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  I do wonder about uh, like, what was like a design focus, like the right go to market for this, like the other browser that's done, I think reasonably well is Brave.

• 42:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  But Brave is focused on like these crypto micropayments and they have this whole like economic model that you could be very like, oh, it's just a crypto Ponzi thing, but like, at least like if it works, there will be some sort of like incentivization there. It's kind of like the creator payouts for, for acts where you're, you know, ostensibly like paying to use the browser and then when you visit a website, if they're on your team, they get paid for every time you visit. And then, and then they have an incentive to actually put up a banner like, hey, stop reading my website in Chrome, you should read my website in Brave because I'll get paid for that. And so you have some sort of distribution, um, like economy, whereas if it's just like really cool, yeah, it can be cool and people can say, oh, what's that?

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Oh, that looks really nice. Like it can kind of go viral, but it's just word of mouth and that's really, really hard to scale into like the normie, crossing the chasm is going to be really, really difficult. Anyway, let's move on to Nicole Wiskoff, Wiskoff Ventures, founder shuts down company that never really got off the ground, emails investors, you are welcome into, you are welcome to invest in whatever I build next on a $100 million post money safe. Sometimes I hate it here. She got almost a thousand likes on that. Uh, I, the biggest problem is 100 mil's too low, right?

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I know she seems to back really great companies, so knowing the kind of caliber that she looks for, I don't think it would be absurd to pay a hundred million posts for whatever they, whatever they do next. I think what I, I just want more details to be honest. I'd love to see like, did he send the like filled out safe, like was it already signed on his side and he's just like, here's wire instructions, like counter sign?

• 44:12John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot of founders try and mog investors when things are going well.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Takes a special breed of founder to try and mog investors when things are going poorly.

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. The uh, it's funny, I talked to a founder recently that had like two very high profile failures in like a very specific category. And he was going back for a third company in the same category. And I wanted to, I didn't ultimately get there on investing, uh, just from like, nothing to do with him or the category, just like talked with some people that I knew. And they said like, you know, but just the fact that he was like back to back, these sort of like big, basically blowups and was like, yeah, I'm going back again. Like, just like you want to support that guy, right? Like.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  I mean, under, under discussed, Parker Conrad, uh, Rippling is his third company, not his second company. And the first, the first one was a little bit adjacent. It was a, I think it was like a fintech company, but it was still like kind of in that same realm. It was something for like charts and visualizations for like financial stuff. And that company, he left and it actually is still going on. Like it's, it's still alive. It's not like a phenomenal company, but like, yeah. And it's just like, I talked to a big investor in the firm or in, in Rippling. And was just like, he can't, like, I don't know if he could build anything outside of this, but he's just like destined to do this.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  That'd be a weird thing, like working at the first company, watching the third company. And you're just like, like your, your company hasn't, your shares haven't been marked up in like three years. And you just see Rippling with like the 12 billion dollar valuation. You're just like.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of people moved over and some people didn't. And that was like a big.

• 46:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, the real hero's journey is that he buys back the first company, right? And like merges it into Rippling because Rippling is the last SaaS you ever need.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  There's been a couple of examples of that. I, I, I don't want to like say it because I don't think the deal's done, but there's like a big Y C founder who had a company that blew up and the early team is like going to go back and buy the I P. And like, you know, use it for something else, which I think is really, really cool. I think there's something about like, like owning your, you're owning your child or your baby and like, just like keeping, keeping, working at it and having another shot on goal. If, if it's like an interesting name or an interesting dot com or like it'll have some sort of like cachet. I mean, we gotta talk about getting party around. Once, uh, once Chamath is head of the S E C, you should just be able to text anyone in America. I, I, do you want to buy shares in my company?

• 46:51John Coogan?

  We gotta get rid of all of the, all of the, uh, what is it? Accredited investor laws? We gotta get rid of those.

• 46:57Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even think about. Like Sax gets a role, obviously. He's like, well, I gotta, I gotta support the boys.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  The besties.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  Chamath, SEC.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  And then it's just like a new American Renaissance.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  J Cal press secretary?

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 47:13Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. He's, there's like.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  So good.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  The White House verticalizes podcasts, has podcasts.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  You know, we gotta break out like.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  The D O P, the Department of Podcasting.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  It's, if, if J Cal was running the White House media strategy, it would be heavily monetized.

• 47:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  That, that would be like.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  It's like Secretary of State.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of like a dream scenario. Like imagine like, yeah, White House Press Secretary is up there and they're doing podcast ad reads in between the announcements. For like, obviously big multinational companies, like.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Why not, why not just the, the bond issuances? Like the government sells debt. So it's like, hey, did you know the 30 year, it's at 4%? You wanna buy some? Brought to you by T Bills.

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  T Bills.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  I mean, they used to do that. Like, like during the war, there's like posters and essentially advertisements for government bonds. Now it's all, you know, distributed through like the banks and it's very abstract, but it used to be very much like going direct to like the American, a- average American citizen. Exactly. Because you just wanted everyone to chip in and buy war bonds.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  It's great. But yeah, that's probably the future of party round. It's specifically those, those political texts. So you know how you get those, those texts from politicians like every two hours on your phone now and you can't opt out of them?

• 48:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't know why.

• 48:31John Coogan?

  You don't get me?

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't get any texts.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Is that just because you've never voted?

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  No, I have. I, I like, I, I, I've been trying to figure it out.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Or is it because you're so extreme politically that they're just like, oh.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  We can't turn this guy. It's a waste of money.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's, there's no anarchy candidate on the planet.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't, I, I, I haven't got a political text.

• 48:50John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  But I have made, I have made efforts to like go and like, you can do those like blanket opt out of like, remove my, remove my info from this, this, that.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. But, but that's where we need to get with like, you know, fundraising. It just needs to be like, okay, I'm hiring a firm to spam my roll up vehicle to 10 million Americans.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Send out, send out the vibe reel that went viral on Twitter.

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  Let everyone know I'm building AI for dogs. Let's get some money in there. General solicitation. This is the future. There's a couple of companies that have like kind of figured out how to do that. I've seen some Instagram ads for like crowdfunding efforts and I'm like,

• 49:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my friends, my friends run the biggest agency for advertising crowdfunds in the world.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  Shout out John.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  The Jobs Act.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  The Jobs Act.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's like what it's an amazing like thing, you know, sort of like example of capitalism where companies figured out if you spend a dollar on Facebook, you can drive $10 of investment. So why would you not just do that?

• 49:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  It's like an infinite money glitch, basically.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  I mean, it's the the ratio of cost to capital raise is probably right in line with like big investment banks.

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Like if you take a company public, you're probably paying some massive fee.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  But you're giving an opportunity for everyday Americans to, you know, earn real yield.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  And real alpha.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  With, you know, the next great robotics company or whatever.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Let's move on to Apple. Do you have Apple Intelligence on your phone yet? It's like almost here, right? You can install it if you go to beta, but you don't have it?

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't have it yet.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  I don't have it yet either. I I I used to install the betas and they're always like kind of kind of sketchy, so I just wait.

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:33John Coogan?

  But Schmidt writes, my mom, that hike almost killed me. Apple's AI summary, attempted suicide but recovered and hiked in Redlands and Palm Springs, has 14 million views. I predicted that this was going to happen on a podcast.

• 50:47Jordi Hays?

  And didn't you also say you think you think a lot of these are?

• 50:50John Coogan?

  I I think a lot of these are fake and I think a lot of these are photoshopped. I don't know that this one is. But obviously we know LLMs hallucinate and they get things wrong and they're rough. But that is Apple, that is not Apple's.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was a good take.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  That is not Apple's brand. Like I was talking to a like a really, really big filmmaker in Hollywood. And he was predicting that Apple TV would not be successful. He he works with like HBO and Netflix and stuff. And it is specifically because Apple's brand is.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  Perfection.

• 51:19John Coogan?

  Perfection. Everything needs to look perfect. And so that's not Hollywood. Hollywood is almost more like venture capital where there's going to be some dogs, even the best. And you can't, you can't have everything be guaranteed because it's art, not. Engineering and so the AI thing has been really, really difficult for Apple in my opinion, because they're they're they're two years behind ChatGPT and like the day ChatGPT came out, they should have ripped out Siri and had an LLM replace it in terms of just like what consumers would want. At one point, I actually had a like a macro on my phone where instead of saying, hey Siri, I could say like, hey ChatGPT and it would like take

• 52:01John Coogan?

  a shortcut and routed into ChatGPT. It was slow. It didn't really work, but that's essentially what they're doing now, but they're still going to have problems. And maybe that's why they did the the OpenAI partnership, just because like if they have some really bad hallucinations, like and they need to like respond, they can be like, oh, this is a partner. We switch partners. They're the scapegoat. Like, we can move on to something else. Hey, we revamped it. I again, like, I think that I think the right frame of mind when you're interacting with like an LLM is that like, it is a little sloppy. And as long as everyone goes into it.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  It's like a human.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a human. It's a human assistant that might get something wrong. Or just like when you're online and you and you're scrolling like a feed, you kind of know that like there's going to be, there's going to be slop, there's going to be jokes, there's going to be fake news. And so you just kind of go into that, you're not, and you're not rattled.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  The issue is unlike an executive assistant, you can't berate, like, you can't berate Apple Intelligence, right? Like, if if your EA makes a mistake, you can get on the phone and scream with scream at them for like 20 minutes and then hang up.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  EA? What's an EA?

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  Executive.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Is that like a secretary?

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like a secretary.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  You can't, it's you can't call up Apple Intelligence. You know, it's going to be a robo call and berating a rope, you know, an AI like voice bot is not going to feel the same.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Maybe that would be a good, like, instead of an AI girlfriend, it's just like an AI that you can practice berating. So you get better at just like really giving some of the business.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because those moments don't come up that much.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  They don't. But when you're ready, you need to be able to scream at someone. Like, if you know, if you're raising your second company, if you're raising for your second company after everything failed, you're gonna have to get on the phone with all your, all your VCs and tell them that they don't know anything.

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, look, look at like Jeremy Gaffon, right? He was here. We got to spend some quality time with him over the last few days and very, very calm guy. But he's from, he's from the world of finance. He goes to tech conferences, but don't, it's like a wolf in sheep's clothing, right? Like, he's clearly, you know, and the classic, you know, behavior in finance is that if something bad happens, you like scream and yell. The funny thing is, I can't imagine Jeremy. Yelling at somebody like intensely, but I know he's gonna have to do it.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  He needs to get practice reps in.

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  And so he needs to get his reps in. So if I was an indie hacker right now, I'd be creating like a prosumer.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  Like beration is if that's a word, practice application.

• 54:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It gives you a score at the end. Like, how intimidated was the AI?

• 54:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I don't think you're gonna get a million users.

• 54:21John Coogan?

  Did you go too far? Or were you dialed in perfectly?

• 54:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  Cause you don't just wanna be like, you know, a string of racial epithets.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  Like it had a feature where like HR joins the call. They're like, hey, dial it back.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Dial it back. Okay. Dial it back. But you know, you got your point across. But yeah. I think it'll be good. I, I, I think Apple will eventually dial it in. I mean, the tech is just so good at this point. It's like really easy. And they have a bunch of interesting ways to integrate with all the data in your phone. So you'll just be able to talk to Siri more. And it's so, it's so overdue because Siri's been so bad. Like Siri, I always ask it, the weather, maybe set timers.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Like this feature is silly. Like I would turn it off if I had it because like text should be, text should be short.

• 54:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:59Jordi Hays?

  I shouldn't.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Well, I think it's valuable in the sense that like the, the real use is that the AI should be able. So right now, if you wanna get rid of this political texts, you can go into your iMessage and say, it, it, but it's, it's all hardcoded. So you can say, if I don't have the number saved, put it in a different folder, like a junk folder. But then you miss two factor codes. You miss like things from doctors and stuff.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, the issue, I'm talking more about.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  I, I could actually go to the AI and say like, if it's a political text, just throw it in a different folder.

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  Sorting's cool. Summarization is not cool.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  If Nancy Pelosi texts me and, and the Reddit stock's going up and she says, go long soy, go long.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  That's the way.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  All these other things. But then if the AI hallucinates.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  But politicians, if you're gonna text me every single day, throw a stock tip in.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Throw a stock tip in and then I'll be like, well, yeah, okay. So you told me to go into.

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  Polymarket coupon code.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  You told me that you're gonna make oil great again and you're gonna drill, baby, drill. And so you told me to buy Exxon. I doubled my money. Sure, I'll give you a 10% cut, politicians.

• 56:01Jordi Hays?

  That should be how politicians raise money.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  Exactly. They should give a stock tip and then monetize it by saying, hey, if it works out, you know, grease some wheels.

• 56:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Come on.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  That is, that is how you drive American politics forward.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  I can't wait for the next text.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the senators and various politicians would be focused on seeking alpha.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, hedge funds would be setting up, oh, how can we get the text first? We all wanna be married.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  The issue is hedge funds are going and paying off politicians directly for stock tips.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  They're, they're getting their texts over signal.

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:31John Coogan?

  And we're, we're just stuck with the SMSs.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, plebs.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, that's a play there.

• 56:37John Coogan?

  You see Vivek Ramaswamy, uh, he's now the second largest holder and shareholder in BuzzFeed, and he posted a vlog of him-

• 56:44Jordi Hays?

  Friend of mine's back BuzzFeed.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  What? Really?

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Great guy.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  Um, uh, so he, he posted a vlog of him going to BuzzFeed headquarters and so, uh, George here summarized it. He said, "This is so ruthless. Vivek got on his plane and went in flip flops and shorts, uh, flew to California, went into the BuzzFeed headquarters and handed them a list of conservatives to hire." It's kind of a funny thing to do. Uh, they had no choice but to listen because he's one of their new owners. He's now their second largest outside shareholder. Maybe he'll buy the whole thing and turn it into a non-woke organization. This is how we win the culture war." So I can completely disagree with that.

• 57:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  I don't think anti-woke BuzzFeed is a-

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  I do think that the thing that's interesting about that is that Bezos was in the news this last week-

• 57:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  For saying, like, one, obviously the Washington Post not endorsing a presidential candidate.

• 57:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  Two, being like, "You need to hire some conservatives." When I see these things, I'm like, "Why, like, we need to have media companies like, sort of, we'll never do this."

• 57:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  But other media companies should have to label, "Are we hyper-politicized or are we a news source?"

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  Right? Because like, when I'm, when I'm seeing that, that it's just like, I don't know, it just feels like newspapers have this, legacy newspapers have this like, sort of, you know, permanent, uh, label of being able to be arbiters, arbiters of truth.

• 58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Jordi Hays?

  And so, but if they're hyper-politicized, then like, the truth is gonna get kind of lost in that, so.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  I was looking at the New York Times endorsements. Since 1960, they have endorsed every single Democratic presidential nominee. Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton. It's just like, you know-

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  You gotta respect the conviction.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  I mean, at least you know like, where they stand, I guess.

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  But it's just odd that like, you would never be like, "Hey, actually, we switched around this time. We're mixing it up."

• 58:37Jordi Hays?

  Do we need to put journalists in our enemies bucket, or that would be too political?

• 58:41John Coogan?

  I don't know. Maybe.

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  I like journalists.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Jordi Hays?

  I like them far away.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  Depends. Some of them are great. Um, some of them, I'm sure are good people. Um, but, uh-

• 58:54John Coogan?

  But Vivek thing is interesting because not because of what he's doing with BuzzFeed. I mean, I hope it works out. I hope he makes a ton of money, but it's because the did you actually watch the vlog of him going and doing this? That was interesting because I have this theory that like Andrew Yang was the first presidential nominee to go on Rogan. Bernie Sanders went on, Tulsi Gabbard went on, and so there were like the fringe candidates that were polling very low had to go on Rogan in 2016 in that cycle. And then in this cycle, the all the major party candidates are doing this huge, huge podcasts. Meanwhile, the the more like fringe candidates, like I mean Vivek's like not running right now, but he's clearly going to like gear up for more politics stuff in the future.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  And I think having a having a candidate that does like vlogs and direct video and actually like owns their own media and puts stuff out, I think that will be the future.

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  Why is there no, it's actually insane that

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, they don't know.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  Even Trump doesn't vlog. He's putting out like

• 59:56John Coogan?

  And Kamala puts out these little short videos.

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  Like UFC, have you ever seen UFC embedded, which is like the week prior to a fight?

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:00:03Jordi Hays?

  They vlog all the fighters and it's the most engaging content.

• 1:00:06John Coogan?

  That will 100% be the future.

• 1:00:08Jordi Hays?

  And and you can make it narrative driven, so it's very easy for a political candidate to make it look like, oh, our so much momentum building in the campaign. Like make, politics is like more about likability than policy.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  100% like like with the whole RFK endorsing Trump thing.

• 1:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Likability is like this parasit, this is what Senna always talks about the value of podcasting. If you're in business is like, he's developed like a real friendship. It's a one way friendship with millions of people.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  And so if I'm shocked that a political, high profile political candidate hasn't used the vlog format or even having their own podcast.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Or their own podcast, like with the RFK Trump endorsement, like they both got on stage at a rally and both, you know, gave their talking points and gave independent speeches. I think that that would honestly do better if it was like the Donald Trump podcast, RFK is the guest and and they're just having a conversation about health.

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  And so you're just watching, you're just in the room with them, watching them have a conversation. Or it's like JD and someone who, you know, knows about like, you know, industrialization. And JD is like, look, I don't know if this guy's going to be in the cabinet, but he's a buddy and we're going to have a conversation about how we actually like. Revitalize the Rust Belt, like something that he cares about a lot. Instead of him having to go to Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan being or, you know, or Kamala going to.

• 1:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's, and it's a way to, it's a way to stay active. Like, over the last couple of weeks, I think people have been like really hyper fixating on what did this candidate do today? And the thing with a podcast is like, we can record, I mean, for us, we, we publish live effectively, like within, you know, a couple of hours of, of recording. But other candidates could save up a bank of content and put it out when they like wake up and they're feeling a little tired and they don't want to hit the campaign trail.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't tip politicians, or I don't donate to politicians, hit the campaign trail.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  Hit the campaign trail. Uh, should we do, uh, this one? Mike Dudis says pump.fund is the fastest company in tech in history to 100 million dollars in revenue. I feel like there's a new company that claims this like every day.

• 1:02:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, so the cool thing with this company is you can look on chain and verify it. And it's like actual like dollars in the wallet.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  Because it's, uh, give me the overview, like what is pumped out fun? It's like Solana meme coins, right?

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  Basically, historically, people would make meme coins and they'd have to combine all these different things and they were actually writing code.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, they were always like ERC 20, like Four Kings projects and stuff.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was basically every single, this is like Shopify for creating a meme coin. Basically, that's the way to, Shopify for meme.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Shopify for meme coins. It's basically Shopify for memes because it just allow, anything happens and like, it'll be like the trash coin or like, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  So like, there's one for like Mudang, the hippo or whatever.

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  And so the thing that's crazy about this is that, one, they, they, they made it, they built the perfect product to enable crypto speculation. Because I think, I, I haven't used it, but I think you can actually invest on the platform too. So it's like two sided marketplace. Like Shopify, so you can create it, people can invest. It actually is good for consumers because it's like easy, like they like help, uh, it's creating more standardized.

• 1:03:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, sort of underlying structures.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Well, it, it's like, it's, you're still likely, you could still get rugged very easily if people just decided this meme is not hot, but it's not getting hacked as much.

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, less, less hacked.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  There's like, meme coins were historically extremely complicated.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like, if you're on a Shopify site, like the product might be bad, but you're not going to get your credit card information stolen.

• 1:03:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Because the credit card information is with Shopify. Shopify is reliable. Now, the product might be white labeled and like junk, but at least you know that like your credit card information didn't get leaked.

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

  So what's interesting about this is what, uh, I think this could be a company where they end up returning billions of dollars to investors without any liquidity event or through like stock buybacks or something like that, or just distributions, because I don't know any company that could buy this because it's in such a-

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  Coinbase or something.

• 1:04:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but it's in such a regulatory like gray area of like you're creating, the government, like the SEC wants to say that these are securities and like every crypto company has had to like fight back and like make their case, like this isn't a security. And so I just don't think you're going to see like Goldman Sachs like buy a company like this, like pump dot fun. But they're making so much revenue.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  Buy or underwrite? Like would they, would they not even touch it from an underwriting perspective? They want to take the company public?

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if this company could be public because it's got so much regulatory baggage, right? Maybe in a Trump administration, it could go public.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Because like he's launching like his own meme token, but, but yeah, I think this is one of those things like they might end up returning like billions of dollars to their VCs. And I don't think they raise that much money. I don't, I don't know how much they raised, but like, I think it's like under $10 million.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  And they're just doing really well.

• 1:05:14Jordi Hays?

  And they could just distribute it out to VCs.

• 1:05:18Jordi Hays?

  Like Mike and I'm sure it'll be a great return, but I think this is-

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  You're distributing like tokens that are liquid.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  This is, yeah, this is such an amazing example of a product with like really good execution, but in hindsight, it's like, why didn't this exist in 2020 or 2021? Like, it's just like the most obvious thing, like Shopify for me.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  It just seems like there, yeah, there weren't that many like actual builders, like the ratio of like scammers to builders.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  But even, but even, yeah, even before this product was created, like this probably increased the number of tokens by like an order of magnitude.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  And even before that, there was like hundreds, hundred thousand per day.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Something absurd, right? Cause the cost to create them is low.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Fascinating.

• 1:06:02Jordi Hays?

  I like how this guy got like a little bucky.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  I don't even know who this guy is.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:07John Coogan?

  But he's also in there just like, yeah, wow. I love it.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  So Peter Levels, the indie hacker extraordinaire, says, where do I start with robotics? I want to code and build my own robots at home for fun with potential for world domination. And Matt Bogus, Matt V, says, the raw volume of software engineers who have asked this exact question in the last 20 days is insane. So all software engineers are pivoting to robotics, apparently.

• 1:06:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think what's interesting here is that there's going to be a bunch of like really, the thing about indie stuff is that it's oftentimes like, could have been fundable, but wasn't. Oftentimes it's just like unfundable, like it's just like weird, like some like clearly very small TAM. The thing that's interesting here is like it will be dependent on how cheap robotics get, which I think everybody thinks like, robots are going to continue to like get cheaper and cheaper. But like right now it's expensive, like robotics company I'm involved with, the Terrence, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, like we're going to need like millions of dollars worth of robots over time.

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  So it's not like something you can just kind of like, I don't, I'm sort of like very for the trend, but sort of like, I'm not, wouldn't go super long on it just because of the part of the nature of like, I don't know. I think, I think it could be like, you know, it's probably like a decade plus.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  There were a couple like kind of cheaper open source robotics platforms like.

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  Like Arduino.

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  Arduino, but you could also like get like a Roomba and like open, like a hack it and then you, and then you can just like have it draw.

• 1:07:44Jordi Hays?

  The death Roomba that's a Roomba with a Glock attached to it. It's like, just patrols your house.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  And I know Boston Dynamics does sell the dog for like, I think it's under 10K. It's like around there. So it's like somewhat doable. Yeah.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  That brings us.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  You can also rent those, but those are much more close.

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Much, but if we had a dog that could go to the fridge and bring you a beer.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  Probably with the arm. Yeah, it could. And then George Hots has a, has a, it's basically like two wheels and like a stick. And it's like the comma body. And then you can, and then so you can like write code for it to like do stuff, but it's very limited. It's just like, it's just two wheels and it balances. It's like a segue, basically.

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, it's always hard with that. It's like. These should be at like every single hackathon, so like the next generation of like college hackers can like try a bunch of different stuff, even if it's like really junky.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Totally. My, um, my dad, as a teacher, ran this thing called Project Make, which was basically like woodshops, woodshop meets robotics meets like aerospace and just like hacking.

• 1:08:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Jordi Hays?

  And so he had, at, at his school, he had this like warehouse that was just filled with like robots and Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. I think that's kind of like starting to happen in, you know, in high schools.

• 1:09:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Which is very American.

• 1:09:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Right? Innovation is American.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's always, it's always hard to tell like where the, where, where the real value will be like even, even if it's like, okay, you had, if Waymo had an open API, like what would you do with that?

• 1:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14John Coogan?

  It's like people really just want the one thing.

• 1:09:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to see more like, I think like Nat Freeman tweeted out like, I want like a, not a leaf blower, but like a little robot to like go.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  Somebody built it.

• 1:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. To like pick up the leaves and like, I'm so for that, like leaf blowers, we should add it. Can we add, then can we add this to the enemies list of like leaf blowers? Because like, I've lived in places where like leaf blowers were just like, I'm like, this is insane. Like not only is it loud, but like you're blowing particles.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  Like everywhere.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  Into my yard and they're hitting my window. Like I'm, I'm going to go postal.

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  Uh, well, this one's related. Uh, Yakseen writes, we need more, we, we really need more software engineers to enter fields that are very easy. Like electrical engineering and mechatronics. We can bring so much fresh perspective with our relatively high degree of skill compared to them.

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  That's like.

• 1:10:07John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Perfectly intellectual rage bait.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, so good. 3,000 likes, of course.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  3,000 likes.

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  Banger.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Poor, poor person, uh, probably had like a thousand engineers in their DMs just being like, you are the world's biggest idiot.

• 1:10:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Everyone who's an electrical engineer is like, come on dude. But, uh, it's great, great rage bait. But yeah, I mean, I, I, I do think though, that there should be more, uh, like intellectual flexibility between the disciplines, especially with like, uh, just how easy LLMs translating between different. Languages will be. So it's like, oh, yeah, there's some sort of like little bit trickier, lower level language that you need to learn. But now you can just write Python code and the LLM can like transform it into whatever very quickly. So there's like, there's like a seed of like truth there, even though like it's the great, it's a great bait post. Let's go to this Will tweet. Absolute banger 4K likes, less than a day ago. Did he really post this at 6:50 AM on Halloween?

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  Was he up that late or up that early? Maybe this is a east coast, west coast thing.

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  That's a good question. I don't know. Ben would have screenshotted it.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  I think he just posts in the middle of the night. He just wakes up and something divine, divine.

• 1:11:21Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's very, I think I'm gonna guess that it was 9:52 in Miami.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Okay. So Will says, "The real measure of wealth is how many problems you can solve by calling one of your guys."

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:11:33Jordi Hays?

  Very real. This is.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  This is the phone CEO.

• 1:11:36Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think like Jeremy may have brought this up like at Senra's event, but um, but yeah, like it's about, everybody's like, oh, I have like my car guy. I have like a barber is like a form of a guy, you know, like a hair guy. I've got, as you get down, it's like, oh, I have like the stylist or I have my watch guy, or I have.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Feng Shui guy.

• 1:11:55Jordi Hays?

  This, you know, specific type of lawyer Feng Shui. I have a Feng Shui guy.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, and you know, at Heretic on, the conversation is more like, who's your Antichrist guy? Right? And.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Who's your aliens guy?

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Who's your aliens guy? Who's your terraforming guy? Um, if you need to terraform, who's your first call? Like, a lot of people are gonna come up blank on that. We're not, we're not.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  There's also the shift from, uh, most people have like an app.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  And when you, when you reach a level of wealth, you have a guy. Like, instead of, and instead of DoorDash, you have a personal chef. Instead of Uber, you have a personal driver. Instead of United Airlines app, you have a private plane.

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  Pilot or two of them, since you always have to have two flying.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I had to make a note. I need to text back my Feng Shui guy.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  Oh, you do? That's great. Feng Shui is real. We'll do a deep dive on it soon. So there's news in TechCrunch that Dropbox is laying off 20% of its staff. And Paki McCormick writes, "You're laughing, but one out of every 17 Americans just lost their job." Which is hilarious because he's thinking of DocuSign.

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  Not Dropbox. I'm sure Dropbox has a lot of employees, but it's nowhere near.

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  Dropbox slander.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 1:13:06Jordi Hays?

  That's the most, that's the most attention Dropbox has gotten.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's so funny. They got 8K likes and a million views because like it's wrong, but it's like kind of spiritually correct.

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  And then it's like, okay, no one really knows. But Dropbox is definitely going through a change because Drew Houston is doing like videos and going direct. I've actually gotten this from a few people.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Or is he just working with Lulu?

• 1:13:27John Coogan?

  No, no, Lulu has like straight up created like a zeitgeist shift, even in like public company tech CEOs. I've gotten texts from a few people.

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So here's, here's the thing. So Lulu was at Hereticon. We actually got to spend some quality time.

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting because like she's, she's done the public market stuff, right?

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  She's currently on Shopify's board.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Yeah. I didn't even know that. Um, that's cool.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  And she, and she was like the, the, you know, the comms person on the Activision Blizzard Microsoft deal.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  But then she's also like watching like seed stage companies.

• 1:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. She's working with these like really hot seed stage companies, helping them do it. But like, is the real, is that a waste of time when she could turn a $20 billion company into a $21 billion company?

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  Like imagine if she goes, turns around Boeing.

• 1:14:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  Like that would be crazy.

• 1:14:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And like.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  Probably more value creation than like getting some seed stage company of Series A.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. That's like charity work.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  It is. Yeah. That should be her pro bono work.

• 1:14:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. She should be like, yeah. She should literally have her charity division.

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, it's Gabby, who's also Gabby Goldberg, whenever there. That's going to end up being like a crazy, I don't know if it's going to be a mafia or just like a generational firm.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Jordi Hays?

  If they keep creating this like orbit.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, one of those like, one of those firms that's like behind the scenes.

• 1:14:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I guess like, to go back to Will's tweet, like, a guy is not necessarily a guy.

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Jordi Hays?

  It's spiritually like, you know, as a spiritual.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  There's like a meme like Call Lulu, if you're, if there's a hit piece that's coming out, or you have a comms crisis, like, there's really only one person. And if you have someone that can actually solve your problem, that's really valuable.

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the, if you think about Heretic on the highest percentage, like, any like tech conference, the highest percentage of people that have had, have been doxxed, or had a hit piece against them, is like, yeah, it's like half the people.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  Everyone, yeah. But yeah. Um, yeah, it's fascinating seeing like, the, the like, the texts that are getting passed around from like, oh, this tech CEO who is running a public company, uh, I'll get a text from someone being like, what podcast do you think they should go on? Like, they want, they want to, they want to do the Zuck playbook now.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  And it's like, they're running like a $20 billion public company, and they're just like, they're just getting pilled on this now. And it's like, it's been like, what, two years since like, all these people started going on Lex and Rogan? And I'm like, okay, well, here's the list.

• 1:15:45Jordi Hays?

  You gotta little bro them a little bit. You're like, dude, you're 2% of the size of Meta, like.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  But I think it's doable for some of these people, if they're interesting. A lot of them are interesting, they've just been beaten down by like, the, the HR apparatchiks.

• 1:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's actually a way to like, you know, kind of like, pull up the ladder for, for these public company CEOs, being like, no, no more startup founders on like, these big podcasts.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  Only like real ballers. Yeah, I mean, the, the guy that I'm thinking of.

• 1:16:09Jordi Hays?

  If you're not trading.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  The, the guy that I'm thinking of runs like, a, like a massive public tech company, um, and there was a hit piece on him younger, when he was like, coming up, because, I mean, he was already like a billionaire, and he was from a very wealthy family, but he bought like a McLaren, or like a Ferrari or something, and they were like, using that as evidence of like, him like, I don't even know, like, being materialist or something, or being a capitalist, like, it didn't make any sense.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Stimulating the economy.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  And, and you know that, you know that his takeaway from like, his comms team was like, like. If you're gonna do something nice, like make sure there's no cameras there. Like, the press cannot know that you went on a boat, or like, went on a vacation. And, and, but, but what's interesting is that like, if he actually, like, now Zuck is like, yes, I have a boat that follow, I have one boat that follows me while I'm surfing, so it can take videos of me. Like, I, yeah, I show up to UFC through the back entrance, because I'm such a VIP. And, and Zuck just realized that, like, wait, actually, like,

• 1:17:03Jordi Hays?

  So much more important to be authentic.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  And, and he's just authentic about it. And so, uh, i- i- if, if the public company CEO that's been like beaten down can actually, and that's what Lulu does a lot of times, just coaching them.

• 1:17:13Jordi Hays?

  I don't know who you're referencing, but the CEO from a wealthy family, like, it's just okay to own it. The only way that you could legitimately get criticism is if he tries to go with a story of like, I, I like,

• 1:17:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, yeah, just don't be fake.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Just don't be fake. Authenticity wins every time.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Exactly, but, but, you know, the, the, the comms teams of the 2010s, their entire mandate was to destroy authenticity.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  And, and, and hide as much as possible, which is just very, ah, just.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Unsustainable. Arguably leads to the hit piece.

• 1:17:45John Coogan?

  Exactly, because people smell that, like, oh, there's something off here, like, this person's being cagey. And so, like, there must be a bigger story here, when really, it's just like, no, the person, like, created a lot of shareholder value, created a lot of consumer surplus, consumers love the product, they're making money, and they're enjoying it, and that's great.

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't be a 20 billion dollar company if it wasn't.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  Or if they become a hype beast fashion guy, like, that's great, too, like, it's fine. Uh, yeah, very silly, but I, I hope he, I hope he breaks through and, and gets out of his shell and does some cool stuff, because, uh, I've been a fan of his for a long time, so, be good. Uh, this, we, we've had Signal, we've, we've reacted to this guy a few times now.

• 1:18:21Jordi Hays?

  I don't even, honestly, is a testament to him crushing the X algo, because I don't know if I follow.

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  I don't know, I mean, yeah, I don't know. But, uh, most great founders are after vengeance in the form of success. They have been wronged in some way, either by being passed up, ignored, or overruled by people that they feel are inferior to them. The possibility that somewhere, the person who fucked you will potentially read a headline where you succeed. Beyond belief is better than sex. It's kind of like a more aggressive, like cold grudges take.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the, the example that pops into mind immediately is, is Palmer, obviously, but like Parker Conrad is the same thing. And like, yeah, if you're Jason, it's funny, it's All In guys. Um, you know, we don't have anything against All In. We just have things against under monetized.

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, we don't like that they don't advertise.

• 1:19:07Jordi Hays?

  No, it's more of like, we're against under monetized, we're against under monetized podcasts, we're not against All In.

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:13Jordi Hays?

  But David and Jason having to watch Palmer and Parker Conrad both build these Decacorns. Decacorns, like the most like important company in SaaS. Kraft is a SaaS focused investor. And the most important company potentially in the 21st century in America, Anduril.

• 1:19:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  That's got to hurt. So like, yeah, like I think this is probably real and I, and I think that Palmer and Parker, like they're, they know that they're only like 5% through the mission.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:49Jordi Hays?

  But they're like, I'm sure they, they appreciate the headlines.

• 1:19:53John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I, I mean, to your point about the 5% through the, through the mission, I, I wonder if the motivation dies down once you have like total cultural victory over your, you know, nemesis. Because at this point, it's like, it, it's like the, the Palmer viral clip of him at All In, like, like trashing Jason, like that goes viral like once every six months and gets like millions of views, like.

• 1:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  It, it, it's like, it's not, like, it's, it's widely accepted that like Palmer has won that beef. And so I wonder if he needs like a new enemy.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Jason arguably doesn't.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  Accepted?

• 1:20:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Otherwise he wouldn't keep poking the bear.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  That's good. I mean, maybe he needs to keep doing it because we got to keep Palmer motivated. We got, yeah, we got to keep Palmer grinding.

• 1:20:30Jordi Hays?

  It's good for, if it's good for Palmer, it's good for America.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. Palmer's like, I could take off this weekend, but, you know, I could play more D and D.

• 1:20:39Jordi Hays?

  I don't think that.

• 1:20:39John Coogan?

  I gotta, I gotta get on the grind because I gotta, I gotta keep proving that I'm better.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  It would be, since, since Parker and Palmer are both P names, strong, uh, since they're both billionaires, will eventually allow them to call into the, to the Polycom, but, um, but yeah, I don't think you, I would be shocked if they were like, yes, spite was the only reason.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  It's more like, I want to, Parker wanted to revolutionize SaaS.

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  Palmer wanted to build the most advanced weapon systems in the world and like there's some like product, there has to be some product foundation there too.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, whenever I hear Palmer talk about it, it's, it seems like a lot of the, like the reason he gives that talk is, is because he feels like there are dozens of founders who were destroyed and didn't get the opportunity that he did. And so he wants to like, kind of do a cultural reset there, which I think is very valuable. So I think his, his victory lap is less for him and it's more for

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  Selfless.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  The community. Yeah. It's good. Uh, let's go to, uh, Tariq Mansour, uh, who says, he posts a screenshot from what looks like WhatsApp. Uh, it looks like an investor said, you should, you should receive 12.4 million dollars today. 5.4 from Neo and 7 million from me personally. I've already sent in the wire requests. We can figure out the terms later. Go, go, go. And he's posted with a comment. It's in times like these that investors show their true nature. Uh, Ali Portovi and Neo have just redefined the term conviction. Why'd you like this?

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I like it for, I like it for a lot of reasons. One, I like it because it's great for Google and, and Meta shareholders because I'm sure a large part of that 12.4 million dollars was immediately dumped into the ad platforms, right?

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  I actually don't know what he's building.

• 1:22:32Jordi Hays?

  This is the, this is Kalshi. This is a competitor to

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Oh, really? No way. Okay.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  So, so the reason

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  They also advertise on podcasts.

• 1:22:40Jordi Hays?

  The reason for the speed was because the, it's an election betting marketplace.

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  Makes sense. It's gotta happen right now.

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  And the election is coming up.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:47Jordi Hays?

  And they needed, they probably just wanted to spend a lot of money on ads. Otherwise, you know, why the 12.4 million with no terms and like, so anyways, like honestly, props to, uh, props to the, to the Neo guy. Uh, and yeah, I hope, I hope they're able to agree on terms, you know, mutually agreeable terms. Uh, but, but yeah, it's kind of like, it's kind of like crazy because what's, I don't know the guy's full name, A- A- A- Portovi?

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  I think it's Ali.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Ali, Ali A- Portovi?

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Ali Partovi.

• 1:23:20Jordi Hays?

  Ali Partovi.

• 1:23:22Jordi Hays?

  But like, that's either gonna be like, something that each of them like scrub from like their Twitter, or it's gonna be like framed in his office at the fund about like conviction.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  It's it's long tail no matter what.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  It does feel like, it does feel like a highly, I don't know if people are gonna be betting on,

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  you know, sort of like state and like localized elections to the same degree as presidential election. I would imagine like the volume dropped significantly.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  But it'll either be a legendary investment. It's very binary legendary investment or like that guy is gonna be like a month from now being like, what was I thinking?

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  But I'm sure their metrics are insane, right?

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm sure everything's ripping. It's great.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one, one thing I was thinking on that note, on the topic of election betting markets is what happens if

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  the election results are contested by either side? Like, are the funds released when the winner is announced? Or are they, is like Polly Market and these other platforms gonna have to hold funds until the person is actually like?

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't think it's as much of an issue as you think because there's a lot of liquidity in the market. So what happens is like, I don't, I don't know if Polly Market had the 2020 election on there, but let's say that they did, like obviously January 6th happened, the transfer of power happened on January 20th. But the election was like up in the air the night of, a few days later, it was like being called by like CNN and Fox and all of that. Then there was a lot of chaos and discussion. But through that time, like, let's say we just reran the 2020 election where it was like in question. Well, throughout the 2020 process, even on January 5th or January 7th, it would, it would be at 99% Biden.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  So you could sell your Biden shares for 99 cents, or you, or you could be buying Trump, right?

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  So, so, so there's still liquidity and I think the actual like payout mechanism is less relevant. Or it's not as critical.

• 1:25:25Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe this investor is thinking, I'm gonna, we're gonna make millions and millions of dollars in fees over the next. We just want to be super capitalized so we can outspend.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  And so even if there's like a battle, like it's like you have two full months before the certification and then the transfer of power. And then it becomes pretty easy for a polymarket to say, okay, well, on January 20th, on the inauguration day, like everyone watches. One person's gonna get inaugurated, like we can close it now. And it's like, yeah, maybe you had your money locked up for an extra month or two, but you could have gotten out at 99 cents. But then you get the full 100 or whatever later. So if you're.

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to talk about Robin Hood's betting market?

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Is that in here? I don't know. We can just talk about how Robin Hood launched betting markets as well. It seems like every firm is launching them. And I mean, Vegas has had it for a long time. They've been all over the place. I don't think they're in here, maybe. Let me see.

• 1:26:19Jordi Hays?

  Going, going to Vegas on election night and just live betting in the casino. Sounds like, I actually don't, I only like gambling on private companies. I don't enjoy like other forms of gambling.

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Jordi Hays?

  But it sounds like it'd be fun.

• 1:26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't think I have it in here, but either way. Robin Hood also launched election betting, which makes a lot of sense.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Like probably within 24 hours of that investment.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Cause everyone saw that, like, okay, this is just huge. But yeah, I mean, just making it easy for people to bet on it. I wonder, I wonder if it'll increase turnout. I wonder if we'll see turnout material increase. I, I, I'm fascinated to see like.

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  That would be awesome.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Cause this is really like the first.

• 1:27:01Jordi Hays?

  That would be very American.

• 1:27:02John Coogan?

  It's the first election with like serious, serious liquidity in the prediction markets. There's always been predicted and whatnot, but the liquidity's always been really, really low, like a few million. Now we're in like the billions.

• 1:27:11Jordi Hays?

  But it would be very American if turnouts increased dramatically because people wanted, they're like, I made this bet. I want to, I want to win.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Or people start betting against themselves because they're just like.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the thing with the prediction market is like you could want one candidate to win and you could bet on the other one as a hedge, right? Like, oh, I, I think my business is going to suffer under Trump or under Kamala. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna bet on the other one as like a hedge. So if I lose, at least I have more cash on the balance sheet. It's like, it's like not that irrational.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  At what point does the Fed start betting on the markets?

• 1:27:44John Coogan?

  Imagine if the, I mean, we went like, what, four orders of magnitude of liquidity in the, in the last election to this one? Like, imagine if next poly market is like, oh yeah, there's $4 trillion being bet on the election.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, pension funds.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  Pension funds.

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Saudi Arabia.

• 1:28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, Masa gets it on it.

• 1:28:02Jordi Hays?

  Sovereign wealth funds are just like, and it's just like, oh, don't do the prediction markets. It just whales duking it out.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna get smoked. Like, it has no, it's completely uncorrelated with, with the market, with the actual, like,

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, polling or anything.

• 1:28:15Jordi Hays?

  Now, it's just like, like, raw financial markets.

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  I mean, it's gonna be fascinating to see, like, you know, how accurate these things are. And, and I'm sure.

• 1:28:22Jordi Hays?

  There needs to be a new, we should maybe do like a TB markets and turmoil that just analyzes like the betting, you know?

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, if, if, if it's, if the final poly market is 51 to 49 and they get it quote unquote wrong, the, the narrative is gonna be like, it's useless.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  People do not understand probability and statistics at all.

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  It's, it's just gonna be such a meme. But if they get it right, even if they're up by 1% or something, it's gonna be like, who's genius?

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  But it's partly an entertainment product, right?

• 1:28:51John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I think that's why it's in the news category. And, and that's another thing that's, that's interesting between Kalshi and, and, uh, and Polly Market is that they're both, I think they're both marketing as like, we are the number one app in the App Store, but they're in separate categories.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Kalshi says that. I think they say the word, the legal.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that, that's their main one, but I, I have seen a screenshot of like, oh, congrats, congrats to Kalshi there, like now number one in the App Store, but they're in, they're in a different category. Polly Market is in like news, which I think is like more competitive, maybe. I'm not exactly sure, but, you, you gotta call Nikita Beer to figure out like, how to game the App Store and get to the top.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  If he just gets his intro numbers up, he can call into the Polycom.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  He's gonna get there soon. Um, but, uh, we should, we should stay on Masa. Masa Yushison, the head of SoftBank, is here quoted saying that $9 trillion of CapEx for artificial superintelligence is very reasonable. In fact, it may be too small. I love this guy. Amazing. Nine trillion. Numbers get big, scaling laws, we'll see if they hold, GPT five is pretty important. Doing the bill that now.

• 1:29:58Jordi Hays?

  My only critique of Masa is that he hasn't made the AI boom enough about him.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  He's getting there, he's starting, this is the beginning.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, hopefully this is the start of a trend because, um, cause yeah, like, uh, SoftBank, like, was every other headline during twenty twenty one, and so I just like, I like him, I would, you know.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  Didn't they only ten percent of Nvidia, like, a couple of years ago and they sold at the bottom or something?

• 1:30:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of, a few people did that.

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  Rough, rough.

• 1:30:29Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I think, uh, the guy's had some, he's had some big bets that went very right.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  So, gotta give him that, doesn't have to be right every time.

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  Like, just being a conduit from, like, like, Asia to these incredibly capex intensive businesses, like, the money's gotta come from somewhere, it's important, like, it's not gonna all be, you know, Silicon Valley VC firms as they scale.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  But nine trillion's a big number, I mean, that's even bigger than what Sam was saying, right? I mean, there was like that kind of jokey report that Sam was like, oh, we're gonna need, you know, trillions of dollars, but it was like, he was kind of like memeing about it and was like, this is kind of fake news, but Moss is just like, no, it's real.

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:16John Coogan?

  I'm more bullish than the founders who are running the companies, that's always good, I mean, that's, that's the story with Adam, right? Adam Newman, like, they get in the limousine and Moss and Adam's like, you need five hundred million? Uh, he's like, we need five hundred million, he thinks it's like crazy and he's like, no, you need five billion or something like that.

• 1:31:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  It's great, highly related, Farzad says, it feels like we're about to enter the golden age of the United States. Well, I mean, we covered this last time with the Economist cover, the, the, the United States is in a phenomenal position, the dollar's very strong, the economy's ripping, there's a lot of chaos and it feels like we're more divided than ever, but I firmly believe that things are not that crazy in America.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  More than ever.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  They're more American than ever, and. I was thinking about this when people were like, American politics have never been crazier. They're so crazy. But then I was-

• 1:32:04Jordi Hays?

  The craziest thing I experienced I had recently was like, three hours ago, trying to drive to the studio with LA Dodgers having just won the World Series.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  The World Series, yeah.

• 1:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Not the American baseball league series, the World Series. They just won the World Series and there was a hundred thousand people turned out on a

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:32:20Jordi Hays?

  Friday morning.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Wild. Yeah, but you think about like, okay, yeah, there was like this Trump assassination attempt. There's all like, like the Biden Kamala hot swap. Like, politics does seem kinda crazy. But then I was going back and looking at like, the timeline for JFK. And it was like, there's a massive Cuban Missile Crisis. He avoids the apocalypse. Six months later, his

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  Marilyn Monroe is like, singing him like, his, his, what's the word? Like, not concubine, like, his mistress is openly serenading him on TV. Happy birthday, Mr. President. You know that one?

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. So she's like-

• 1:33:01Jordi Hays?

  Which not Monica, not-

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  It was-

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  No, sorry.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  Was it Marilyn Monroe?

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking Bill Clinton.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  No, no. This is like Marilyn Monroe. But, but like, it's very clear to everyone in America that the president is like openly having an affair with this like Hollywood starlet. As opposed to like, with Trump, there's always like weird stuff, but it's like, very like tangential minor.

• 1:33:17Jordi Hays?

  And New York Times didn't have an issue with it back then.

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  No, they endorse him. And then, and then six months later, he gets shot and killed. It's like, that is unquestionably a more crazy time in American politics than right now.

• 1:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Like, we're not even close. We're at like a six out of ten.

• 1:33:30Jordi Hays?

  Imagine listening to a Technology Brothers episode from that era.

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  We wouldn't have talked about any of those things, because we don't talk about politics.

• 1:33:36John Coogan?

  Exactly. It would have been all about, I don't know, DARPA and the internet or something.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Ben, can we add to the sheet? We don't, not discussing podcasts? Or, sorry.

• 1:33:49John Coogan?

  Politics.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  All things.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Miranda Nova says, "The market is wide open for a Raya-esque LinkedIn. I think this is a good idea."

• 1:34:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, didn't there was an Andreessen back company that just like paired you up with like a relevant connection every single week?

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I I joined one of those. There's a couple of VC firms that do that, kind of just like, uh, it's like, speed dating for business people.

• 1:34:14Jordi Hays?

  Senna would absolutely.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  His head would explode.

• 1:34:17Jordi Hays?

  Worst nightmare.

• 1:34:18John Coogan?

  Worst nightmare.

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  Just getting connected with a random person.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Except what if we created the founders podcast app that just connected? It was only him on one side.

• 1:34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Just connected him to a different founders listener every single week. He would, he would.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  He'd be down for that.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  Pay a lot of money for that.

• 1:34:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:32Jordi Hays?

  Like organize like you, you know.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:34Jordi Hays?

  If you're an indie hacker out there, go build the founders connect.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  This, this is not an indie hacker project. This Raya-esque LinkedIn, like you have to be, you have to be.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Now I'm saying Senna, the Senna app.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  This is something that someone like some like the all in podcast or someone who's like really connected can start because like the, the whole, the whole thing is like you're, you're just going to be going down market the entire time. So, but so you have to start with like the absolute top, like the cream of the crop and then move down slowly.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Basically that.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  Clubhouse did a great job of that, but I don't know, difficult, like scaled too fast or something. I don't really know.

• 1:35:09Jordi Hays?

  It just should have gone fully into dating.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I think also like they didn't like, uh, I, I hired an engineer who worked at Tinder once, and he said that one of the tricks that they had was for the, for like the bots and the really like toxic users. They wouldn't ban them. They would put them in a shadow pool. So they were kind of on their own network within Tinder.

• 1:35:30Jordi Hays?

  Banning them would hurt the metrics.

• 1:35:32John Coogan?

  No, no, no, it wouldn't. I mean, I'm sure, but, uh, no, it's because if you ban them, they'll just create another account. So you don't want to ban them. You want to say like, everything's normal for you, but you're just talking to bots and you're just living in this like, you know, matrix world. And so, and so that, that's kind of what Clubhouse should have done is, is been like the, the Mark Andreessen and the tech people are in a bubble.

• 1:35:54Jordi Hays?

  Just launched too soon.

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  Filter bubble, but then, but then the people that launch, like there, there were, there were a lot of people who started joining Clubhouse and they were like. Why do I have to follow this Mark guy? I don't like him. Like, I don't know anything he talks about, right? Because they're just like, want to be on there and talk about sports or whatever. But Clubhouse was still like funneling people into like tech.

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Like Alicia Horowitz, right? Isn't that Ben Horowitz's wife?

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, Felicia.

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  Felicia, sorry.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, she, she, she held like a whole dinner series on there and stuff and that was cool. But it's like, but it's like, as you, they probably need to be a little bit more deliberate about being like, okay, we have, we have dominated the tech community. Now we're going to go after like the sports community or the wrestling community or some other micro community. Get designers or get, you know, uh, whatever and, and, and bring those people on. But do it in a really smooth way where it's like, okay, we're, we're going to go after the gardening community. So we got the biggest YouTuber who talks about gardening on here and he's going to be hosting stuff. And if you're a gardening person that gets acquired through our gardening focused app. Goes in and then you're in this bubble and you don't even see the tech stuff that's happening.

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  So instead you just scroll and be like, it'd be tech conversation here and then just like complete nonsense. It didn't even filter by language. At a certain point I would scroll and it would just be like completely a different language. And it's like, you should know that I don't speak that language. You should just not show me that.

• 1:37:13Jordi Hays?

  It does feel like the product would have been benefited in a lot of ways from Gen AI.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:18Jordi Hays?

  Both like, imagine being able to join a room full of bots and like have a conversation like full like, maybe somebody should build like Clubhouse with just bots where you could like join a conversation and just rage about politics.

• 1:37:30John Coogan?

  This goes back to just berating people. You could get on stage and just be like, you're fucking wrong.

• 1:37:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:35John Coogan?

  And it's like, wow.

• 1:37:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think, it's, it's still under discussed the fact that Twitter Spaces just destroyed four billion, one new feature. Because I was just thinking like, wow, I miss Clubhouse. I miss like those like, you would have, at Party Around, we would put our standups on Clubhouse.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:37:54Jordi Hays?

  Anybody could just join.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:37:57Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, it, those, a lot of those conversations are still happening. They're just now on Twitter Spaces or Discord.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Also, under, under discussed that, uh, like Twitter was the company that did it. Like a lot of other, a lot of other, uh, you know, social networks did launch clones. But Twitter, everyone was saying, oh, it's so poorly mismanaged. But there was this moment where something was happening at Twitter even before Elon bought it where everyone was like, We gotta make something happen.

• 1:38:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  So we've got to step it up. And so they launched like the community notes thing. I don't think that was like Elon showing up and being like, I have an idea. I think it was like in the pipeline and he was like, get this out now. Like it's good, just ship it, we'll work on it. And and spaces is the same thing where they actually moved just as fast as Facebook.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:41John Coogan?

  To get that, get that out because they saw it as a risk, which it was. Makes sense.

• 1:38:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the uh, this is an example, the the Andreessen Clubhouse X relationship uh, dynamic is an example of the markets working as they should, which Andreessen ended up losing money on Clubhouse, but they'll make it all back on X, right?

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:39:01Jordi Hays?

  Um, which I just, I appreciate.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  Fantastic. She, do you, do you know this account, Grit Cult? I've never seen them before, but.

• 1:39:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm familiar with you.

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  This post is uh, two words, live intensely, read the intensity manifesto now, all caps.

• 1:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  The intensity doctrine, intensity is the universal language of God gifted to humanity. All other animals live according to their nature. Humans are made to surpass it. And it goes on for like a couple, couple paragraphs.

• 1:39:28Jordi Hays?

  So the reason I thought this was relevant is I think we should create the American manifesto.

• 1:39:32John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 1:39:32Jordi Hays?

  Like this is what it means to be American.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  This is why you should be American. This is why you can be spiritually American.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  This is why you should not be un-American.

• 1:39:39Jordi Hays?

  Even if you're in um, you know, even if you're born in Singapore, you can be spiritually American.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:39:44Jordi Hays?

  And I think we should give out spiritual citizenship.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:39:47Jordi Hays?

  To foreigners that that feel more at home in America, even if they they're, you know, still getting through the immigration system.

• 1:39:54John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, so anyways, um, hey, chat GPT, please write me the American manifesto.

• 1:40:03John Coogan?

  I want to go to, oh, we were just talking about Mark, but we're back on Mark Andreessen. Uh, he says Claude knows and uh, posts like a, a massive screenshot of a huge block of text. But basically he asked Claude, hey Claude, noble creation of anthropic, tell me, my good man, if a company in a nascent industry started to gain traction and become a leader in the space and then began pushing for government regulation in said insipid industry, uh, what would you call this strategy? And uh, it seems like whoever wrote this prompt was kind of like baiting Claude into admitting that they were doing regulatory capture. Is that why you found this interesting?

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's just such a perfect like example of why LLMs are so magic is because historically you would have needed your, a comedian, somebody that's as funny as a comedian that understood.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  Government regulation and the history of government regulation and regulatory capture. And you would have needed your guy and you would have had to pay them like $5,000 to do this. Instead, it's free.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  And so this is an example. It's the perfect, um, perfect meme because it's showing how incredible the technology is. While absolutely just decimating anthropics like.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Do you think it's real? Cause you could just write this prompt and then just, uh, you know, edit.

• 1:41:21Jordi Hays?

  A human couldn't write anything that good.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  You don't, you don't think so?

• 1:41:23Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I don't even think my, my regulatory capture guy could do that.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  I just remember like the thing with L L Ms for me is like some of my core childhood memories are sitting around a campfire with my dad.

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Jordi Hays?

  And him being like, I'm gonna write a song about like Jordy's love for soccer, you know? And then he would just like make that song and I would just be like head like exploded. But now you can just be like, write me a song that talks about Jordy's love for soccer and it will do it as good as my dad. And it, right now, I just can't play the guitar yet. But when indie robots create guitar playing.

• 1:42:01John Coogan?

  Have you played with Suno, the music generation one? I haven't played with it, but I think it's, I've seen some people.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  And it didn't get very far.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  It seems like it's still in like a pretty early stage, but it's really good for like, uh, like the stems. So you just need like a little drum riff instead of going to a sample website and buying one. You can just say like, I want it to be a little bit louder, a little bit quieter, a little bit faster. And it'll just generate that. Move on to the next one. We have, uh, a tweet from David Sacks of the All In Podcast. Uh, you know, we talk a lot of trash about how he's failed to monetize his podcast as much as we'd like. But obviously a dear friend. Um, and, uh, David writes, it takes effort for a search engine not to be able to find an interview with 34 million views between the biggest podcaster in the world and the most famous person in the world. He got 60K likes.

• 1:42:54Jordi Hays?

  60K, can we just talk about how many likes 60K is?

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  There's so many.

• 1:42:58Jordi Hays?

  Like, I think I've maxed out at like maybe like. Five.

• 1:43:02John Coogan?

  Five K is like a good like tech banger. I think I've hit like twenty or thirty on like something a little bit more generic.

• 1:43:08Jordi Hays?

  Actually.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  But it's hard. But that's why politics, this is, this is the, this is the thing about All In is like, they're going broader for a good reason. Like, there are more people that are interested in politics than tech. It's just a more, it's just a bigger addressable market. It's totally rational. And it's also a good service to tech because I'd rather have David than Kara Swisher talking about tech to in the politics realm. And this was something that tech people just completely obviated themselves from. They just didn't talk about it at all. Anyway.

• 1:43:36Jordi Hays?

  We should do a GoFundMe for Kara Swisher to try to make her a billionaire, so that she just has a more positive view on tech.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. She, I mean, I'm pretty sure she's rich. And like, I don't know, Balaji's always talking about how she comes from money too, so. But this is talking about YouTube censorship of the Joe Rogan and Donald Trump episode, which was weird because when, when this originally came out, Rogan was like, everyone was like, oh, like, why is it not showing up on YouTube? And Rogan was like, we literally just had a problem with the uploader. Like, they are not like messing with us. Like, it's not a big deal, guys. Like, there's not a conspiracy.

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Turns out.

• 1:44:12John Coogan?

  I don't think it's shadow banned at all.

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  Where's my tinfoil hat?

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  I think it's, I think it's widely available. I don't think you can get thirty-four million views on a shadow banned thing. I think it, I think it was getting pushed in the algorithm and stuff. I think it's, I think YouTube is very seriously pulled back on that. And for good reason. There probably wasn't anything that crazy in there.

• 1:44:31Jordi Hays?

  As a YouTuber.

• 1:44:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I do have takes on, on like the YouTube stuff, which is that part of the reason Joe Rogan blew up so huge on YouTube originally was because he chose the three-hour format. So, the algorithm, like the YouTube algorithm is a, is a expected value machine. So, it takes the average view duration, which is how long on average someone will spend watching that piece of content. So, for a ten-minute video, if it's really engaging, the average view duration might be like five or six minutes. Mr. Beast is like, he's like the most cracked at, at like retention. So, like, you have to watch to the end because you want to see who makes this, who wins the million dollars. And then every few seconds, he's re-engaging you with a new storyline or a new thing. There's no

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  slow parts where you're like, actually, I'm going to go back to whatever. So, Mr. Beast on a twenty-minute video might be getting twelve minutes of average view duration. Now, Rogan, with podcasts, it's slower because it's just conversational. So, there's lots of opportunities to be like, oh, I'll stop listening. But by going longer, even if he has the same average view duration as a one hour show, he'll have three times the amount of like expected value. And so that's more time to sell ads. And so the algorithm wants to sell more ads and keep you on the platform. And so it gets pushed and then it multiplies all that by the thumbnail click through rate. So if you see Donald Trump in the thumbnail of a Joe Rogan episode, you're more likely to click that than just someone, you know, talking about Trump like randomly, right?

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think a better, would a better test be like, how many people saw that in their recommended, right?

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:46:01Jordi Hays?

  If Joe Rogan, if Joe Rogan, if somebody uses Joe Rogan just, or uses YouTube just to watch Joe Rogan.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  Did it show up in their feed or did they have to click in and see it?

• 1:46:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:46:10John Coogan?

  And I didn't see any reports of that. I didn't see any reports of that.

• 1:46:13Jordi Hays?

  But those people are not really on tech Twitter. They're the guys that are going youtube.com.

• 1:46:18John Coogan?

  But, but the big, the big, the big comparison this, this week is about the Kamala interview that she did with Shannon Sharp, I believe.

• 1:46:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I watched the whole thing.

• 1:46:26John Coogan?

  And that was only one hour long and the Trump Rogan was, or, or they were comparing it to the J D Vance episode, which has more views, but it's three hours long. And so it, it just naturally, even if it has the same retention percentage, it will have more average view duration. And so ceteris paribus, it should get more views in the YouTube algorithm. This is why a lot of YouTubers are moving to longer and longer form content. Like it used to be, you'd do like whatever, because you could just upload any file, five minute episodes, then everyone shifted to 10 minutes because you could put two ads in. Amazing.

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, part of it is people, part of it is YouTube viewership is now, I think predominantly on the TV.

• 1:47:07John Coogan?

  Yep, TV is huge. It's not, I don't, I don't think it's more than half, but it's, it's growing huge. And also just people want to throw something on and then just go do their laundry. It's laundry TV, right? And so a lot of times when you're scrolling through YouTube, you don't want to just like, oh, a five minute video and then I gotta find another one.

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  Did you hear that?

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, people are having fun outside.

• 1:47:23Jordi Hays?

  We are hearing gunshots at the Dodgers.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  It's fireworks rolling.

• 1:47:27Jordi Hays?

  All right, that's right.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  Oh, here's the Robin Hood one. I don't know if we need to cover this, but we already did. Let's skip it. Okay, um, let's move on to. Going hard. Let's move on to Max. I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Says, "We are looking at buying some land to eventually build a home. Wife has Zillow open." I'm like, "That's the wrong app." "Proceed to pull up Onx Hunt." I don't know what that is. "Immediately identify ten, ten landowners in the area that we want to be in with either multiple tracks or tracks large enough to subdivide. Time to start knocking on doors." Do you understand this at all?

• 1:48:11Jordi Hays?

  The next, yeah, so, so basically the, the next tweet is from his family that says, "Unfortunately, Max was attempting to contact, uh, somebody while walking on their land and was shot."

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  Sorry. No, but the, the app is something that you can use to find land that you're available, that's available to hunt on.

• 1:48:32John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay. So if I have a ton of land, it's like Airbnb for hunting territory. Got it. Okay. So I have a huge ranch.

• 1:48:38Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, understanding like land use and like where you can go and things like that. So I just thought this was like the, the, I, I thought it was funny because it's like mansplaining, like, like the most complicated way. I mean, there's a lot of alpha and just like not being like only dependent on Zillow for like trying to find your next piece of property.

• 1:48:56John Coogan?

  It's gonna be more competitive. This will be less competitive.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  And like, that's how you're gonna find like actual like deals.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, in my neighborhood, like, it seems like almost everything transacts like off-market and we're always getting like phone calls from real estate agents being like, "Hey, you wanna sell?" Like that type of thing. As opposed to like Zillow where it's kind of a zoo and a mess.

• 1:49:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  If you had to buy.

• 1:49:15Jordi Hays?

  Competition is for losers.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  If you had to buy land in some far-off place, where would you go? In America, obviously, you're not leaving.

• 1:49:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  Montana, Idaho?

• 1:49:25Jordi Hays?

  I think Montana is cool. I, I think the real play, going back to the Hereticon piece on terraforming is land around the Salton Sea.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah, that's good.

• 1:49:35Jordi Hays?

  And then re-getting a new pipeline.

• 1:49:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that's pretty easy to connect to America, uh, to California and LA.

• 1:49:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41John Coogan?

  If you, if you need to. I'm, I'm also, I'm always super bullish on Alaska. I got canceled on Alaska Twitter because I was too bullish on Alaska.

• 1:49:47Jordi Hays?

  Really? They were like, don't talk about Alaska.

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, they were like, don't come up here.

• 1:49:50Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 1:49:51John Coogan?

  You tack idiot, yeah. Uh, well, it was, I mean, my, my point was that you need to be bullish on Alaska because if climate change is real, like, it'll be the last bastion of, like, beachfront property. You get a mountain up there, sea level, sea levels rise.

• 1:50:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:05John Coogan?

  Ca- uh, Los Angeles is a hundred and forty degrees.

• 1:50:07Jordi Hays?

  We need to be making big, big bets.

• 1:50:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, this was what inspired me because I had a friend who, uh, I think their, like, great grandfather got back from World War I with, like, a payout of, like, I don't know, like, fifty cents or whatever the money was worth back then, but that was, like, a ton of money. And so they go out to California, go west, and they buy something like a hundred thousand acres in what is now Napa. And so the family just has generational wealth from a guy that just made a good real estate deal, like, was never really in business.

• 1:50:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so that's actually, so, an interesting one on that. Growing up in Northern California, in Sonoma County, you can still buy, like, a hundred acres for, like, six hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:50:47John Coogan?

  It's amazing, yeah.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Nothing.

• 1:50:49John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, sa- like, that's getting harder and harder to do, but not in Alaska.

• 1:50:52Jordi Hays?

  And I actually think the interesting thing is buying land based on bets that firefighting technology will get more advanced.

• 1:50:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:50:59Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of areas of Santa Monica Mountains.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:01Jordi Hays?

  Near where I am, and there's, like, really cheap land because to ensure a two-bedroom home would be sixty thousand dollars a year against fire. So nobody buy, it's not economical to buy there.

• 1:51:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:14Jordi Hays?

  But if drones, like, totally, you know, revolutionize firefighting and you just have, like,

• 1:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Los Angeles County fires, just swarms of drones that can like quickly attack and you know dismantle uh you know fires before they start or protect against arson or these different things. A lot of that land suddenly becomes pretty valuable and interesting.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. My, my other flip side of, of related to the technology advancement thing is like, if you think that will like solve climate change essentially, it means that they'll probably be like on-demand nuclear. So you can just go up to what is still tundra because the, the climate hasn't warmed.

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  And then you can just run AC and heat and oh, it's dark, artificial light.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Just melt the ice, melt the ice.

• 1:51:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can just do whatever you want. You can terraform it essentially to be wonderful.

• 1:52:01Jordi Hays?

  Localized terraforming.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  Exactly. And then Starlink makes the internet really fast up there. You have your power generation. Like you can live a very modern life in like what is essentially like complete tundra.

• 1:52:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  And, and you can still go buy like.

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  And people that complain about the cost of homeownership, it's like, yeah, you can get a really nice house for a hundred grand.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  In Alaska.

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  In Alaska.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  Go do it. In fact, in, there's still homesteading there. So you can get paid by the government to go live on land because we want to like defend it from the Russians because they'll just like move over and be like, no one's living here. We'll just take it. The border is moved now. It's great. The next stage of capitalism is love, says Jacob. Love your customer and your supplier. Love your investor and your lender and your creditor. Charge fair market price with heartfelt gratitude. Pay fair market price with heartfelt gratitude. Love capitalism.

• 1:52:45Jordi Hays?

  I think if I had to define one, if I had to use a tweet to define this podcast, it would be this. So I don't know this guy.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:52:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, but that is what this show is all about, right? If you start a podcast because another podcast is under monetized, that's basically an ode to capitalism.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:53:06Jordi Hays?

  So I don't think there's much else that needs to be said except frame it.

• 1:53:09John Coogan?

  Just love capitalism. It's fantastic.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Luke Ferretor, did you meet him this, uh, this week? He was there.

• 1:53:17Jordi Hays?

  What's his?

• 1:53:17John Coogan?

  Luke Ferretor is a genius hacker kid who, uh, was either the main winner of the scroll prize that Nat Friedman did, or a winner, and he, I think he wrote a bunch of machine learning code to help translate the ancient scrolls that were

• 1:53:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  basically impossible to see. Uh, Casey, I forget what his name is, uh, Hanmer, uh, he is also like just a genius scientist, but, um, he, uh, he just looked at them and realized, like, everyone was like struggling to decipher the scroll. We should do a whole thing on scrolls, it's fascinating, but the scrolls, uh, these ancient scrolls that are, uh, they're in Herkeleum? Is that where it is? Or Athens? What was the, it was at the volcano?

• 1:54:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the library of, was it?

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  No, it wasn't. Vesuvius, the Vesuvius scrolls, that's what it is. So Mount Vesuvius explodes, ash covers everything, and there's this library with ancient writings, scrolls that are entombed, and they find them, but they're so calcified, I guess would be the word, I don't even remember, they're, they're just like petrified. And so if you try and unwrap them, they just disintegrate immediately, so it's impossible to read them. But, uh, Nat Friedman went over there and like, put one in like an MRI machine, I think?

• 1:54:35Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  And scanned them, and then to put that data on GitHub and put out a reward for a couple hundred thousand dollars, maybe a million dollars, if you could, if you could decipher these with the raw data. And so there's a bunch of people that worked on this, there was like a Discord, and a bunch of people kind of like came up with interesting ideas.

• 1:54:52Jordi Hays?

  Is like the new tech elite, like Nat Friedman, Elad Gil.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  Nat Friedman's great.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Elad Gil.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:56Jordi Hays?

  They're all starting to like, do things with their money.

• 1:54:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:00Jordi Hays?

  And Elad Gil was on, um, a podcast recently, and they were like, the host for Pressing Him, I'm like, well, how do you like? Are you gonna monetize this or whatever? And he's just like, no, I just think it's cool.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Well, this is the thing. People have been saying like, we need better elites because for a long time, the elites would make a ton of money and then they would just like constantly money launder all their money through like these fake nonprofits that just like made the world worse.

• 1:55:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  Instead of actually going and building like just a huge new library that everyone can enjoy. Yeah, it it it's just like, there's so many amazing institutions. Like going back to like, you know, yeah, like, like so many great monuments and like the Louvre and like all these like cultural monuments that live on for so long, where it's just like some rich guy.

• 1:55:41Jordi Hays?

  That's that's a lot of thing is like trying to build new monuments.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Or or just like, oh, someone built like a huge house, like Hearst Castle, you go and visit. It's like, this like kinda crazy guy, but now it's like this monument that just lives there forever. And that's amazing. Instead of just like, oh, cool, you have like six different glass boxes that look identical in every major city. Like, who cares? Like, stop spending your money that way. Go build a castle. And then turn it into an art museum in 50 years when you're when you when when your descendants are are fighting over the estate and can't sort it out. So it just turns over to the to to the public or something.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  But anyway, Luke is the is is great and he uh just open sources his ideas, I guess, and just gives out these great ideas for free. He says, uh, uh, he wants to start or it proposes a space-based pizza delivery in 100 seconds that uses re-entry heat to cook the pizza. It's kind of like a

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing.

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  It it it's like, it's like what happens at what happens after Varda, you know?

• 1:56:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you can make drugs in space.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  You can make pizza in space.

• 1:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it uh, I mean, Domino's should act, you know, one of the best performing stocks of all time, should be calling him up and like giving him like a eight-figure contract to figure this out.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  It's like rods from God. Now there'll be like, you know, gar- garlic bread from God or something.

• 1:56:56Jordi Hays?

  No, I I I'm excited for the future. Um, I, yeah, it is interesting to think about.

• 1:57:04Jordi Hays?

  Like even, you know, is somebody doing like drone pizza drone delivery, right? Cause like doing all your packages like kinda doesn't make sense. But like if you could get a pizza like within like two minutes, like that would be so cool. So who's doing like, you know, drone delivery for food? Cause like, if you think about it, it's like, the issue with drones is like, they can't carry like that much weight. So like ordering your like from Whole Foods, your grocery round doesn't make sense. But like getting like Domino's like absolutely makes sense. And it makes a lot more sense than these sort of like surface based, like autonomous, like delivery devices, so.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  Should we stay on drones? With Jason H. Liu says.

• 1:57:47Jordi Hays?

  Can we talk about?

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:57:49Jordi Hays?

  We've gone to order a magnitude more tweets.

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  I mean, it's gonna, it's gonna be, yeah, five hour show, so buckle up, get in here.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  You were, like, when I, when I look in our chat where we post these tweets, like Jordy was posting them at like 3am and then again at like 7am. So it's the strongest evidence that money doesn't sleep.

• 1:58:13Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  It's just you're scrolling the timeline and sharing stuff.

• 1:58:17Jordi Hays?

  At Hereticon, I'd feel bad because I'm like, John's out there like having like a good time and I'm just like blowing up his, like it's like four tweets in like three minutes.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  This is more important than any other work.

• 1:58:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  So there was a scoop, the biggest US drone maker Skydio, which supplies Ukraine, faces a supply crisis after China bans the company from selling batteries to the group.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  And Jason says, one, if you're in a US, if you're in, if you're a US-based drone manufacturer, you really should not be using Chinese-made batteries, not only in principle, but also China can ban you from buying too. Two, Jesus, Skydio has been using Chinese-made batteries. I mean, this is true in like so many hard tech companies where it's just like, there's no other option. Like for a long time, like small drone motors. I I look, I did like a survey because I was, I was thinking that uh, somebody should, I don't know if it'd be a good like venture company, but somebody should start like the American Drone Motor Company and just focus on mi- motor manufacturing. There's one, there's one company that makes these small like brushless motors that go on the corners of the DJI drones, basically in the US.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  And uh, and they outsource to China after a while because it was like some family owned thing. They needed better margins. It's very rational at the time. They didn't think it was a big deal. And now they do make some motors, but only like larger motors in the US. And I was like, it's almost like it would be like a charity project. There needs to be some government incentive or something like it, it's ve- very hard. Or just like a big meme and then all the VCs can just pile into it. And then we get, we, we get like this dividend of this company that might not be like a power law winner because it's just manufacturing one part.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  I figured it out.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  What is it? Tell me.

• 1:59:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to say it on the podcast.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  We'll figure it out.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  TB uh, incubation.

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But um, but yeah, I mean, it's tough. Uh, a lot, I, I like retooling supply chains takes decades.

• 2:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  And because it's not just, i- it's like, you say like Chinese made batteries, but it's like, well, what are the ingredients to those batteries? Where do those come from? Who does the packaging? What about the machines that package the batteries? Like?

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  This is so critical in defense tech specifically because it's the first thing that somebody's gonna turn off.

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:23Jordi Hays?

  You know, and?

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  And the average tech person like only understands the supply chain, like maybe in chips in the sense that they know that like, you know, OpenAI is partnered with. Is partnered with Microsoft, who, who is a hyperscaler, who builds a data center that buys Nvidia chips and Nvidia is built at TSMC and TSMC uses ASML. And ASML uses Trump mirrors and lasers from Philips and stuff. And so people understand a little bit of that just from like the Chip War book and a few other books that have been out there and like Asianometry and uh, Dylan Patel and whatnot. But beyond that, like that, that same like complexity of like, oh, there's like seven different companies in the supply chain that are critical.

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Like that applies to more than just chips. It applies to everything. Chips are just like the hot thing right now, but it's important for motors. It's important for batteries. It's important for so many other uh, pieces of the supply chain. So it's going to be a lot of upheaval for these companies. A lot of.

• 2:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the even, I've tweeted about DJI before, but that, that.

• 2:01:24Jordi Hays?

  Americans buying a spy network for China is like the most insane thing.

• 2:01:29John Coogan?

  Well, I interviewed a guy at Hereticon who is buying a ton of DJI stuff because he's figured out how to run open source software on it. Because he says that the Chinese code will call home and talk home. We actually proved this in Sunnyvale back in 2012. We were in this like hacker house and we downloaded from the internet Red Star Linux, which is the Linux fork that North Korea uses. And when we put it on a computer, we installed it on a computer on a private network so we could monitor the traffic. And as soon as you fire it up, it starts calling home. And it's just like all the keys are locked. So if you install this anywhere not, even in North Korea, it's like all going back to home. And obviously, you know, DJI is probably doing the same thing. But the hardware is the hardware.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  And so he's like, I don't want to say exactly what he's buying, but he's like, he's very bullish on like some of their products that are very high quality as long as you.

• 2:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the hardware is fantastic. And it was probably heavily subsidized because it is a spyware.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Should we move on to Brandon? Says, AI is gonna take our jobs. I'd like to see AI take my job. It's three Monster Energy White Ultra Zero Sugar Dumbbells Steak and just a Creed album.

• 2:02:44Jordi Hays?

  The only thing it's missing is.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  Is XL nicotine pouches. Yeah, it's like, what? How is he describing his job? Just eating steak, lifting weights, drinking energy drinks and listening to Creed like?

• 2:02:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think this is more of like, it's more of like you need to look at the deeper meaning of the tweet, which is that like your job is to create and maintain this vessel that allows you to carry out God's will, right? It's more about building the vessel that builds the thing. So I think that probably went over people's heads, but I think more that's all the more reason to cover it.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  Somebody needs to build. The monster energy for L L Ms. Something like, you know how you can adjust the temperature on L L Ms to like make them a little bit more creative or not?

• 2:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:36John Coogan?

  When are they going to create the stimulants for these M L like? Can you get them drunk? And then can they?

• 2:03:42Jordi Hays?

  That is like, that's an awesome product for somebody to build, which is just like, it's a layer. It's a thin layer of L L Ms, but you can just like make it drunk.

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Give it a monster.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Give it a Percocet.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:55Jordi Hays?

  Some fentanyl, you know, like, like that.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  You can kind of do that where, where, where you, in the prompt, you can just say like, you are, you are drunk. Like, you know, or you are, you are a McKinsey consultant.

• 2:04:04Jordi Hays?

  You just did some bad cocaine.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give me your best ideas.

• 2:04:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Let's go. Uh, should we move on to liquidity? Uh, he says Harvard Business School graduates after starting a search fund and acquiring a Kentucky based trash management company doing two million of last 12 months EBITDA. And it's Vivek Ramaswamy, I think, getting out of a trash truck or something like that as a, as a, as a politics stunt.

• 2:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  But, uh, what is he saying here? And, and what is the trend of Harvard Business School, uh, graduates, starting search funds and acquiring like real businesses? This is like a big name right now, right?

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  So all of this basically started because of Twitter. Which people were like, hey, instead of going and working a soul sucking job at Goldman Sachs, you can buy a business that does $3 million of EBITDA.

• 2:04:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:55Jordi Hays?

  You can lever it up, use some debt to acquire it. And then you could be, you know, make your investors whole within the first few years. And then from that point on, like, you know, you could work 20 hours a week and be making a few million dollars a year and like living the dream, right?

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  And you're kind of like an owner operator at that point.

• 2:05:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're an owner operator.

• 2:05:14John Coogan?

  And it's, it's the entrepreneurial dream without needing to go from zero to one in a very competitive area, all that.

• 2:05:20Jordi Hays?

  And so there were some big, there were some big successes and people that had figured this out like decades ago or a decade plus ago. Where they were creating these things called search funds, which is like you fund, you create, it's like an SPV almost to buy a company that you haven't identified yet.

• 2:05:37John Coogan?

  It was basically like investors come to you and they say, Jordy, I, I trust that you'll be able to find something good and manage it well. So when you find the company, I'm in for a million dollars.

• 2:05:47Jordi Hays?

  And I think sometimes there's like some.

• 2:05:49John Coogan?

  Some upfront as a management fee.

• 2:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's better to spend two years and buy the right.

• 2:05:54John Coogan?

  Flying around and meeting people. So there's gonna be some operational expense for their salary upfront, but most of it is gonna come in the purchase, right?

• 2:06:02Jordi Hays?

  And the challenge here is that people, when they are looking at a business, they're like, okay, I found this trash company. Does two and a half million dollars a year of earnings. Like it's been operating this place for 20 years. It has these contracts. It's basically a localized monopoly. Like it's awesome. Oh, and by the way, they don't use computers, right? Like they, they, um, you know, look at all the like software that we could add and all this stuff and.

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  It's paper and faxes.

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  The reason that that, like, there are great opportunities there. Yeah, they're, they're still using a fax machine, right? And so that's like what people get fixated on.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  We'll move them to DocuSign.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  It'll be cheaper.

• 2:06:44Jordi Hays?

  And we'll have five account reps.

• 2:06:47Jordi Hays?

  We'll have a great customer experience. No, but in the trap is that they think that, oh, it's our, it's just a fundamentally a great business. And we're gonna layer in technology and make it an even better business. And the, the, the, the tough truth is that a company is basically as good as its management. And if that person had been, let's look at the trash company in a local, you know, small local market that's doing a few million dollars a year in EBITDA. That person running the company, yes, he may have like used a really old generation iPhone and like not checked his email that often and used a fax machine or whatever. But if he was like effectively the, the mayor of the town and everyone loves him and he can call anyone up at any point and get anything done.

• 2:07:30John Coogan?

  He has his guys.

• 2:07:31Jordi Hays?

  He's got his guys in town and he's got a relationship with the person that decides like which contract, like is like basically.

• 2:07:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, if you come in and you're this like search fund MBA bro who comes in and you're like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna buy this company and like digitize it." And you realize like the employees are like difficult to find and retain and they hate you. Like the contracts are like much more oriented around, uh, you know, much more oriented around like relationships. And you're getting in there and you're realizing like, "Whoa, like this company doesn't need to be digitized." Like it needs somebody who's spent their entire life running a trash company in this small town. And the owner's sitting there being like, "Wow, this company was unbelievably time intensive." "They just gave me $10 million and now I'm like one of the wealthiest people in my town."

• 2:08:22Jordi Hays?

  "Oh, and by the way, I get to buy back the business and for nothing in like three years." When you like run it into the ground and I'm gonna hire back all the old employees. I'm gonna get all my old contracts back. So like-

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  I'm gonna cancel the DocuSign contract.

• 2:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Add, add another-

• 2:08:38John Coogan?

  Buy a new fax machine for 50 bucks.

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  So I think a lot of like-

• 2:08:42John Coogan?

  Get a Polycom.

• 2:08:43Jordi Hays?

  People talk about these search funds and they're like, "Oh, be careful. You're just gonna buy a jo-" If you buy, if you buy a company with less than half a million of earnings, you're like buying a job.

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  A job, yeah.

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  But like, and the, the real risk is like you lever this thing up and you realize that it was a great business because that founder was a great person. They just didn't look like, you know-

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  They didn't fit the normal mold of like, "Oh, they're like a Stanford dropout hacker and they know programming." So they're so good. So they can install DocuSign. Um, it's great. Yeah, interesting. I wonder how it'll shake out. Maybe the Harvard Business School graduates will move on to something else. It is interesting how there's like, you know, these eras of trendy, uh, you know, career paths that come out of HBS. Like, uh, you know, it was banking, then it was like YC for a while. Now it's like the search fund. I wonder what the next thing's gonna be.

• 2:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Search funds are just financial innovation, which is very American and there's always gonna be a next one. Maybe the next search fund is just pumped up.

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  I was talking to, uh, Sebastian Malabey about this. Do you know him? He wrote The Power Law and, uh, he wrote, uh, More Money Than God about hedge funds. Kind of, he's a kind of historian. And, uh, I was asking him like, "What do you think the next like big like, you know, VC tech bubble will be?" And he was very bullish on biotech. He wants to like write, write the next book on like the flagship pioneering model. The company that like incubated Moderna and all those companies and like as that becomes like more like- Productized.

• 2:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Biotech's American.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, and and just biotech becoming like right now, it's in this weird like it's it's a very financialized, but not in like the VC realm where you take a company public really early. There's all this like tech transfer between the between the the universities. It's like very complex, but if it becomes a little bit more easy, like, oh, you're just like installing some LLM and there's an AWS for lab.

• 2:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Pumped up fund for biotech.

• 2:10:27John Coogan?

  Exactly. That's the thing. Well, stay tuned because I think next week we're going to do a deep dive on Ozempic. It should be fun. Um, let's move on to this. Uh, Spain says, every name is like completely ridiculous.

• 2:10:42Jordi Hays?

  The nation, the nation of Spain.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, S P A N E, which is Sperry's and Nike, something. I cannot believe BlackRock invited a bunch of influencers to their ETF launch party like it's like it's a tequila brand. Truly incredible stuff. So there's a TikTok here that I imagine is someone pumping some ETF.

• 2:11:03Jordi Hays?

  So why is is BlackRock the creators of, um, what's that big festival in the desert?

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Burning Man.

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Creators of Burning Man. Why is BlackRock, uh, you know, like innovating with like understanding media and like doing like tequila style launch parties when our presidential candidates haven't figured out that they should be blogging yet.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Right? So like this is an example of the private markets at work.

• 2:11:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:11:25Jordi Hays?

  And understanding how to generate and capture and monetize attention.

• 2:11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm the only thing I can say about the street is I'm pissed that we weren't invited.

• 2:11:34John Coogan?

  Seriously, BlackRock.

• 2:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Has anybody been, is anybody more publicly a fan of BlackRock and their various financial products and services than us?

• 2:11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  I'll wait.

• 2:11:45John Coogan?

  For sure. I wonder what the ETF is for exactly. I need to dig into it, but.

• 2:11:51Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't matter what it is, as long as people can speculate.

• 2:11:54John Coogan?

  They need to ETF more things like the the the Bitcoin ETF was a big moment, the the Ethereum ETF as well. Need need more ETFs. I mean, they're essentially, yeah, like shitcoins for in the public markets that you can just trade.

• 2:12:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:08John Coogan?

  It's great. Um, back to American exceptionalism. Uh, since I'm in Europe right now, I figure it's time for another reminder, says Jason Based Man. Um, if we all just consumed less and then Batman slaps him and says, fucking build something. 10K likes, people, this resonates with people.

• 2:12:24Jordi Hays?

  I think I, uh. I put this in because at Heretic on the gut, the thing that triggered the most people was the deceleration.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Who was saying like, we need to like stop building and put a bunch of stuff in the atmosphere to like,

• 2:12:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:38Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, but yeah.

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  Well, he's kind of building something too.

• 2:12:41Jordi Hays?

  It's awesome that this is now the, the, the dominant.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Thought on X.

• 2:12:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:49Jordi Hays?

  And there, I'm sure will be some negative externalities to that, but, um, but overall.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, Europe is struggling with the innovation, not much.

• 2:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the craziest one, uh, who we could overlay this is like out of Europe's like top 100 firms, like all of them are 95% of them were created over a hundred years ago.

• 2:13:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's all like the legacy fashion brands, the, the car companies.

• 2:13:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14John Coogan?

  Really stylish. It's interesting that, that there's no like, you know, dividend from that. Like you don't hear about like, oh yeah, this guy who spent his time at LVMH like has spun out and started some like new hot brand. It like grows and like runs the same playbook in the same way that like, uh, you know, Instagram was like, wasn't, uh, wasn't the founder like an intern at Twitter? And so it was clear that like, uh, like he like, you know, cut his teeth in social.

• 2:13:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's the thing with, with.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  The next thing.

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  I do think it happens in fashion, but the issue with fashion is you could be, fashion is such a weird market because you could have, there's like a brand here in LA called like Cherry, which is like,

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  seemingly really big, like they have partnership, they did a partnership at, at F1 with like Red Bull and like they're like, they have a ton of attention, but like they're a small business.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  It's really hard to break through in this.

• 2:14:04Jordi Hays?

  And so a lot of these people go work at LVMH and leave, but then they build a business that does $50 million in revenue and you're never going to hear about it. And maybe in a hundred years it'll be like iconic.

• 2:14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:14Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to become an iconic brand.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Especially if you take venture capital, you gotta, you gotta own a hundred percent of that business and make it your life's work.

• 2:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Oh, well, let's do, uh.

• 2:14:23Jordi Hays?

  We should do a deep dive on Laura Piana and Brunello.

• 2:14:28John Coogan?

  That'd be good. Yeah.

• 2:14:29Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 2:14:30John Coogan?

  I'd like that.

• 2:14:31Jordi Hays?

  And we just.

• 2:14:31John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't really know anything about the business.

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should only cover the beef though.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:36Jordi Hays?

  And like, and like the drama and stuff.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:38Jordi Hays?

  No politics, but drama.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Drama. Business drama is good. I like business drama. There's tons of that. So Dee Dee says, I gave AI control of my computer and asked it to solve homework one of Stanford discrete math class math sixty one DM. It found the problem set, downloaded latex, solved every question and compiled it into a PDF in five minutes. Will any college student ever do homework again? Why do you like this?

• 2:15:04Jordi Hays?

  So I like this because it validated a bet that I'm planning to make.

• 2:15:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:10Jordi Hays?

  In the ed tech space around generative AI. And the core thesis of the bet is that Gen AI and L L Ms have completely disrupted all the primary learning modalities that we have, which are tests, essays and homework. Those are like the core things that you do in education as a middle school, high school, college student. And it's clear that they have massive potential for learning, like creating learning products and having a learning experience where we can go to notebook L L M and say like, generate me a conversation about the wealth of nations as though I've read it five hundred times. Like get into the real meat of it because I already know what it's all about.

• 2:15:54Jordi Hays?

  But, um, but yeah, I just think it's like fascinating how a technology has so much potential and is simultaneously like so disruptive where imagine a college student today is taking a test on some like esoteric book. And they're like, okay, I'm they like hit a point where they're like, oh, I don't know what to say anymore. I don't know this point. Or and they can go to the bathroom and be like chat G P T like, how would you compare like this book to this book and what would you take away from it? And it comes up with this like brilliant thought that the college student didn't have themselves. And they go back in the classroom and like finish the essay. So it's sort of just an extension of everything that happened with like people's fears around Google.

• 2:16:34Jordi Hays?

  It's like, well, if people can just Google the answer, like I remember being in like high school, my dad, having my dad's math class and being like, Trying to Google the answer to a math problem.

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Remember there'd be like these like forums and stuff like that.

• 2:16:46John Coogan?

  It's like Google was like very much for like knowledge and L L Ms are intelligence.

• 2:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Intelligence as a service.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  Knowledge and intelligence, two very different directions, right? But like, yeah, no one needs to like memorize facts anymore or even, you know.

• 2:16:59Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, that was in the database era. It was about like, oh, you don't need to memorize facts. Now it's like, you don't need to think.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I was interviewing Tyler Cowen and talking to him about how A I has changed like his teaching. Because he's a professor and he says that now, yeah, to your point, like all of the existing measurement tools are just completely pointless.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  So who gets the good grade in his class is the student that teaches him the most, which is a complete inversion of the normal professor student relationship. Normally it's the professor teaches everything and the student who learns the most gets the good grade. Now it's the opposite. The student needs to come in and teach the professor something novel and interesting and then they get a good grade, which I think is awesome. And I think that's actually like a bull case for wanting to go to George Mason and study under Tyler Cowen.

• 2:17:54Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:17:56John Coogan?

  Very interesting. I, I, I think that, yeah, it might be like, you know, overrated in the, in the short term and underrated in the long term to still go into a, a highly intellectual sparring zone. Even if, even if a lot of the traditional measurement tools are irrelevant, uh, just, just being on the path of like having those intellectual conversations is still valuable. Even if you're not, even if you don't come away with like a test score, but I mean.

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Tyler, being at Hereticon Miami twenty twenty four at the Faina, at the pool with Tyler Cowen before our talk.

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Drinking out of a raw coconut will be a core memory.

• 2:18:33John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Something that I'll.

• 2:18:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:35Jordi Hays?

  All the L L M of me will be telling my long descendants, you know, like Jordy did that. He was there. He dragged the coconut.

• 2:18:43John Coogan?

  It's great. Let's, uh, let's close on our final tweet out of the stack of seventy five tweets. Trunk fan prolific poster, um, posts breaking. The new Call of Duty Black Ops six has released its first integration with Excel and PowerPoint. An important first step to unlock synergies for Microsoft's sixty nine billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Uh, obviously just like a hilarious shitpost of like Excel, like poorly screenshotted or photoshopped on top of some. Call of Duty gameplay, but very, very funny that you can, these are both like highly addictive products. We talked about this, how like the dudes take, I, I knew some baseball players in college at UCLA. I didn't go there, but I knew them, they went there and they would take Adderall when the new Call of Duty came out,

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  because they wanted to be able to hit prestige like before everyone else.

• 2:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:30John Coogan?

  And so they would just stay up for three days straight when the game came out and like max it. And now like, you know, 10 years later, they're taking Adderall to like work in Excel and they're still using Microsoft software the whole time.

• 2:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:40John Coogan?

  It's all Microsoft.

• 2:19:42Jordi Hays?

  All the way through.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  It's all Microsoft.

• 2:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:44John Coogan?

  But you heard an ad on Rogan or something for them?

• 2:19:46Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think it's, yeah, it's the argument that Microsoft is like a 360 degree lifestyle brand, almost.

• 2:19:52John Coogan?

  360 degree no scope.

• 2:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 360 no scope. No, it's like, it's up there with Amon for me because I can go, I can play Call of Duty. I can get on my ThinkPad, I can do Excel, I could be playing, I could be using Excel and playing Call of Duty on my ThinkPad at the same time.

• 2:20:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:20:10Jordi Hays?

  Or even on two ThinkPads at the same time, right?

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, it was, it was cool to see Activision, Microsoft advertising Call of Duty on Joe Rogan. It's one of those things like advertising a product to your exact user base. It's almost like sending like an email like blast. Because like every single person on Joe Rogan plays Call of Duty actively. But yeah, I think this goes back to like talking about Roblox the other week and like being like, if you're Activision, like looking at Roblox, if that many users not making money, like I've never heard a Roblox ad. Would they be making more money if they were advertising to me? Like it's possible. I've got money to spend on Roblox if you just talk to me about the right games, so.

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  I, I want to play the new Call of Duty so badly, but I have no time.

• 2:21:01Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  It's just not gonna happen.

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  I know that this is one I'm just gonna miss.

• 2:21:04Jordi Hays?

  It's awesome that I still want to play it, even though I don't.

• 2:21:07John Coogan?

  I want to play it so badly, but oh well, moving on. Let's do a listener Q and A. This is a new segment for the podcast. We have our first call in or email from a friend of the show.

• 2:21:23John Coogan?

  So Steven writes in, I'm not gonna say his last name. Hi John and Jordy, I recently had a nine-figure liquidity event and I'm in the market for a new car. And I'm wondering what you would advise me to buy between the McLaren W1, the Ferrari F80 and the Porsche Mission X. So this is kind of like the new Holy Trinity. Are you familiar with the original Holy Trinity? So like back in like the 2010s, there was the LaFerrari, the McLaren P1 and the Porsche 918 Spyder. And the three supercars, you know, the 918 was $850,000 at launch. The LaFerrari was 1.4 million, the P1 was over a million.

• 2:22:05John Coogan?

  They all had 900 horsepower, some controversial features, you know, 918 was hybrid and so. But owning, owning three of those cars, like it was a really interesting collection because usually people just collect like in one brand. But people started collecting across them and kind of all three of those brands like, it was like a rising tide situation. But we're on the cusp of a new one because McLaren, I think like a month ago, announced the W1. But they've announced like a bunch of other special cars in between. So like the Senna and some other ones. And then Ferrari launched the F80 and they're back on like the numbered track. It was like a 40, a 50, Enzo, LaFerrari, which would have been the 60 and 70, 70th anniversary. And now they're back on the F80. It's a $4 million car.

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  V6, hybrid.

• 2:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  Controversial, but beautiful. And then there's the Porsche Mission X, which is all electric.

• 2:22:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:22:58John Coogan?

  Which is also super controversial because I think, I think orders have been a little bit weak because a lot of the Porsche fans, they like the, they like the Carrera GT. They like a really manual, really like gauging, naturally aspirated V10 or something like that. But what would you go with between the three if you had to just pick one?

• 2:23:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, to answer Steven's question, you know, nine-figure exit, he, the real.

• 2:23:22Jordi Hays?

  The real, the right answer is buy two of each car. Put one, put three, you know, total into storage. Yeah, keep them in the plastic. Wrapped, drive the other ones daily them, put thirty, forty thousand miles on them, however much you drive. Yeah. But yeah, it's hard to answer that question without more context. I think that um

• 2:23:44Jordi Hays?

  if he's looking at it as, you know, the guy clearly likes making money. If he wanted to buy a car, drive it and basically get paid for owning it. You have to look in the last generation. LaFerrari is an incredible buy in that three to five million dollar range. I think that the F80 coming out only makes LaFerrari more valuable. Yep. I think that uh there's a lot of issues with the Ferrari brand right now, like um if you, you know, they're making some very questionable decisions. To make like the SF90. Which I feel like I can comment on as a, as a, you know, I recently sold my Ferrari, but um as a, you know, a real enthusiast and consumer of the brand. But the interesting decision right now is they made their family SUV.

• 2:24:29Jordi Hays?

  Purusangwe, pure blood. And then they made the F80. The, the, the family car has a naturally aspirated V12. Yep. Uh similar engine to mine. And then the F80 sounds like you're, when, when it's on track, running hard. Yeah. Sounds like my Roomba. Yeah. Like it sounds like a Roomba going on in the other room. Yeah. And so it's just like, I don't know, I don't know if it's European regulatory bodies, because these manufacturers are over there like putting this intense pressure on to be like, nerf your cars, nerf your cars, like make them quieter, make them, you know, and they're going to argue like, oh, it actually has more power. Yeah. And so with LaFerrari, or sorry, the F80,

• 2:25:11Jordi Hays?

  it is an award-winning, you know, system, right? They, they went and they won Le Mans with it. It's Le Mans derived. And like, that's awesome. Yeah. But I just think that you're, they're clearly going.

• 2:25:26Jordi Hays?

  All the big Ferrari launches that I've seen recently, like the 12-cylinder you got a ton of hate.

• 2:25:31John Coogan?

  I thought that was a beautiful car.

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 2:25:33John Coogan?

  I think it's beautiful. I don't like the front end shit, but I just think the design language is fantastic and they took a lot of that design language over into the F80. I think it's a little controversial, but I think over time, people are going to warm up on it and it'll be beautiful.

• 2:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  Like the black front end is so weird, but it's interesting and I think it'll, I think it'll work.

• 2:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think a lot of these cars too, when they announce them, they're specced in like a very distinct way. And if you spec them differently, they'll just look dramatically different. Like I didn't like the 12-cylinder, like the way like some of the color blocking was, but if you did it in like a black.

• 2:26:05John Coogan?

  You could do all black.

• 2:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it would probably look like.

• 2:26:07John Coogan?

  I think they won't sell you that actually. Like, or there's something like they won't, they won't sell it without the two-tone. Like they want the two-tone. They want to enforce that in their, in their design language, interestingly. But uh, my, I mean, so Jordy's pick is get six. Get two of each. I think mine would be a wild card go for ignore the holy trinity and get the AMG one.

• 2:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:26:29John Coogan?

  Because the AMG one, look, it's a, it's a what turbo hybrid V6 or whatever, but it's an F1 derived V6. So it's actually a smaller engine. It's 1.6 liter. But at least you can say, you know, it's an F1 car for the road and it's not this like half step.

• 2:26:43Jordi Hays?

  It's probably the most collectible. It, it could easily be the most collectible out of the.

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  I think so. I mean, they, they don't do that many supercars, whereas McLaren, you know, they, every few years they're coming out with a speed tail. That was a really special one. But then it's like the center is also really special.

• 2:26:58Jordi Hays?

  And the Porsche one is gonna, if it follows the Taycan Tero S path, it will be worth half the price in literally a year.

• 2:27:06John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the real flex.

• 2:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Even if you don't drive it.

• 2:27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you can just buy a new Taycan every year, take 80K in depreciation, everyone will know, wow, you're really rich.

• 2:27:14Jordi Hays?

  That's part of, that's part of Porsche's like effectively like scam operation is that they, they're like, oh, you want to buy the GT3 RS? Like buy three Taycans.

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  Taycans, yeah, exactly.

• 2:27:24Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, yeah, it's like you can pay a hundred dollars over MSRP or you can buy three Taycans.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  I just love the AMG one because it's this, I mean, it's destroying Nürburgring. Records like

• 2:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  I I don't think any of the these new Holy Trinity will come close.

• 2:27:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:41John Coogan?

  I think the mission acts will wind up being too too heavy.

• 2:27:43Jordi Hays?

  I would respect Ferrari a lot more if it was actually like the fastest car.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  If it's that some sort of record.

• 2:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if it's that some sort of record.

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  They need to do something. Um, there was a I there's a new car. The isn't the new C eight Corvette, the the ZR one setting like a a speed record. They went like two thirty something with it, or is the fastest American made car? And and the sick thing is in the video of them uh doing the speed test, the guy driving it is like the CEO of the company or like the.

• 2:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no, I think you're talking about the Ford. The are you talking about the new Ford G like GT?

• 2:28:18John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. This is the this is the this is the Corvette ZR one.

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

  I think we're gonna see an American

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Car renaissance.

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  I hope so.

• 2:28:26Jordi Hays?

  Because because it seems like the American CEOs are locked in driving their actual cars.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, kind of. The Ford CEO was caught driving like a Chinese car. Did you see this? And he's like, this is the most amazing thing.

• 2:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh, maybe. I saw the the like PR response to that of like him getting out of the new Ford.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Mustang GT car that looks like it's gonna be pretty cool.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  All these guys just need to start tweeting and going direct.

• 2:28:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm concerned.

• 2:28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, the beauty of the AMG one is that like you can just tell people, yeah, I just drive a Mercedes. And they'll be like, oh, you probably have like a Metris or a G Wagon.

• 2:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  And little do they know, you're driving like a limited production multimillion dollar car.

• 2:28:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, you get a daily it, obviously.

• 2:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:02John Coogan?

  With the it has active DRS, so you can like change.

• 2:29:04Jordi Hays?

  That's the thing to respect most about Sam Altman is that he dailies hypercars.

• 2:29:09John Coogan?

  Full sends.

• 2:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Hypercars.

• 2:29:10John Coogan?

  That's the most important reason to get him equity in OpenAI, because we're gonna see a renaissance in San Francisco and the new car guy.

• 2:29:16Jordi Hays?

  More hypercars.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  More hypercars, street parked.

• 2:29:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:18John Coogan?

  This is the way.

• 2:29:19Jordi Hays?

  The techno elite.

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next time.