Jeffrey Katzenberg & Kimbal Musk, Dow Jumps as Powell Signals Rate Cut, Crusoe in Talks for $10B Valuation, Inside America's Most Expensive Home | Joe Weisenthal, Jessica Livingston, Zachary Bookman

(00:58) - Dow Jumps as Powell Signals Rate Cut (05:46) - Crusoe in Talks for $10B Valuation (15:24) - Inside America's Most Expensive Home (35:46) - Timeline (01:13:47) - Joe Weisenthal, a financial journalist and co-host of Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast, discusses the Federal Reserve's recent policy signals, noting that Chair Jerome Powell's comments suggest a dovish stance, which has positively impacted markets and cryptocurrencies. He highlights the debate over recent labor market data revisions, suggesting that while some view them as signs of economic slowdown, others believe they reflect temporary uncertainties, with potential for acceleration as businesses gain clarity. Weisenthal also touches on the limited role of AI in current economic discussions, indicating that while it's a theoretical concern for central bankers, it hasn't yet significantly influenced policy decisions. (01:31:20) - Jeffrey Katzenberg, a renowned entertainment executive and co-founder of DreamWorks, discusses his investment in Nova Sky Stories, a drone entertainment company co-founded by Kimbal Musk. He likens Nova's innovative use of thousands of proprietary drones to create sky-based visuals to the early days of Pixar, emphasizing its potential to revolutionize storytelling. Katzenberg expresses excitement about collaborating with Musk to develop immersive "Sky Story" experiences, aiming to establish a new era of family-friendly entertainment. (01:56:54) - Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator, discusses her observations on the evolving startup ecosystem in San Francisco, noting a significant revitalization and optimism compared to previous years. She reflects on the importance of founders being deeply committed to their ventures, emphasizing that genuine interest and dedication are crucial for navigating the challenges of building a successful startup. Livingston also highlights the value of maintaining a focused and disciplined approach during the early stages of a company, suggesting that minimizing distractions can enhance productivity and increase the likelihood of achieving product-market fit. (02:31:52) - Zachary Bookman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenGov, a company that provides cloud software solutions to local governments and state agencies. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges of modernizing government operations, emphasizing the importance of transparency and efficiency in public administration. He also highlights the need for mission-driven approaches to improve government performance and accountability. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPS. Today is Friday, August 22nd, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  And we are in white suits.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  The fortress of finance, the capital of capital, because the fortress of finance, the stock market is on fire. Jordy Hayes, ring that gong, kick us off with a huge gong hit for the market right now. The NASDAQ is up one point, actually 2%.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  Dow Jones is up 2%, Bitcoin's up 4%. You'll love to see it.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Ben Carlson on X says the stock market is up on news that the Fed chair thinks the labor market is slowing down.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  Yes. So if you want to save time and money, go to ramp.com, easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  In one single place.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Yes, very weird narrative going on. My, to actually break down what's happening, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, gave a speech at a conference in Jackson Hole. And so the stock market's ripping today, the Dow's on track for its first record close this year. I would have thought that happened earlier because the NASDAQ was setting so many records. But again, it's because of all the tech, the tech movement that's been really pushing the NASDAQ higher. The Dow's been a little bit lagging, but that's expected. It's industrials index. But the news is not that the Fed is cutting rates. It's not that Powell said the Fed is going to cut rates.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  The news that's moving the market 2% today is he said that there are risks that inflation will continue rising and that the labor market will keep weakening. And if that happens, it could prompt the Fed to support economic growth by reducing rates.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  The narrative earlier this year was that everything computer.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  The narrative now, everything bullish.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  Everything bullish.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Everything bullish. You got news? Bullish.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Bullish. Yes, yes. Everything's a bullish catalyst.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  Good morning, Gold Rock. Good morning, Regov.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  Good morning, everyone. We will have Joe Weisenthal joining us in about an hour.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  He's in Jackson Hole.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  So.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  He was getting paparazzi shots of Mr. Jerome Powell himself.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  So Powell said the word inflation 55 times during his speech. And the market clearly interpreted that as a signal that the Fed is ready to cut rates if cracks begin to show in the economy. And I, we talked about this earlier, just.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Maybe it's not this time is different. There won't be another bubble. There won't be a correction. Just, you know, no two moments in history are exactly the same. What's, what's particularly unique about this particular setup is that, um, yes, the stock market's on fire. There are a lot of top signals all over the place, but given that interest rates are high, that gives the Fed a, you know, like a potential tool in the tool chest. If there is a correction, if we do get over our skis on, on a bubble.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  And this morning, the odds on poly market of a rate cut were sitting at under 80%. It popped dramatically after Powell's comments, up to a 94% chance of a Fed rate cut in 2025.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  This is after some of the bigger investment banks have been saying, no rate cut.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:18Jordi Hays?

  Even recently.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Yep. So, um, let's talk about what was actually going on in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Uh, the, the, the official name of this event is Labor Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy, an economic symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And this was a barn burner. I heard from people on the ground, there were tears, there were gasps, there were people shaking, cheering, standing ovations. It was a huge moment. People get fired up when they hear about macroeconomic policy. Joe Weisenthal is one of them. Uh, let me just read from some of this and just tell me if you get chills. Um, "When I appeared at this podium

• 4:02John Coogan?

  one year ago, the economy was at an inflection point. Our policy rate had stood at five and a quarter to five and a half percent for more than a year. That restrictive policy stance was appropriate to bring down inflation and to foster a sustainable balance between aggregate demand and supply." Mic drop.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  He went there.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  He went there. He went there. "The labor market is a case in point. The July employment report released earlier this month showed that payroll job growth slowed to an average pace of only 35,000 per month over the past three months, down from 168,000 per month during 2024. This slowdown is much larger than assessed just a month ago, as the earlier figures for May and June were revised down substantially." Get ready to rumble.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  Another mic drop.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Yes, another mic drop moment. I got chills. So, um, yesterday, if you were watching closely, we had Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe on the show. He called in from a very nicely appointed log cabin. We asked him where he was. He said he was in Jackson Hole. What do you think, Jordy? Do you think he was at this event? Or do you think he was just doing some extreme mountain biking on a Thursday? Based on how you, how hard you know he works?

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. Hard, hard question.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he does, I, I, like anybody, everybody loves mountain biking.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  Everybody would, would love to spend a Thursday mountain biking.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm guessing, given that they were announcing a major acquisition. I think it's quite possible he was there for something else.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Yes, which is interesting because Crusoe is thought of as a startup and Jackson Hole, this particular event, is typically for central bankers from other countries, academics, econo- uh, economic researchers, financial industry leaders, and a few journalists. Like, it's not really like startup central.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Um, and yet he maybe was there. We don't know. We'll, we'll figure it out.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  The $10 billion startup?

• 5:51John Coogan?

  Well, that's what Bloomberg reported yesterday. Crusoe's allegedly out raising at a $10 billion valuation. We will wait until they announce the, uh, round.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  We would never scoop.

• 6:01John Coogan?

  We would never preemptively ring a gong for someone.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's bad luck.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, it's, it is bad luck to, to.

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  Let them get it done.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  To hit the gong on a scoop, on a scoop. Exactly.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  But I had two takeaways from talking to Chase yesterday. Uh, the first is that I genuinely do not understand, uh, data center technology at nearly the level I would like to. Um, I, I, I know the chips are important. Chips gotta be big, fast, cheap. The energy is important.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  The racks.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  The water's important. The racks are important. I understand the memory's important. I know S K Hynix is involved in the memory. And then, once you have the memory.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  I used to think that, that it was important to have a structure.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  But then Zuck put everything in a tent.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Upended that. Everything's changing. Everything's changing. And Dylan Patel is the only reliable guide in the space. Um, but, uh, and I understand that, like, optimizing KV caches is important. KV cache, key value store, where like all, everything goes in the memory and then the model needs to access the memory. And that's what the acquisition was about. How can you access different models faster on chips?

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was funny that I asked, I asked Joe.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Do you think this has any, is this at all like high-frequency trading?

• 7:08John Coogan?

  Oh, you mean Chase?

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  So, so, sorry, not Joe.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Not Joe, Joe Wasenfield. He's coming on the show at 12:15, by the way.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  Just very excited to talk to Joe.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  In an hour.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  But you, but you asked Chase.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  No, but I asked Chase, do you think this is going in the direction of?

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Like, is there any way that running a NeoCloud would benefit from having a CEO with some experience in high-frequency trading potentially?

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  Is there any overlap in skill sets? And he's like, well, I did spend a decade in high-frequency trading.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Jordy, did we?

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  And if you think about it, I mean.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  It sounded like he had fed you that question.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I totally, it was actually.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I, I actually didn't know that.

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  I was just wildly unprepared, clearly.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Yes, shallowly researched interviews. That's what you come to us for.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  But.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  You can get deeply researched interviews elsewhere.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  There is someone whose whole thing is deeply researched interviews, and we're a big fan of his. It's Dwarsh Patel, of course. Go subscribe. Anyway, I want to learn more about that stuff. I think it's going to be important. And the other lens is from just more of a business context. There is a, there's one.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  It's not just important, it's, it's, it's the backbone of GDP growth.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  I think so. And I think it's, it's, I don't know, it's, it, it's just, people have been debating, will the AI boom accrue to the foundation model layer? Or the, or the application layer? And in fact, there is a third layer that is very important for startups and venture capitalists to participate in. And that's the NeoCloud layer, the data center build-out layer, the infrastructure layer below the foundation model layer.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  And, and so there's one lens where you could have a take that's kind of like, okay, well, NeoClouds are hyper-competitive. There's three hyperscalers. You have GCP, you have Azure, you have, you have AWS. Those, Andy Jassy doesn't want to lose. He's going to eat you alive. He has, and all three of those businesses have insane cash flow to underwrite insane CapEx. Like, how are you going to compete? And then, and then even if you can compete, is it not winner-take-all where maybe Crusoe runs away with it? Or CoreWeave runs away with it? Or someone else runs away with it? Like, like, yes, there, it, like any startup category.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  Or mom-and-pop data center.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  True, true. It could be a wild card, right?

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  A little 15 mil.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Who knows? Blue, Blue Owl's next client could be the, somebody you've never heard of.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Uh, and shock the industry. But I think this is a different story because it's a very positive-sum market.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  And like hyperscalers are already spending tens of billions of dollars on CapEx. The NeoClouds are also valued in the tens of billions of dollars. It's a lot of money, but AI clearly and just token generation is a new technology. It seems extremely additive to productivity, entertainment, the economy broadly. Like it's going to take time for these things to diffuse and show up in the economic statistics. But clearly something valuable is happening and everyone who's interacted with an LLM, at least at some level, understands that there is some benefit. And when you multiply that out to billions of people, you create a big boom, you create a big industry. And so just as an American, NeoCloud's pumped me up. I'm excited. We're doing the re-industrialized meme.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  There's a new thing to build and we're actually building it here in America.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  We're, are we the best in the world at this?

• 10:14John Coogan?

  Yes, we have the biggest data centers for sure. And we continue to, and then we have.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  People, people like to say, we don't know how to build beautiful things anymore.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Go visit the Titan cluster.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go visit Abilene.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  With a straight face, tell me that doesn't bring a tear to your eye.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And so like, it's not just that we're building things in America. It's that we're building really big things, really ambitious things. It's like billion dollar projects are, are happening and they, and because it's, because it's complicated stuff, like the KV cache and like, what actually makes a NeoCloud win? What actually gets you to score higher on Dylan Patel and semi-analysis ClusterMax? Is this odd combination of reliability, uptime, cost, all these different things that should be table stakes, but aren't because we're in this new era of a different style of computing, a different, a different architecture. And so the NeoCloud market broadly is kind of at a turning point.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Dylan Patel just went on the NoPriors podcast with, and dug into kind of this turning point. He said of the NeoCloud, there, there's kind of four potential next paths. One, you can move up the stack and so you have a data center. You can now offer inference APIs. So you want to not run Llama yourself or not run DeepSeek yourself. You just want the tokens. You just want to have an API that's affordable and reliable. Together and Nebius are already playing in this market. CoreWeave is rumored to be acquiring Fireworks for this exact reason. So CoreWeave has data centers. They're going to offer APIs.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  So an API is a service, not just the infrastructure of the service. Then the, the second path for NeoClouds is go massive. This is what Crusoe is doing. They're trying to build a gigawatts, at gigawatt scale. No one's doing this. Yeah. And so that creates differentiation where someone who's really focused on serving a reliable API that's, you know, easy to integrate and scalable, that they're not going to be as focused on all the different challenges it takes to build a gigawatt scale data center. And so if you want to build one.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, you have legacy players like Oracle that are just going for that same massive scale. But for a very small number of customers.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. And they might not be, and they might not be the obvious choice for a hyperscaler who wants to build a new. So Crusoe can sit and talk to all of the different hyperscalers and say, hey, we're one of the only, we're the only game in town or one of the few games in town if you want to build a gigawatt data center. Oracle might show up, but people would be, but you have OCI. You're maybe competitive with me. I don't know. So the third one is settle for commercial real estate returns. This is interesting to VCs because VCs are under, underwriting at, you know, 10, 15% IRR these deals. They want venture scale returns out of these deals. But some of the businesses that pop up in that mom and pop data center, you're, you're,

• 13:16John Coogan?

  you're by default going to get real estate level returns, which can be great if you're set up for that. But if you go into a real estate deal with venture expectations, you'll get burned.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and I don't think that real estate economics are guaranteed because anybody in real estate knows that just because you have a plot of land with a billing on it does not mean you're going to generate, you know, returns that even. Beat the, you know, T.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  No, no, you definitely have to like work, work hard to actually make that.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  One other, one other.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  The fourth, the fourth, the fourth direction that the NeoClouds can go, and this is the one that we wouldn't recommend. It's go bankrupt. Because there's many desperate NeoCloud slash prices unsustainably to fill GPUs, but this only delays failure. So, yeah, if you're a NeoCloud, we recommend not go bankrupt.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Just don't do that. Don't do that. There was some news yesterday.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Meta signed a $10 billion cloud deal with Google.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  Reuters reported this. It's a six-year deal with Meta Platforms worth more than $10 billion.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  Under the agreement, Meta will use GCP's server, storage, networking and other services. Said the source. And this is just interesting because like, you know, these, these are the, the two gorillas of the digital advertising market. Right?

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  And they're, they're normally like competing for spend, right?

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, wasn't Bucko Capital bloke was super bullish on Google for this happening? I think he was saying like, well, you were studying something. I studied the Goog. I studied the Goog. I think he's a big Google bull right now.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  Massive. He says, I mean, Google's at all time highs.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  And he's taken a little bit of a victory lap.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Sundar Pichai on an absolute roll.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  I mean, his, his entire thesis is like, nothing ever.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Nothing ever happens?

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  Nothing ever happens.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Love that. Well, Google, if you're listening, your next livestream for Google I/O, get it on Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign up for free.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Anyway, someone from the Wall Street Journal took to the pages of the mansion section to tour America's most expensive home. Inside America's most expensive home, the Wall Street Journal paid a vision, a visit to the Aspen estate of billionaires Linda and Stuart Resnick. This is really, really the, I mean, I don't want to say it's the current thing in tech, but it's certainly like the most.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  Top of mind.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  It, it's being hotly discussed. So it's for sale for $300 million. Let's hear it. That was not the sound effect I was expecting. It's 74 acres. It has a private lake, multiple houses, and a spa. I will read from this, and the team can pull up some beautiful images of this estate. It was a hot August morning when I visited the mansion, but in the great room-

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Mansion doesn't feel like quite sufficient for-

• 16:08John Coogan?

  They need a new word. Like, we said estate, they said mansion, but I feel like giga mansion or super mansion. You know, we have super intelligence, we have super cars, we have hyper cars. Maybe we need super estates and hyper estates.

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

  Hyper estate.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Hyper estate might be the move.

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  I think we're coining this now.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  New coinage. New coinage.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Well, let's hold off on our judgment till the end of this to really see if it fits the category. But I'm thinking, I think that this has, is a strong contender to be called a hyper estate. A vast entertaining space with 30-foot-high ceilings. There were roaring blazes and the towering stone fireplaces at either end. Two fireplaces, love that. The billionaire owners of the roughly 18,500-square-foot house, Linda and Stuart Resnick, weren't in town. But Linda had carefully choreographed my visit, giving instructions as to how I should be led through the house with, for the most dramatic effect.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  You love that. You gotta be really optimizing for the tour. If you have a hyper estate or a super estate, people are gonna want tours.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  QSBs, QSBs rollover in the chat says, "Large language mansion, ultra compound."

• 17:19John Coogan?

  Ultra compound is good.

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  Brandon?

• 17:21John Coogan?

  Chateau is also good. Chateau's a good-

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Hyper chateau.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Do you know, do you know Linda and Stuart Resnick? I would love some, I would love some background. I'm sure there's gonna be a little bit of background in here, but I bet you can go a little bit deeper, give me some extra background there.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Do you wanna break it down now?

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Couple of goats.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Okay, you do some research. I'm gonna read one more paragraph, and then I want, and then I want your analysis. "We crossed the great room and walked through French doors onto a heated patio overlooking the 74-acre property. From there, the epic vista of the continental divide stretched out in front of me. I could see the outlines of distant paragliders swooping over Aspen Mountain. An infinity pool appeared to empty into the estate's private lake, where a swan-shaped paddleboat sat by a small dock. When the Resnicks saw this parcel of land in the early 1990s, it felt transcendent." You were looking at God, Linda had told me by Zoom from her primary home, a lavish

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Boart mansion in Beverly Hills. You thought, am I really allowed to have this? Three decades later, the Resnick's are looking to sell their Aspen home for $300 million, making it the priciest in the nation. If it fetches its asking price, it would be the most expensive home ever sold in the United States, known as Little Lake Lodge.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  So, John, this is Linda and Stuart Resnick.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  They are looking fantastic here.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  They are stunning.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  This hair.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Serving, even.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Serving hair, Linda's serving hair.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  But you don't see this cut very much anymore.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  But I can see it coming back. You know, this feels like it was built for, you know, the algorithmic feed, right? It's only a matter of time until

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Gen Z realizes, if I can get my hair

• 19:09John Coogan?

  This is kind of the

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Bigger.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  The evolution of the Zoom perm.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you could wear, you know, mischief boots.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:16Jordi Hays?

  And have your little boo-boo and have this hair.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  And then just drop

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  And you'd get it somewhere.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  On God for real for real, of course. Known as Little Lake Lodge, the estate comes with several houses for guests and staff in addition to the main residence. The Resnick's, who spend summers and holidays in Aspen, declined to say how much it costs to buy the land or build the estate. Much of Little Lake Lodge's value comes from its location about a mile from downtown Aspen, one of the country's priciest real estate markets, said the listing agent. Having such a vast acreage near the center of town is unheard of, she said, calling the property a unicorn. With an estimated net worth of around $14 billion, the Resnick's are the founders of Turn to Page Six.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  The Wonderful Company.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Turn to Page Six, The Wonderful Company. Oh, no way, okay.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  So, if you've ever had palm

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Pomegranate juice.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Wonderful pomegranate juice, Fiji water.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  Wonderful pistachios and almonds. If you've ever had

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Halos, man.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  If you've ever had a fantastic glass of Justin red wine.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  No way.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  Those bottles.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Owns Justin?

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  I think that's very Trader Joe's coded.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Okay, sure, sure. I'm more familiar with the Josh because people do that.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  Like tonight we let the Josh talk.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  I'll take your finest bottle of Josh.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Josh or Justin.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but anyway, so they have a bunch of, uh, agricultural, uh, businesses and.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  Brands.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  Uh, Stuart is eighty eight, Linda's eighty two. They've been married over fifty years and they share five children from previous relationships. So they both, I guess, were married, had kids, divorced by thirty two and thirty eight, and then boom, boom, boom, fifty year run.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Building this massive compound. Little Lake Lodge is Linda's baby, a force of nature with a meticulously styled brunette. Bob, the Bob got a shout out in the journal.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  Linda ran her own marketing agency before going into business with her husband. The Resnick started coming to Aspen because she developed an interest in fly fishing in the late eighties. Interesting. After a visit to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home of the actor Harrison Ford and home of where chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell gives updates on inflation and interest rates. Uh, that's why you want a place in Jackson Hole. So you get easy access to Jerome.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  As we pulled up to Harrison's home, he ran out of his front door screaming like a lunatic. They are rising, she recalled in a book about Little Lake Lodge she commissioned. To her surprise, her friend Skip Brittenham quickly dropped his pants as he rushed to get ready for fishing with Ford. I thought if grown men can get so excited about fishing that they drop their drawers and stand in freezing water to cast their lines, maybe there's something to this. I love that. The Resnick started visiting Aspen in the summers so Linda could try fly fishing herself. They liked Aspen, which Linda described as a camp for grown up, rich people. In the early nineteen nineties, they bought the land that became Little Lake Lodge. To build a house on the property, the Resnick tapped architect Peter

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Dominic, who designs, uh, include the Grand Californian Hotel and Spa Disneyland. That's amazing. And if you look at the pictures of this, there are some incredible touches. It has very log cabin vibes to it and yet extremely utilitarian and feels very like luxurious inside. For inspiration, Linda looked at books on the rustic architecture created for the National Park Service in the 1920s, 1930s. The exterior facade would include materials indigenous to the land, Linda said, adding that she wanted the house to fade into the environment. The completed home is gray sandstone with a dark green slate roof. Blink,

• 22:58John Coogan?

  she said, and it disappears. Linda revealed in the building process, she said, but Stuart reveled in the building process, but Stuart didn't enjoy it. He didn't understand why the construction crew wouldn't would take off for the ski slopes on powdery snow days, for example. She eventually banned him from our site.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  What? What's there to not understand?

• 23:20John Coogan?

  He was like, they need to be grinding. They need to be locked in. They can't be skiing even though it's unacceptable. Yeah, this is why we don't we don't

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  headquarter TBPN in Aspen because all the production boys would be hitting the slopes.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  They have, they're able to criticize their crew and the world has also criticized them.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  Get into it a little bit. During the 2011 to 2017 California drought, also called the Great Drought, Resnick's Paramount Farms, which is part of the Wonderful Company, drilled 21 new wells in 2015. If you don't understand how

• 23:54John Coogan?

  I drink your milkshake.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  aquifers work.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  Historically, there was a point in history where if you owned a piece of land, you could drill basically as many wells as you wanted into it and just pull out as much water.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  Then people realized over time that that aquifers sort of span huge, huge, vast tracts of land. And if you're you're basically taking water from your neighbors, right? And so Resnick, who is the wealthiest farmer in the United States, actually bought a majority stake in the Kern Water Bank, which

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Though privately owned, profits from water sales through publicly funded water transportation systems. And so they faced a ton of criticism because they produce nuts, which require a massive amount of water and export those all over the world. And many farmers historically have complained about not being able to access enough water. They also were accused at one point-

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Gotta call Augustus.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep. They also were accused at one point of using water that had been previously used for fracking.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  No way.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  There's a water recycling program in California that allows oil companies to sell fracking wastewater to landowners, including farmers.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  Filter that.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  So if you want fracking, fracking water, food products, you've got options.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  I'm sure they test this stuff.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  All of this is alleged.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  Alleged. The house is packed with trinkets and souvenirs from the couple's life and travels. The bathroom holds a collection of rubber duckies, a logo Linda had made for the house, depicting three of the properties. Ponderosa pines is emblazoned on linens and towels. The primary suite, larger than most New York apartments, was specifically designed around mountain and lake views. It has a private office for Linda, his and hers bathrooms and closets, and an oxygen system to counteract the altitude. We talked about that in one of the first shows we did. This is very popular. If you're living at altitude, the new thing is getting oxygen pumped in to make the house internally feel like it's at sea level, and so you can sleep much better. If you need to sleep better and you're at sea level, get an eight sleep. Get a Pod 5.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  How'd you sleep last night?

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, let's see. I've been consistently fluctuating in the 70 to 80 range. I got an 81 last night, only put up six hours and 56 minutes. But I did get over 90 minutes of deep sleep.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Not bad at all.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  That's great. Linda has thrown plenty of parties at Little Lake Lodge over the years with attendees including Diane Keaton, Barbara Streisand, and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To make hosting easier, the Resnick's have a computer program that lists their collections of linens, dishes, glassware, and silver down to the naff kit. They built their own ERP. They built their own ERP. That's insane.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  You love to see it.

• 27:03Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is why, this is why people watch this show is so they can, they can learn how to better optimize their linens.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  And sometimes you just need to go all the way to an ERP.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  Yes. If you are designing an ERP for your super mansion, get on Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build better products together, great products together. Get started for free at Figma.com.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Anyway, we will close this out. She drove me around the edge of the lake in a golf cart. Wellgoes pointed out marked trails for walks and cross-country skiing. The lake is fully stocked with trout and carp, not Alex carp, but C A R P. You will see him cross-country skiing from time to time in Aspen.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure at some point he's accidentally cross-country skied across their property.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  On a mission.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Potentially. The swan boat was her idea, thinking it would be fun for the grandkids. The property contains several other houses, including a roughly 5,300 square foot home, also constructed in 2014. There's also permits in place for a 19,500 square foot residence on a separate parcel that adds to the property's value, because it is far larger than what can be built in Aspen today. The Resnick's are selling because they recently built a home in Santa Barbara, and maintaining three properties is just too hard.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  Cope. Skill issue.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Skill issue.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  Upgrade your ERP.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Upgrade your ERP.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  What are you doing?

• 28:30John Coogan?

  The ERP needs to be like multi-talent. You need to move to the cloud. If that's on-prem, you need to move that to the cloud.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  It is funny, the reasons that people make up. Like, when you're selling a house, you have to make up a reason for why you're moving, other than, "I just don't want the place anymore."

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  And so it's always something.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  Oh, we should read this post. I didn't put it in the stack, but Kanye West's former mansion has relisted amid dispute. Five months ago, things were looking up for the Malibu, California mansion abandoned by Kanye West.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  This one is.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  You know this story, right?

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  This is such a crazy property.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  It's so crazy. So Kanye West bought a... So he bought a mansion on the beach in Malibu and had someone like completely tear it down and it looked like it was going to maybe be a renovation, but then it just turned into a disaster zone, basically. So developer Andrew Mazzella was in contract to pay $30 million for the concrete structure designed by Star Architect, Star Architect, they call them Star Architects, Tao Tao Ando West, who now goes by Yi, had purchased the house in 2021 for about 57.3 million and gutted it. And Mazzella planned to restore the house

• 29:44John Coogan?

  to its original glory. Instead, Mazzella's deal is off. Seller Bellwood Investments, which bought the hulking property for 21 million in 2024, is claiming Mazzella was massively underqualified and unable to get funding for the transaction. For his part, Mazzella has said a peek under the hood revealed the project would require hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars more than anticipated. I'm not a How is ... of misleading me.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  How, the idea that a, you know, a 20-ish million dollar property would go over budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  I know exactly, yeah.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  Deals extremely, like, basically exactly what you should plan for.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Look at these pictures, like.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  I honestly think that somebody would buy this in its current state and just like keep it.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Keep it crazy?

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like a monument to going insane.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. It's like, it is, and I never understood the rationale. Was it, was it purely?

• 30:42Jordi Hays?

  It feels like, it feels like having this like incredibly, this incredible,

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  you know, brutalist but beautiful home and then just destroying.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  It now feels like it's, it's like buying, you know, going to Sotheby's and buying a piece of art. It's like performance art.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Was it performance art or was it more just like Kanye actually wanted to renovate it and the renovation just went off the rails? Because, I mean, people tear houses down to the studs all the time, get hung up in permitting, and then they just have like a cement slab outside their house for 10 months.

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  Or 10 years.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Speaking from experience here. Like it is hard to do renovations. In mid-August, the house went back on the market for 34.9 million, down from 39 million. Designed more than a decade ago for financier Richard Sacks. The house is roughly 4,000 square feet with four bedrooms. West listed it in 2023 amid a firestorm over his antisemitic comments and erratic behavior. Bellwood bought the property in 2024 and embarked on a roughly 8.5 million dollar restoration project. With fractional ownership model, it raised millions of dollars from investors for the Ando project. Then in March, Bellwood signed a contract to sell to Mazella, a commercial fisherman

• 32:03John Coogan?

  turned developer, who until recently was based in Montana. The Malibu project was to be among his company's priciest residential deals to date, but closing was delayed. Mazella couldn't secure funding. Last month, they made a revised offer of 19.5. Of course, this is post fires, so there were a lot of fires in Malibu. They were

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 32:25John Coogan?

  H was locked down. It was a bad time.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  And Mazella, Mazella had a contract to buy the home for a certain price.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:31Jordi Hays?

  Decided at a later date that he wanted to pay less.

• 32:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  And Belmont is pissed because, and he has a quote here, "Mazella turned out to be nothing more than a quote-unquote cowboy from Montana who was quote-unquote trying to do something in Malibu. Shame on me for not doing diligence."

• 32:52John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 32:53Jordi Hays?

  Happens.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  This is fun. Shark Tank star Robert Herjavec? How do I not know how to pronounce that? I don't watch nearly enough Shark Tank. Herjavec? Hershevak. Hershevak. Yeah. Robert Hershevak is going from one super tall to another on Billionaires Row roughly a year after Hershevak sold his apartment at 157. Am I close? Okay.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  Herschavec.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Herschavec, for a tidy profit, he signed a deal to buy another one about 400 feet away on the same upscale strip. Herschavec is in contract to pay just north of $20 million for a roughly 4,500 square foot four-bedroom apartment at 111 West 57th Street, a new super-tall condominium overlooking Central Park. The apartment has a formal entry gallery with white Makuba stone floors, a great room with 14-foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. For the project's developers, the price falls well below their original expectations. The apartment was once listed for as much as $28.5 million. It was most recently listed at $22.5. "We got a very good deal.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  I am a shark after all, lol," Herschavec wrote in an email.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  I thought he was saying that out loud.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  "I am a shark after all, lol."

• 34:13John Coogan?

  The mansion section, the Wall Street Journal emailed him and he replied, "We got a very good deal. I am a shark after all, lol." I love that. Since starting construction in 2014, 111 West 54th Street has faced a number of challenges, including developer infighting and construction delays. This seems common in today's edition of the mansion section. That initially contributed to sluggish sales and heavy discounting at the roughly 60-unit building. Herschavec previously owned a unit at 157, completed before 111 57th Street. He sold that roughly 6,200-square-foot unit for $38.8 million in 2024, just over the

• 34:56John Coogan?

  asking price and well above the $31.9 he paid for it three years prior. The founder of the eponymous IT security firm, Herschavec, has appeared on Shark Tank, an investment reality show, since 2009. He's based in Los Angeles. He said by email, "But enjoys New York City and particularly likes the finishes at 111 West 57th. He loves the neighborhood and his seven-year-old twins go to Central Park at least three or four times a day when the family is in town." Three or four times a day? That's back and forth constantly. That's crazy. "Anyway, we are very happy to be back in NYC," he said in the email. "The death of NYC is always highly exaggerated."

• 35:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Good take. Anyway, get on Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Jordy, what do you want to get next?

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Dylan Field got an email this morning with the subject line, revised cost. Dylan Field for the most influential visionary leader to watch in 2025. So if you are, if you want to be on the list for the most influential visionary leader to watch in 2025, be sure.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  Contact [email protected], right?

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  I almost commented, I was like, whatever, whatever they're, whatever they're asking, we'll beat them.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  We'll beat them. We can beat them on price.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  We should, actually Tyler, you should make the, the most influential visionary leader to watch in 2026 with Figma Make and then make, put Dylan at the top. This is just one of the benefits of being in the TBPN orbit, is that we'll make a list just for you and we'll put you on it.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  And you don't have to pay anything.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. We, we should also put out an RFP for most influential news show hosts to watch in 2026 and see who wants to bid.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  What can they bring to the table? How much does it cost? And then we can, you know, really evaluate.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  It really should be an auction.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. It should be a proper sales process. It should be whining and dining. You should wine and dine us in order to.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I really think, I think the Forbes, the Forbes list, right? There's people that want to be on the list. There's people that don't want to be on the list. There's people that effectively pay to not be on the list and stay off the list. But the most pure hyper capitalist form of the, of the Forbes list would be it's just 100 spots get released. It's just a, it's just an auction, right? So like you can bid and people can say, ah, do I want to be in the top five? Do I want to be number one?

• 37:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  Am I cool with the top 10? Am I cool? And so it's really like proof of wealth, right?

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Congratulations, you invented Sotheby's.

• 37:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  This is basically like, what art do you have on your walls?

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  We invented Sotheby's from first principles.

• 37:42John Coogan?

  We really did. This is, you know, at a certain point, the most expensive home in America, 300 million, you can easily put a billion dollars of art in that home if you want to flex like that. It's certainly possible.

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 37:55John Coogan?

  But if you're running your organization on GitHub, you need to flex by getting your team on Graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Big news from Trey Stevens.

• 38:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was massive.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  Fly Fisherman, we talked about fly fishing earlier. Trey says, "My 12-year-old son recently got into fingerboards and realized there were a bunch of improvements that he could make to boards, so he bought himself a bunch of wood, tools, sandpaper, etc., and made an incredible deck himself."

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  This is so...

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Anyone out there want to buy a handcrafted board from him?

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  Were you into fingerboards?

• 38:32John Coogan?

  I was a little bit, but never at this level.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  You were never really that big in that world.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  But you were into custom skateboards. Tell me that.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I had a, my first ever company was a skateboard company when I was 12. I figured out that I could manufacture boards in the Midwest for like $17.50.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  A board?

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  And I could, and I could easily sell them for 35 to 40.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Well, so you were kind of like dropshipping, whereas we were looking at a real craftsman.

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  I was not, it was not dropshipping.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  You were, you were kind of reselling someone else's labor. You weren't, you weren't a craftsman.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, okay, I wasn't hand whittling. I wasn't whittling.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  This was a craftsman. And how old were you at the time?

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  I was 12. He looks...

• 39:06John Coogan?

  You were 12?

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  He's 12.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  He's 12. Okay, well, he's still knocking you. Same age.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  I guess 12 is when people hit their skateboard.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  We're looking at, we're looking at a generational craftsman.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  But I think this is really cool. I, you know, this is...

• 39:15John Coogan?

  It's incredible.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  There's so many, there's so many good ideas that when you see them, they're just totally obvious.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  And beautiful, custom, you know, the typical fingerboards, whatever makes them.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  This is such a flex as a dad, too. It's like, nothing says my kids have not been one-shot by AI slop than my kids are handcrafting fingerboards from wood, tools, and sandpaper.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  So congrats.

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic work.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Fantastic news.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Junior Stevens.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Anyway, also fantastic work from the team over at Base Power. Arfa Rock has a rumor that they are raising a $500 million Series C and a $3 billion pre-money with substantial demand up to $1 billion. People want to get in on.

• 40:03Jordi Hays?

  Another billion dollars for Thrive Capital.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Is Thrive early?

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  No, they were, yeah, they were super early.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  They were super early. Well, this is fantastic. Zach Dell has been on the show and.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Not Zach Dell.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Wait, what? Zach Dell is the co-founder of Base Power, but we had other.

• 40:19Jordi Hays?

  No, it's Justin. We had Justin on.

• 40:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had Justin on the show, but Zach is his co-founder.

• 40:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  And we were texting with Zach, but didn't, but wound up going with the co-founder. Anyway, just a few months after the Series B, so congratulations. We will hold off on the gong ringing until it's official, but good luck with the, with the massive Series C fundraiser. It looks.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  Brandon, Brandon Gurrell in the chat says they're called Tech Decks and that is.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  Oh, Tech Decks, that's right.

• 40:53Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we should, we should probably get TBP on Tech Decks.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  We should, we should.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  Or we should just hire.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Tech Decks are like the plastic version. So I also did the same thing.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  You did?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  As Trey Stevens' son.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  I like built them out of wood.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 41:06Jordi Hays?

  Let's, uh, let's give it up. Let's hit the air horn because you managed to bring a shirt to the office. I'd love to see it.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, wow.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  That's really the sign that summer's over.

• 41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  Summer's over. Tyler got a shirt.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Not good. But I, I had like, uh, I had this whole like belt sander. I bought like a bunch of hardware. But yeah, it was a lot of fun.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Did you ever monetize?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  I think I sold them to some friends, but it was never a big business. It was just more for love of the craft. Yeah.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  Love of the craft.

• 41:35Jordi Hays?

  Love of the game.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  Were you, were you 12 as well? Is that the right age?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Probably. I was like 12, 13.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  It seems to be like the, the tech deck age.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I liked the idea. The same thing with, with skateboarding broadly. I liked the idea of being able to do like cool tricks, but like did not have the grind to actually like level up to the point where I could do a kickflip with a tech deck. It seemed like that was, that was grind that I was not willing.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  You were reading books about data centers.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  Semiconductors.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was working in like the precursor to After Effects, Macromedia Flash.

• 42:07John Coogan?

  And uh, and doing like, I don't know, playing Counter-Strike and modding Counter-Strike. I was, I was fully online. I was going digital. I was in the metaverse, for sure.

• 42:15Jordi Hays?

  Going digital.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  For sure. I was building, building computers every once in a while. And, and my, my like, my adolescent hustle was buying DJ equipment and reselling it on eBay. So I'd buy it in America. The American DJ equipment companies didn't have distribution internationally. And so I'd go on eBay, uh, meet buyers internationally and then just do all the hard work to get through the customs and shipping. Cause people would like, I want that thing. I'm a DJ in Australia. I want American DJ equipment from like Denon and Morantz or, uh, or, or you know, whoever else. And, uh, and, and I would do all the work.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy that you could have had a residency in Vegas now if you just had actually learned the craft of your thing. Instead, you know, we're here in UltraDome. But, another life, you can come back.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  I, I did at one point learn how to, how to mix on vinyl. It's incredibly difficult. Uh, it's way easier now. The technology is so much easier.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  You would learn how to not just mix, but mix on vinyl.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, yeah. It's really, really hard. Um, it, it is like a true like skill, but then, uh, once, once like the different tools came out, Serato and Mixmeister and Ableton. I never really got into Ableton, but I.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  It's such an important.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  You got a DJ story?

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, but.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  DJ Flip Flops?

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  Did you put, did you ever put stuff on SoundCloud? Cause I think, um, Jacob Brittamacki has found your SoundCloud.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  I, I just reposted things. I never, I never put.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  Those were never your own.

• 43:38John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. He, he, I think he just said that I have good taste in like what I had retweeted on SoundCloud or something.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Um, but I, I, I've, I'm thinking I'm gonna double down on Flip Flops as the nickname because.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just Flops.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Well, I like it because it's like, I've, like, uh, a NeoCloud, what is Chase Lockmiller doing? He's flipping flops, right? He buys flops for one price. He flips them for the next price. He's like a house flipper, but for flops. So he's Flip Flops. And I think that that, that, uh, the, the, there's layers to the nickname. So I'm hoping it catches on. But if you just wanna go Flops, that's fine too.

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  I like Flops.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Okay. Anyway, anything else from you Flops? What else is in the timeline? What's, what, what's burning up the timeline? What's burning up Flops timeline?

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, all right, you'll come back to me.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  Okay, we'll come back to you. We will tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights. And seconds, ask Julius to analyze your data.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  Your own personal data analyst.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Two million users entrusted by individuals at Princeton.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  Two billion users soon.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Two billion soon.

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna call it.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  This is a funny post by Chrisman, who's been on the show. And it's funny because it's like this, it's a picture of, what is it? It's a painting of a disius tied to the mast during the Odyssey where the sirens are calling to him. And Chrisman just says, all respect to the greatest entrepreneur to ever do it, but someone needs to tie him to the mast and stuff wax in his ears. And the original post was deleted, so I couldn't even tell who it was, but I immediately knew who he was subtweeting. But he was actually quote tweeting him, but then the post was deleted. So the timeline continues to be somewhat just, I wouldn't even call it anti Elon. I would call it like, they're just like.

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  It's like, come on.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  It's almost like an intervention. They're like, please, like, you know, we're asking you nicely. Can you please like, you know, stick to the cool techno pop stuff.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  If a friend is making a joke.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Cyberpunk stuff.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  If a friend's like actively making a mistake, a strategic error.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  And you're delivering it in the form of humor, right? You're delivering the advice through humor.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't always get through.

• 45:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, who knows if it's good, if it's good advice? It's more just like, it's like a nice, it's a nice ask. It's like, you know, I wish, I wish this thing was there. Anyway, there's, there's more news about Elon Musk. This time about the coordination between Meta and XAI on a bid to buy OpenAI, which was kind of rumored earlier. And people weren't sure if it was like this head fake to just like make the nonprofit to for-profit conversion more difficult. There's clearly a crazy battle and rivalry going on between Elon, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Sam, Zuck and Elon have been at odds a long time ago

• 46:23John Coogan?

  because of the Twitter and threads debate and battle there. And then they were about to do that UFC fight or the MMA fight for a while. And then that never happened. And that was hotly debated. And then now Elon has kind of turned his sights on Sam. And maybe Zuck is a little bit more of an ally. The quote here from Nick is, OpenAI says Mr. Musk's interrogatory responses named Mr. Zuck. What? That that has to be like edited. Name Mark Zuckerberg as someone someone he spoke with about potential financing or investments to bid OpenAI for 97 billion, which would be a 80% discount to the current valuation. Is that right?

• 47:07John Coogan?

  And this was like earlier this year or something. That's crazy to think about. Meta didn't join or sign the LOI, says document quests are burdensome and OpenAI should seek communication from Musk XAI first, LMAO, says Nick. And then Matthew Donigan Ryan says, surprise, Elon Musk asked Mark Zuckerberg to join XAI's bid to acquire OpenAI. I wonder how that would have worked or even.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  From an antitrust standpoint?

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  It would have been pretty hard to pull off. Maybe if Meta was purely an investor.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe you say, hey, but you know, there's no monopoly in nonprofit research. I'm going to buy a nonprofit, you know, like, you know, hey, I'm a social network. I sell ads, Senator. I don't have any exposure to nonprofits. So let me pick up a little bit of the nonprofit market.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Let me add that to my portfolio.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  Advancing, I just want to help create intelligence that benefits all of humanity.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:06Jordi Hays?

  That's that's all, Your Honor.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Anyway, ChatGPT is obviously dominant, has been on a run. If you want to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT, you got to go to profound, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. So this Wall Street Journal article, Elon Musk wanted Mark Zuckerberg to join OpenAI bid. Court filing says a consortium of investors led by Musk offered to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. So they were trying to buy the nonprofit in February as part of the billionaires' continuing legal battle with the company he co-founded alongside Sam Altman. And that's the most interesting story. That's that's that's why we're getting a movie here. It's not just this, you know, this viral product that everyone's using all the time. It's the fact that what, seven different co-founders have started foundation model companies?

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And OpenAI at the at the latest tender offer is now the most, if it if it actually happens, if it is happening, it would be the most valuable privately held company surpassing SpaceX.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  That is crazy. Yeah. So it's probably just rivalry on market cap, but also rivalry over control of an important technology going forward. In a response included in the filing, Meta said there was no evidence representatives from the company had coordinated with Musk on the OpenAI bid. Meta and OpenAI declined to comment on the filing. Musk didn't respond. Any partnership between Musk and Zuckerberg would have marked a rare coming together of two powerful tech billionaires who have clashed publicly in the past and who are both heavily invested in the race to build the next generation of AI models.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  Heavily invested in building your next best friend, whether that's Ani, Valentine, Russian girl, stepmom.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  Did you know, basically every single Mag7 CEO controls a social network. I'll run through them. Mark Zuckerberg obviously controls Facebook and Instagram, and I would call WhatsApp a social network as well. Sundar Pichai at Google controls YouTube. I would count that as a social network.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  Satya.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  Satya, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, baby.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  GitHub.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  GitHub is somewhat of a social network.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, for people like.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Tim Cook, I would call iMessage basically a social network. People, the group chat functionality operates a lot like that.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  Especially when you add Genmoji in the mix.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  Andy Jassy at Amazon owns Twitch.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  And I've been, I've been begging for this. Andy Jassy, look at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing in terms of comps. He's going direct. He's posting on Instagram. I want you on Twitch. I want you in the chat. Chat, should we make more trainium? Or are we getting GB200s? Thank you for the 200. No, I can't comment on the, on the next James Bond casting. Hold on, I think I'm getting swatted. That's what I hear, want to hear from Andy Jassy. Get on Twitch. I think it would be an absolutely banger moment on the internet. If he just dropped a Twitch stream where he was just explaining how AWS is, he got post earnings Twitch stream from Andy Jassy would go incredibly hard.

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  We haven't even, have we properly set up our Twitch account?

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Yes, we are streaming on Twitch right now. We have done not, we haven't done enough to actually grow it. And I don't know that our audience is necessarily on Twitch at all. But Twitch does have a fantastic live stream experience. And, and, and people who grow audiences on Twitch are really great. But I was talking to someone who was sort of big in the creator economy, and he was saying that it is, it is impossible to cold start Twitch. You have to be big before. You have to be big on YouTube, and then make a bunch of announcements. I'm on Twitch now. Drive a whole bunch of people there and be in the top rankings on day one. And then also, the default-

• 51:46Jordi Hays?

  We're big over there. We have one person watching on Twitch.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  Let's go, welcome!

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna say, reports show one.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  Somebody named Cornstalk is-

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Cornstalk!

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Shout out Cornstalk!

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  Bobby Cosmic says I'm on Twitch. Let's go Bobby!

• 52:02John Coogan?

  Bobby Cosmic is on Twitch?

• 52:03Jordi Hays?

  There we go!

• 52:04John Coogan?

  We got a little army brewing over there on Twitch. Welcome to the team, let's go!

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  Twitch chat is underrated.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Twitch chat is deeply underrated. People will wind up over there. But we're happy to restream. We're happy to be everywhere.

• 52:15Jordi Hays?

  Cornstalk, Bobby, thank you guys for holding it down.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Thank you for holding it down over there.

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  We didn't even know we were streaming on Twitch.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  Safe space over there. I think we're also streaming on LinkedIn technically. Again-

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  The LinkedIn, we gotta-

• 52:25John Coogan?

  We gotta step it up.

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  The Twitch stream is popping off now.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  Let's go! I love it. Thank you, guys. This is awesome. Anyway, who, who else? Elon Musk. He's in the Mag7 CEOs for Tesla. Tesla doesn't have a social network, but he owns X, right? And so you have six CEOs-

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  Twitch, the fidelity on this, the-

• 52:47John Coogan?

  The video?

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  Livestream on Twitch legitimately looks better than every other platform.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  Really? Okay. Andy Jassy, he's been cooking. He's the cloud cowboy. He knows his infrastructure. Maybe he's gonna pull us over there.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  Andy Jassy, get in the Twitch chat right now!

• 53:01John Coogan?

  If Andy Jassy comes on the show next week, we will exclusively stream on Twitch for- Two minutes. I don't want to overcommit, but we would love to have you, Andy. We're big fans. But I don't know if it's actually a good business to go over there.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  I would be honored to hit the gong for...

• 53:15John Coogan?

  But I will do, I will commit to doing a special, one-time exclusive stream on Twitch if Andy Jassy comes on the show. I'll give him that. I don't know exactly what we'll want to trade. But anyway, my point was, six out of the seven Mag7 CEOs own social networks. You know who doesn't? Tyler, who doesn't own a social network? Mag7 CEO?

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Jensen.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  Jensen does not own, uh, Jensen does not own a social network.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  What? TikTok.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  But imagine, that's where I was going.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  That would be the juggler, the juggler.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  The juggler. If he bought TikTok.

• 53:43Jordi Hays?

  This is how you continue to...

• 53:45John Coogan?

  He can run it. He can run it on the new cloud.

• 53:47Jordi Hays?

  He can continue to balance both US and Chinese national interests perfectly.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  Nope. Can you imagine?

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully he doesn't drop a ball.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  There's zero competitive, there's zero competitive antitrust problems. He could build out the infrastructure to actually run TikTok profitably. He has the chips to do all the inference, can do AI video generating shit like...

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  He can get you, he's the guy to get you more addicted to TikTok. If you're addicted to TikTok and you want to, you want to be putting up more hours.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  I don't know why this didn't come to us earlier. It seems so obvious in hindsight. Uh, he should definitely buy TikTok. But if he doesn't, let's say he, let's say he wants to grow his own. I think DJX Lepton, the network, would be amazing. Just a pure social network, just for fans of semi, of semiconductors.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  I could also see...

• 54:30John Coogan?

  Where you could go and talk about Backside Power. Go talk about HBM.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  Allison, he's gunning to be in the Mag8.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  He's on, he's, the rise is...

• 54:39John Coogan?

  Oracle's the obvious.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  And he was rumored to be, uh, one of the bidders on, on, uh, TikTok, uh, acquisition.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  He knows that if he wants to be in the Mag8.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  That's the way to do it. You gotta own a social network. You gotta go direct.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  I could also see Jensen adding in messaging to Cuda. I think that would be interesting. So between, you know, AI, AI Labs, maybe you send a little...

• 55:01Jordi Hays?

  Bloomberg for AI researchers.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, that would be good. Yes. More lock-in for the Cuda network.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I want it right on the bare metal. I want super low-level messaging.

• 55:09John Coogan?

  For sure, low-level. Yeah, you have to write a new, uh, you have to, you have to write in Cuda to call, just like send a post.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, write some kernels in there. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  It acts as a gating, it's kind of exclusivity. Like how when Facebook launched, it was only for, oh, Harvard students. This would only be for AI researchers. And then all of a sudden, everyone's like, I gotta get on DJX Lepton, the network, the DJX Lepton network, the Cuda. We need a better name for the Cuda social network. Uh, something like that. Cootabuck. Maybe that. Cootogram. Get on Cootogram.

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  Cootafeed.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Cootafeed. Uh, anyway, if you're building a social network, you gotta get on Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products that meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  If you're building digital products, I'm literally begging you to get on Linear. If you're not already, I'm begging you.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Begging you.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  Please, support. Do the right thing for your users. Get on Linear.

• 56:05John Coogan?

  Cracker Barrel rebrand. Have you ever been to a Cracker Barrel?

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  No, never heard of it.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  Have you been to a Cracker Barrel, Tyler?

• 56:11Speaker 02

  Uh, I have not.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  I don't think I've ever been to a Cracker Barrel.

• 56:14Jordi Hays?

  Wait, this is crazy. I met one of the, um, one of, uh, I think it, I think it's been, I, I think it's still privately held. Um, let me check this out.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Do they have them on the West Coast? Or is it just like a?

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  No, it's publicly traded now, but I know, I know one of the descendants of the original owners.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Yes, shout out Substack. We love streaming on Substack. Go subscribe to our Substack. We are sending out the show notes every morning before the show goes live in email form.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, anyways, I met, I met one of the, uh, second or third generation, uh, that like basically, uh, uh, the grandson, I think, of the original owner, um, Total Chad. Uh, but yeah, never, never been to one. He told me about it and it's, I think it's a big, Cracker Barrel is a pretty big deal. I'd never, never been there, but, uh...

• 57:05John Coogan?

  Scott in the chat says Cracker Barrel is not all it's hyped up to be.

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  Uh, is Cracker Barrel cracked? Or are they mid? Let's figure it out. Well, they just rebranded. Cracker Barrel has rebranded for the first time in 1977. Jordy, you're a brand guy. You know, design. What do you think? What do you think? Uh, do you think this is an improvement over their existing, uh, over their existing?

• 57:32John Coogan?

  Brand, the previous Cracker Barrel logo said, "Old Country Store", had a gentleman in a chair leaned up against a literal barrel. And then they also changed their, I think that the logo is somewhat of an evolution. It doesn't strike me as a revolution. I feel like the backlash to the Cracker Barrel rebrand is more about the remodel. Because if you look at the pictures of the Cracker Barrel remodel, Yimby Land says, "It's one of the most upsetting things I've seen in a long time. Literally, everyone I know is in shock." Cracker Barrel has gone from very old timey chairs that you can pull out, wooden desks,

• 58:16John Coogan?

  lots of trinkets, and there's a paddle on the wall from an oar from a boat. It looks just like a normal store that you would walk into. It looks like a mom and pop shop, even though it's a large institution at this point. And now it looks like it's McDonald's. It looks like it's something that has been designed by a corporation to be copied and pasted all over America. And I'm sure that's probably better for the bottom line.

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  I want to see, we want to, we want to show off.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Pull this up, this photo.

• 58:44Jordi Hays?

  Before and after.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  The before and after. We're not, yeah.

• 58:47Jordi Hays?

  They tried to glow up, but they glow down.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Mark in the chat says, "Cracker Barrel is cracked, but this rebrand is bad." I wonder how much money they're actually saving with this type of rebrand? Or if they just genuinely think this is what will get them to the next level. This will be a growth factor for them and they just.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  We have a really unique approach to interior design in our restaurants. What if we made it mid? And what if we made it look like everything else? What if we made it look like some random? Like this, this to me screams like touristy, like seafood shop in a, in a.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  It's just like, what is the most hyper competitive market right now in all of restaurants? It's fast casual.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  None of the fast casual restaurants are differentiating on design or layout.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  Who can yell oink, oink, piggy? Come get your slot bowl.

• 59:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  Cracker Barrel is not fast casual, though.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  No, no, it's not. But what they did was they said, hey, there's this thing that's hyper competitive. We're already differentiated. We could literally do nothing and win, or we could try and remodel to look like a Chipotle and a Kava and a Sweet Green and look like, you know, bland, modern, fast casual place. And then we will be anonymous with everyone else. And all of a sudden, we're like, you know, losing everything that makes us special. I don't know. Um, I, we'll, we'll see, we'll see if this turns into a boycott, if this actually hurts the, uh, the adoption. People might just be interested in Cracker Barrel, they'll just walk in anyway, they don't care. Uh, a lot of these rebrands, they get hated at the beginning and then they just become Lindy over time. I believe that happened to Pepsi.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  If you look at the, the new Pepsi logo, maybe they had to walk that one back. But there's been a number of, uh, there's been a number of rebrands that have been really poorly received and then.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, what Cracker Barrel is doing is the same thing that the luxury houses did.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Look at, if you look at all, whether it's Louis Vuitton or.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  They all went to what San Serif Bold Blocky Fonts.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Bottega and Nata.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Yes, Bottega. They really lost their.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  They omitted themselves.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  They omitted themselves. What's crazy is like, I understand the first person doing that because i- if you're the first person to do minimalism in your category, you're going to stand out. But when you're the seventh and, and the brand designer pulls up the deck and you're like, wait, so you're going to make us look exactly like all of our competitors? Like, why would we want that? And you say, yes, that feels crazy to me and that's what this feels like. This feels.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Pull this picture up in the chat. This is the, all the.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. YSL, Balenciaga, Burberry, Berluti and Balmain?

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Balmain. They'll all switch back eventually.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think they'll, I think they might have to, but I wonder.

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  It's funny that they did this right as Gen Z, the new generation says, no, we want. Maximalist brands, right? So they'll all end up, they'll all end up going back eventually.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  Well, if you're selling something, one of these luxury goods, you gotta get on Numeral, Sales Tax and Autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 1:01:50Jordi Hays?

  You already know, Sales Tax AGI. There's a post here from Vittorio.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  This is a video.

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  If we can pull this video up. Can we pull this video up? This is one of the hardest things. This is one of the hardest things to do.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  It's because it's deeper in the timeline. We gotta dig it up. I can copy it and put it down there. Copy message.

• 1:02:11Jordi Hays?

  I'll read the next post from Rune for now. He says, "Companies like Facebook record every imaginable interaction their users have with the platform. They log each of your clicks and taps. They keep track of how long your gaze lingered on a post. Whether you were on the same wifi as that woman who might be your friend, which Instagram reel you watched three times. For a single user, this is quaint, but these practices are done on a planetary scale across all technology giants. They create petabytes of data per day and keep it for as long as the European regulators will let them. Then they can have machine intelligence instrument it to useful knowledge for their cybernetic control systems that build news feeds, serve ads, decide how much compute to spend on you, which SKUs should be in which warehouses right before you want them.

• 1:02:57Jordi Hays?

  That hive meta-store bills run into the billions. Hospitals throw most of their data and telemetry

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Telemetry.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  telemetry out after each case every single day. They record videos of vascular surgeries, endoscopies, discovering interesting physiologies. Sometimes they're not recorded at all, and most of them, the time they delete them as soon as they're done. It's even worse for physiologic waveforms, which are essentially never recorded anywhere at all."

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  But ECG.

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  Millisecond scale views of patients' brains, vasculatures, hearts are generated.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Well, the vasculatures are recorded on YouTube. If you're like watching Sam Sulek, you'll see how vascular he is. So bodybuilding in terms of, I think bodybuilding YouTube videos sort of solves the data capture.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  And we want, we want that to be the predominant training data.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:03:49Jordi Hays?

  All video models.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  Yes, it's good that Sam, that Sam Sulek is uploading a daily video because that waits the models to be more muscular in the future. Like when you just say, generate one person.

• 1:04:01Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  Please, it will just pick Sam Sulek because he's overwhelming the algorithm.

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Ruin says, all of these time series, of course, predict people's heart stopping, brains exploding, et cetera, ahead of time. Brains exploding?

• 1:04:12John Coogan?

  What are you talking about, Ruin? Uh. Brains don't explode.

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Surgeons tell or op, tell operate robots. None of the micro movements are recorded, policies never learned, never correlated into which outcomes were successful or not. This would be unthinkable to most software people whose instinct is to record everything, everywhere, never mind the cloud cost, because we are sure that there will be some use for it later and some model to be trained later. I don't have a prescription here per se. My point is just that our civilization routinely hordes and treasures some of the silliest data in the world. I pressed like on the John Pork reel.

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  John Pork?

• 1:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Is this a, is.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  This is real.

• 1:04:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  This is like, John Pork is like, one of like the brain rot terms, uh, which is just like, it's, it's like Skibidi. It's like that, that, that era, basically.

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  And destroys much of all the most important data it generates and limits what machines can learn.

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, machines had to learn that I pressed like on the John Pork reel.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Before they could learn how my body will react to different medicines.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, so surveillance state exists on the phone. Should it exist in the, in the, uh, in the clinic, in the hospital? Uh, and we've talked to some people about like cursor for bio and there's a lot of note taking that's going on, but there isn't as much just capture all the data. And that feels like, okay, have everyone in the hospital wear a, you know, glasses that are constantly recording video. So when they look at the ECG monitor, that data is just captured and it's in video. Yeah, it's hard to get at, but at least it's recorded every, every back and forth. Of course there's HIPAA compliance, it needs to be really secure.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  But maybe there's a signal that you could pull out of all that data at some point. But people are going to be very worried about that for good reasons because if you're recording all the data in a doctor's office, are you likely to be honest with your doctor when they ask, how many glasses of Screaming Eagle do you have a day?

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19John Coogan?

  You know, you need to be honest about that.

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  If you're putting back 12 glasses a day, like many venture capitalists, we know do.

• 1:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Especially in August.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  Especially in August. You know, it needs to be a judgment-free zone. Look, you enjoy Screaming Eagle, that's fine, but you should know the risks. And if you're seeing there's a recorder going on and you, you know, I dabble, I dabble. I have two glasses. And you're lying, you're not going to get good advice from your doctor.

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  There is a trade-off here, but I like Rune's point here that we probably shouldn't be throwing out data if there's some use.

• 1:06:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just give it to us.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  I can be trusted.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  If you got a petabyte, we got some storage here behind us, we'll put some racks up.

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's been companies that have teased this, like the technology certainly exists, the AI pins, the wearables, the Google Glass, the Meta Raybands, all of these different products could find their way into, like with a pretty simple wrapper, like a HIPAA compliant data center wrapper, could find their way into the clinic, into the hospital. Certainly hasn't happened yet, maybe it's a business opportunity, we will see. Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmark, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2. I was thinking about this, we always say it's the number one AI agent for customer service, fin.ai. You could think about fin as a company, as an agency.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  No one's really used that. Everyone says they're building agents, no one says we are an agency. Because that's what, you know, we are an agency.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  Come to us to hire your agents.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, come to us, hire agents. We produce agents. We're an agency. I think that's maybe the next, the next catchphrase in Silicon Valley.

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, Farzad says, "To me, it's become quite obvious that after Tesla builds the Roadster, they are done building cars with steering wheels and pedals. Every new platform from that point forward will be driverless. They will continue to tweak existing platforms, Model YL, Super Affordable 3&Y, cheaper Cybertruck, etc. But as far as new platforms go, it's pretty obvious that they're going for a brand-new TAM. Car enthusiasts are not going to be happy. You could make us happy by making a driverless car with a naturally aspirated V12."

• 1:08:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. But I don't need a steering wheel. I would give up the steering wheel if I got, if I got 12 cylinders and straight-piped exhaust. Do you think they will never, he's predicting that they will never do Cyber...

• 1:08:54Jordi Hays?

  A humanoid in the front that would just manually shift for you.

• 1:08:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:58Jordi Hays?

  It's just entertaining to watch the...

• 1:09:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the final, the final test. I, he's, he's basically saying that they will never, the, the, the deeper reading here is that he thinks that they will never do a Cyberbon. And I think that they have to. I don't think the model...

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Is that not the YL?

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  I don't think the YL will, will satisfy someone who wants Cybertruck aesthetics, Cybertruck durability, truly like load the entire family and go to Tahoe. Like, the original Chevy Tahoe was designed for exactly that. Like, go into inclement weather with the whole family and the dogs and all the gear. And they have the platform. It would be crazy not to build more stuff on top of the Cybertruck platform, like they did with the 3 and the Y and the S, right? They, they, they took that platform and they expanded it. Why not expand on top of the Cybertruck platform? But yeah, maybe, maybe they're just super, super pilled on, on driverless and they just,

• 1:09:59John Coogan?

  and they just never do it. But I would think that if you're... If you're taking the family to the to the snow and you have the big family hauler, the huge, huge, uh, full-size SUV, uh, the, because the Model Y L, I think is still technically a, uh, it's like a mid-size SUV, even though it's the lo- long-wheelbase version, it's not as big as the Cadillac Escalade ESV.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Not a true-size Lord.

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  It's not 220 inches, which is the true-size Lord. It's like 200 inches, which is big. It's, it's big, but it is like a mid-size SUV, or full-size. Uh, it's not extended, like the biggest of the biggest, which I think is people, what people want. Uh, anyway. Uh, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI-native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free, Adio. Um, what else we got? Angela Strange, um...

• 1:10:49Jordi Hays?

  She's got a good post here.

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  It's called "Always Respond Quickly. responsiveness is one of the most powerful superpowers you can have in working in life. It's because speed wins, and responsiveness is the form of speed people can actually feel on the other side, whether they are a customer, a founder, a boss, or a friend. For a startup, this shows up as sales velocity. A buyer who emails three vendors with products that look very similar, one responds within the hour, schedules a demo that same day, and is ready to help them implement that afternoon. They may not have the best product or the lowest price, but they are the fastest, and that usually means they win. The same principle applies to customer success. If your customer knows they can send a message and get a reply right away, whether by Slack, email, or phone, they will feel supported, and that speed builds trust, and that trust compounds over time. It's no different for investors, employees, or even friends. The

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  investors who respond quickly are the ones who get into the most competitive deals, true. The employees who respond quickly are the ones who get more responsibility, more ownership, and eventually more promotions. The friend who responds quickly are the ones you turn to first when something important happens. Speed signals seriousness. It shows that you care. It creates momentum. And once people know that you are fast, they will bring you more opportunities, more trust, and more responsibility. responsiveness, the form of speed that others directly experience, often makes the biggest difference in who actually wins. Totally agree. I'm unfortunately at a point where I will either respond in one second or 24 hours or even longer.

• 1:12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's, it's like very binary.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it, I, the, wha- wha- what is never said when people say like, respond quickly to everything is like, no, it's like, respond super quickly to the super important things and do not respond at all to the random spam that you're getting. Like, don't respond to the junk. And then, and then there is stuff in the middle that it's like, you can get to it in a week and it's fine. And it's really just like, triage appropriately, but when there's something important, do it right then.

• 1:12:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Don't ha- don't have a, don't have a single SLA for every form of communication. Like, there are people in your life who you should get back to within two seconds. There are people who, if they come to you with something, you should just pick up the phone and call them. And there are other people who can totally wait and the thing is not important and you can catch up later and discuss whatever, you know, they're trying to sell you or whatever deal you're trying to do and, and you should probably take those. And then some of them, you should just like, yeah, this is obviously slop. Like, you, you sent me junk and you're going to the slop folder with my email. And you might already be there.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Do you actually have a folder called slop?

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  We do.

• 1:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  Yes. Um, and, and if somebody gets too sloppy, they get automatically added to that.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:13:26John Coogan?

  Tip for the people.

• 1:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, 10xers said, "Phone addiction so bad that watching a movie feels productive."

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  It really does. It really does. Last Saturday, I was like, I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna watch the new Superman movie. I'm gonna sit down, watch this thing. Couldn't do it. Wasn't in enough of a productive mood. Uh, anyway, public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And you know who else is trusted by millions?

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Wall Street himself.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Who is in-

• 1:13:54Jordi Hays?

  The president of Wall Street.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  The TBP and Ultra Dome. He's in the Fortune Finance, but he's also in Jackson Hole. How was it? Was it emotional? Was there standing ovation?

• 1:14:04Joe Weisenthal?

  It was incredibly emotional.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  It's incredibly emotional.

• 1:14:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Incredibly exciting.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  That's amazing. It's a joy just to talk to someone who was there.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Amazing too, by the way. You got him, you got him in emotion.

• 1:14:15John Coogan?

  Okay, break it down for us. What happened?

• 1:14:17Joe Weisenthal?

  You know what's really funny is like the people around that paparazzi shop where you see the world's major central bankers, they call it the perp walk. You know, like they joke about, they're like, oh, this is where the perp walk is going to be. I, you know, I don't want to like feed any like conspiracy theories about like what the world's central bankers do, but I do find that to be funny that that is like what the people in that area refer to it as. Um, all that being said, you know, look, it's always sort of an extraordinary time, late August in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, like there's arguably nowhere better to be in the world except for the fact that the internet access out here is a little bit spotty. Other than that, it is the perfect spot, but you get why all the central bankers come here. You get why it's so compelling.

• 1:15:01Joe Weisenthal?

  And of course this year, so many questions about the short-term path of the economy, the long-term path of the economy and the pressure on the Federal Reserve or central bank independence, it's the place to be.

• 1:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm just glad that we got through the bear market of Monday too.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:15:18Joe Weisenthal?

  It was rough.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Talk to me about, uh, how people read the tea leaves that is a Jerome Powell speech. I didn't have time to read the whole thing. I just kind of control F for inflation and there were 55 mentions, which seemed high, but are people doing a deeper level of analysis here? Is there even a deeper level of analysis that you can do? Or is it always just him kind of like vague posting about what's going on in the economy? And then people read from it what they will.

• 1:15:46Joe Weisenthal?

  So I would say that typically speaking, the control F approach is a very good approach to decoding monetary policy, except for this year.

• 1:15:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:55Joe Weisenthal?

  And the reason why I would say you can't do it this year is that every five years, they'd announce the framework review, which is not really anything to do with the short-term path of monetary policy. It's more like how they're thinking about meeting their goals. So this was a framework review year.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:16:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Um, year. And so therefore there was just a bunch of words in there that are probably very important for like thinkers of long-term that don't really reflect any sort of immediate thing. In terms of the immediate cycle, you know, it wasn't a particularly extreme speech, but in terms of the immediate cycle, he flagged the labor market side of the mandate as being the source of where there's more concern right now. Hence sort of keeping in play in a real way that, uh, September meeting, hence why the stock market got saved and everything is flying to the moon. Hence why Ethereum is up 12% today and so forth, like all of these things.

• 1:16:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, even even Circle, Circle was up almost 10%, even though their revenue is tied to the federal funds rate.

• 1:16:54Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, you joke about that, and I saw that observation and I, there's one argument that's like, oh, like, why, you know, rates are going to be lower, their spread is going to be compressed. The fact that the stock is flying says to me, you know, it's still more crypto play than it is.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:17:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Than it is a bank, you know.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  It's also just a growing company and people and there's risk with the stock and so, you know, lower rates, meaning I go more risk on, right? It's just a trade off.

• 1:17:19Joe Weisenthal?

  But I think, but I think the thing that was genuinely interesting is that, you know, a couple, in the last couple of weeks, we've got some sort of, we got that very anxiety inducing producer, producer price index report.

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Joe Weisenthal?

  And there is this concern like, oh, maybe, you know, the, the embers of inflation are not completely stomped out. So even in just the last few days, there's been this like, wait, do we have to start watching a pickup in inflation again? Like that has been the vibes from like other, you know, regional Fed presidents and so forth. We had Jeffrey Schmidt on our podcast, the head of the Kansas City Fed, that came out yesterday. He was talking about, you know, there are scenarios in which one might be talking about higher rates rather than lower rates, given where the stock market is, given where the unemployment rate is, given where inflation is and so forth. And so the fact that like Powell came out and said, look, basically it still seems like we're in a trajectory where the cut is probably, you know, that's where the risks lie.

• 1:18:14Joe Weisenthal?

  I think sort of magnified the degree to which the markets took that as dumb.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:20Joe Weisenthal?

  The music has been more hawkish, as you, as one might say.

• 1:18:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give us the update on the labor market debate and where, where that sits. So there was like this revision downward. It seemed really bad, but then there were lots of people casting questions about how real it is, what it actually means. Like, what, what's the current thinking from the various camps?

• 1:18:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure. I think this is a great question and you know, there's two ways to think about those revisions. And one, and I like hadn't thought of originally until some conversations over the last few days. Because there's one version of events where it's like, okay, this makes sense. Like May, June, these were not great months, like all of our predictions about the tariffs, like they were, it turned out they were right. The economists were right. Tariffs weren't good for the economy and the numbers vindicate that. And so that is what, and then we are like sliding and maybe we're at the risk of a recession and so forth. So that's one way. The other way you could look at those exact same numbers, which I've been hearing from people and I find this very interesting is like, look, those were very uncertain months, right? Those were crazy months. Of course hiring was slow.

• 1:19:23Joe Weisenthal?

  But now we have a considerable, considerable more tariff certainty today on August 22nd than we had in May or June. So maybe already that was the lowest part of the year. Like maybe we've already seen the slowest two or three months of the economy of 2025. And that already maybe we're accelerating a little bit because businesses have more uncertainty than they had this spring or early summer. And therefore, if that's the case, then the idea that recession is the risk is not so obvious, even by looking at the same data. So I think like, you know, this is the, this is the tragedy of following economics, which is you never really get an answer. You're just, you think you get close to something and then there's new data. It's like, I gotta look at it. But I think it's still very unclear.

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  Is Powell AGI pilled? Is there any element of AI? We saw Francois Chollet last, yesterday on the timeline, uh, saying that AI productivity is not showing up in productivity numbers. There, there are like various takes on, there's going to be this fast takeoff and people are going to be out of jobs or GDP is going to grow. But it feels like AI is just not even in the conversation when it comes to actual, like the gravity of economic stats.

• 1:20:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. And, and you, you contrast that to the, the tech's reaction to GPT-5, which was generally, people were, my view on it was like, this is good for like models plateauing a little bit is good if you have a consumer app like OpenAI and you have hundreds of millions of users that rely on you every day for like a utility. Bad if you're the neck, you know, uh, the bot, the, the 10 to 20th foundation model lab. And so there's been general kind of bearishness on the timeline around AI broadly.

• 1:21:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I'll say, look, I do not know, like, you know, what year Chairman Powell has for like when he sees breakout or take off. He didn't say anything about that today. But that makes sense. The actual formal theme of this year's conference is like, I forget, the labor market in transition or something. And talking about these big structural questions about the future of the labor market. And AI is absolutely one of them. I don't think there is a paper being presented on AI this year, but there is a panel, I believe, happening in that room, to which I'm not, do not have access. There's an interesting thing about Jackson Hole, which is that a lot of media comes who actually don't really have formal access to the thing. And so we just hang out in the lobby and try to,

• 1:21:49Joe Weisenthal?

  you know, flag people down, etc. There is a panel, though, that I believe is talking about AI. So I do think this is, it's sort of top of mind, I would say, for many of these central bankers and economists from a sort of theoretical perspective, and probably less so, at least at the moment, from a policy perspective in terms of, is any of the, what we're seeing in the labor market specifically, you know, AI related that way. But it's truly top of mind.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. We were talking to Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe yesterday. He mentioned that he was in Jackson Hole. He didn't say that why he was there, but I'm interested in some of like, like, the various parties, what they get out of it. It seems like the central bankers from other countries need to know what United States Fed policy is, because that will affect their economies. It's obvious why journalists go. It's obvious why regional federal bankers and members and economists might go. But who are some of the other characters that you're seeing? And like, what are they getting out of this particular event?

• 1:22:53Joe Weisenthal?

  So I'll say two things. One is that prior to the financial crisis in 2008, I think you actually had more characters. I believe that you actually had like some of the top economists from Wall Street were formally invited to the event. And then there was a backlash. And so I don't think they got invites after 2008, 2009. So like the actual, it's actually narrow. But I also, I sort of hinted at this at the top. I don't think I could stress enough that like, the actual like, late August in Wyoming, if you like fishing, like, what do people get out of this? I do, in no joking manner at all, does it have to do with like,

• 1:23:33Joe Weisenthal?

  I could take a work trip to Wyoming in late August and go fishing and hiking. I think that's a lot.

• 1:23:40John Coogan?

  This is a catalyst for more stable, this is a catalyst for more stable global markets. Because if you're a power player in the financial world, and you blow up the global economy, you're not going to get invited to Jackson Hole. And so you need to bring the VIX down, you need to bring down volatility, you need to prevent the next recession. So if you're out there thinking about causing the next global recession,

• 1:24:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  don't do it. You want to be spending your summers.

• 1:24:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't miss your chance to like get a chance to. Yeah, don't do it. It's that simple. Just don't do it.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  You're gonna get to go fly fishing. Come on. It's that easy. It's that easy. What else? Yeah. What else is on the economic calendar for the rest of the year that we should be looking forward to? When's the next Jackson Hole?

• 1:24:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, the next Jackson Hole is going to be next August. You know, the funny thing is the other regional, so this is the Kansas, formerly it's the Kansas City Fed Monetary Policy Symposium. Again, the other regional Fed presence, they actually have those that nobody ever talks about. There's an Atlanta Fed one that happens in Florida. I don't think you've probably ever heard of it. There's a Boston one. No one ever really talks about it. There are so those happen. The big thing is going to be the next jobs report, you know, the August jobs report that we get in early September, and the September Fed meeting. I mean, those. September is a very live meeting in terms of we genuinely don't know which way.

• 1:24:59Jordi Hays?

  What is the, is the, how much of the August jobs report will be the result of, of their approach to that report over the last year versus are we expecting changes in terms of how it's put together, given the, given the, the, I forget the, the person who was fired over it. What's, what's the story there?

• 1:25:25Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, look, I think the widespread expectation is that it is way too soon to imagine that something could change with the methodology prior to, certainly prior to the August report. I mean, the, um, the, the, the new guy who has been nominated, E.G. Antony, he hasn't been confirmed yet or anything. I think the widespread assumption, and maybe the assumption is mistaken because of 2025 and we live in a world where a lot of assumptions are wrong. Like the widespread assumption is that for better or worse, whatever like the sort of challenges of collecting this data under the existing approach is not going to change anytime soon. It's certainly not going to change by the August report. Now, if there's something else going on and everyone's wrong,

• 1:26:09Joe Weisenthal?

  look, I guess that's possible, but I haven't really heard anyone think that this soon we could have some scenario where there's uncertainty about that.

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  We really got to get the other feds to step up their conference game. They should be going to Aspen, Vale, Park City, Big Sky. They can just go all around.

• 1:26:29Jordi Hays?

  Just the Hamptons. Why not?

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  The Hamptons. Why not Lanai, Hawaii, you know, really, really pulling the heavy hitters and increase that incentive to not blow up the economy.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  Is there any concern on Wall Street with how levered up all these, you know, massive data center projects are, right? We've been joked, we joked off, we joked off there. It's like, this is the first time that tech, is this the first time that tech is levered up to this extent? And it feels like, like the next, the next tech, the next backlash against tech could very well be that tech blows up the global economy.

• 1:27:07Joe Weisenthal?

  This is real. This is, look, I would say three things about that.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:27:10Joe Weisenthal?

  One is, you know, tech got really levered up in a sort of classical debt sense in 1999 with the telecom. So we do have, look, and that blew up.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Joe Weisenthal?

  And, you know.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  But, but in the more recent era, the, the, you know, mobile, et cetera.

• 1:27:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, no, yeah, we were not as used to that. Two, just the sheer vol-, you know, I would say there's probably more, less anxiety about the sort of levering out part, like, or borrowing money to finance these data centers, even though that is the case. And there's probably more anxiety about just how levered the entire economy is to the stock market itself. And the stock market is both this engine of consumer spending, fueling this wealth effect, but also an engine of investment impulse. Because if you keep getting rewarded in the stock market for just like more AI activity, that fuels it and that fuels this sort of like, you know, potentially snowball effect. And so I think that the anxiety is like, yeah, there is just a lot riding on the stock market.

• 1:28:05Joe Weisenthal?

  But then also, setting aside the financial market, setting aside debt, setting aside stocks, there's just a lot of dollars being spent into the economy in this one area, area. And when you look at other parts of the economy, it's like caring for old people, caring for old people and data centers.

• 1:28:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, isn't it dialysis?

• 1:28:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Two things.

• 1:28:23Jordi Hays?

  It's like one, one percent of the.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  Dialysis.

• 1:28:26Jordi Hays?

  One percent of the GDP is just dialysis.

• 1:28:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, and it's growing. Like, all these things are like, every year, like, yeah, it's insane. And so like, you look at like, the most recent jobs report. The only sector is 73,000 jobs added and like, it was like 48,000, 48,000 in health and 25,000 in social services. So basically, basically 73,000 jobs in caring for an aging population. So it's aging population and data centers. And that sort of feels like the growth drivers of the US economy right now. And that doesn't feel insanely, that doesn't feel insanely stable, given how much everything else is sort of riding on the wealth effect from the stock market.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Well, how, how much longer are you in Jackson Hole? I go back, I go back to, I go back tomorrow. Tomorrow, okay, so 24 hours to stabilize the global economy. Talk some sense into people.

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  Get it done.

• 1:29:15John Coogan?

  Get it done. No excuses.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  Get it done.

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  Thank you for joining. Get back to your work.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  Great to see you.

• 1:29:21John Coogan?

  Take care. Thanks for having me. Have a good one. Bye. If you're looking to visit Jackson Hole, why don't you

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  I'll be right back.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  Find your happy place.

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  Find your happy place.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And Tyler Flops, did you find anything on your timeline? We do have some breaking news in the chat. He18N asks, do we read live chat? Yes, occasionally, we can see it. We do read it every once in a while. We saw some breaking news in here that Apple is planning to integrate Google's Gemini AI into Apple Intelligence. We talked about this a lot and now there's new article out about it. Makes a lot of sense that Tim Cook doesn't want to build out all the infrastructure to train and serve models.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Seems like a reasonable, a reasonable strategy. Do you have anything else on Apple Intelligence or Google?

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  Nothing really there.

• 1:30:22John Coogan?

  Gemini is a great model.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it makes sense.

• 1:30:24John Coogan?

  They're on the parade of frontier and it's probably easier to get a deal done. And Apple's had a relationship with Google on the search side for a long time.

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it feels very natural. But another post I like, since in the X group, Daniel Teneraro, he has this image. The committee will continue to monitor, continue to monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook. But it's like in this funny, hopefully we can pull it up.

• 1:30:51John Coogan?

  Oh, you put it in the group?

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, on X.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  On X. I'm not seeing it. Anyway, I'm seeing something from Junk Bond Salesman.

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  Oh, did it just come through? No, not seeing it. Anyway. Good things come to those who wait, says Ben. The KNOB1 has become shipping out for those who pre-ordered. Thank you so much for believing in my vision for this keyboard. It's a dream come true. So Ben built a keyboard and shipped it. Very cool. You can go pick one up if you're interested. Anyway, we have our next guests. We have two folks coming into the TBPN Ultra Dome. We have Jeffrey Katzenberg and Kimbal Musk. Welcome to the show. How are you guys doing?

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

• 1:31:34Speaker 04

  Happy to be here. How are you guys? Happy Friday.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Happy Friday. It's a good day in the market. We are wearing white suits to celebrate the market's rise.

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  We need a white, we need a hat.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  And we thank you for wearing the white hat. Obviously, you probably saw that this is happening.

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Came prepared.

• 1:31:51Speaker 05

  We have something to celebrate on our side too, so it's great.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  Please, yeah.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  We're super excited to hear about it.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  Pick us off. What are you, what are you sharing?

• 1:32:00Speaker 05

  Well, Jeffrey and I have been getting to know each other over the past couple of years and I've been building a company called Nova Sky Stories, which builds stories in the sky using drone art. So light drones that tell 80 to 90 minute stories, like a movie or like a broadcast, like a Broadway play. And there's just no one better in the world that I could imagine joining as a strategic advisor, board member and investor to Nova Sky Stories. Help us build the next brand in family entertainment and have a lot of fun doing it.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember Palmer Lucky was posting about the fact that there are only like three businesses in the entire United States that do just skywriting. Like it's an incredibly uncompetitive space if you can figure out how to do something in the sky. And it's just something that no one thinks about. And yet, and yet, you know, you could imagine, his point was like, what's the next version of this? And this is clearly.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels like very, it's techno optimist entertainment. I remember the couple of days after the fourth this year in Malibu, we had the worst air quality. It was like India level air quality because of all the fireworks that had been going off. You walked outside, it felt like, just looking around, it looked like you were in a cloud. And I was just thinking, we have drones, you can put them in swarms and you can provide this incredible entertainment. And this has come up recently too. We've, we've told a number of friends, companies that they should do drone advertising in the sky.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  And we don't have a vendor.

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  And there's no, not a, not a great vendor. But yeah, walk us through what these will, these shows will look like in, in practice. Kind of what, what, what the actual, how, the experience will be like.

• 1:33:42Speaker 04

  So, so before we do that, I just wanna, cause it's kind of fun and I know there's a chance that this will.

• 1:33:51Speaker 04

  Catch you off guard here.

• 1:33:52Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 1:33:53Speaker 04

  You know, I have that ambition. So, Kibble and I met at Burning Man.

• 1:34:00Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:34:01Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, see, there you go.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  There you go. What time of day was it? Was it like 2 a.m.?

• 1:34:07Speaker 04

  It was really, yes, it was actually. Years ago, uh, Kibble did this light show at Burning Man. And it was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. It was art in the sky. It's not fair to, you know, sort of look at this through the lens of, you know, fireworks or promotion or marketing because this was genuinely a, a, a very, a brilliant, uh, deployment of this technology that was just at a whole nother level. And so anyway, we first got to know each other just a little bit then.

• 1:34:48Speaker 04

  And then, uh, he's gone off and done this extraordinary job of very organically building out the business. You know, fundamental to it is just the state of the art technology around drones. You know, everybody now just thinks, well, everybody has drones and anybody can put them up in the air. Maybe, just not these drones. These are, you know, very precision built. They're, they're, the design of them, there's all sorts of interesting things I'm learning about them that allow them to swarm together, as you said, George, you know, in a way that can create very, very, very strong imaging and choreography and programming and the application of A I to design programming around it.

• 1:35:33Speaker 04

  And so the analogy that I've, uh, sort of come to, to feel, you know, is, is analogous for me at least, is in, uh, 1990, I saw a little short film called Luxor, The Lamb.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Speaker 04

  Which if you remember was the very first piece of C G animation created by John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. And out of that came the partnership with Disney and Toy Story and Pixar and all of the amazing things. It's just transformative because it wasn't just a tool. It actually created a new form of storytelling. And I believe that what Kimmel has very successfully created already today is a platform to create something that is going to be as innovative and I think as impactful and important as CG animation was 30 years ago. That's how

• 1:36:34Speaker 04

  unique this is and how powerful I think it will be as a storytelling platform to create branded family entertainment in very large venues, global, all of those things. Creating characters, creating original IP, and also being able to work with the greatest IP in the world to create shows around it. But anyway, that's a lot to...

• 1:37:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the thing that's so exciting to me is just like the wonder that you can inspire in a kid. Imagine they walk outside, it's night, and in the sky is this, you know, it could be some character from Frozen or something like that where there's...

• 1:37:19Speaker 05

  You mean the Tinker Bell just flying through the sky. The other thing about the drones, they can start out the size of two, three football fields cubed. I mean, that's literally bigger than your mind can possibly imagine. And then they can come down to, you know, the size of your hand and come land on your hand.

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  That is insane. How, what, like, when you think of these, like, sort of fleets, I don't know if that are swarms, if that's...

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  Exactly the right word.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  How many, you know, if you guys are gonna do a show at something like a festival or a carnival or something like that, how many individual drones would go into something like that? Is it hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?

• 1:38:01Speaker 05

  It's a real physics problem, so the way to look at it is you're trying to evoke emotion, you're trying to make sure you connect with the audience, but you also have to match it to the venue. So if you have the Rose Bowl, you can do 10,000 drones and, I mean, just completely melt people's minds in the most epic ways. And it's really fun to do that. I've done that a few times at Verena. We'll do that again sometime soon. But you can also actually do it with a smaller number, too. You can get down to 400, 500, 600 drones and still convey the emotion and get the character across, connect with the... But the goal is to connect with the audience. The audience is definitely a ticketed audience.

• 1:38:45Speaker 05

  If people are paying to see a show that is 80 to 90 minutes long, or maybe 45 minutes with an intermission and then another 45 minutes, so that you can... More like a Broadway play. But it can be really any size. Of course, in a spring, it's pretty great.

• 1:39:01Jordi Hays?

  I imagine.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  There have to be limitations to, like, the storytelling, though, right? Because you have to physically move the drones from one place to another, so you can't exactly do the Kula Shav effect. You can't exactly have a hard cut. Or can you do that? How do you solve that?

• 1:39:21Speaker 04

  Actually, yeah, because there... And that's what's so exciting about it, I think, and why we're going to get some of the greatest storytellers in the world excited about creating for this new medium as opposed to sort of just retelling something else. Because you can think of this as one dimension, which is a screen.

• 1:39:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:43Speaker 04

  And if you have a screen with 10,000 pixels, right?

• 1:39:47Speaker 05

  Actually, pretty high-def.

• 1:39:48Speaker 04

  Very closely, you know, choreographed together, you can... And remember, these things, it's not just a light in this, and it... These are sophisticated...

• 1:39:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right. It's not like a single bulb, right?

• 1:40:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  No!

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  You can have effectively a tiny screen on each drone, right?

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  Literally, and lasers, and effects, and all sorts of things. They, because that's what, you know, he's been investing in and building and they, you know, that they, these things are patented and he's the only company in the world that builds them. And so this is not like taking a, you know, military drone or a, you know, from, uh, you know.

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  I mean, typically, the ones that you see are these warehouses of military drones that are repurposed.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:33Speaker 05

  This is a division of Intel and we're innovating on it for 10 years. Uh, they, first of all, safety, when you're flying 10,000 drones, I mean, something will go wrong unless you are absolutely dedicated to safety. And we're proud to say, uh, 10 years of Intel and three years with Nova, 100% safety record, very proud of that. So you have to really think about safety. And then there's a level of sophistication just gets, that's where the, where the fun comes in. And, uh, you can, you can play with fire. I mean, we're actually, our, our drones could carry their own fireworks of all different kinds of shapes and sizes, not just like a typical firework.

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  That is.

• 1:41:12Speaker 05

  For example, you can actually, Dragon breathes fire.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  Wow. It's real fire, yeah.

• 1:41:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so even just thinking about what you can do with fireworks if you have a delivery mechanism into the sky.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:23Jordi Hays?

  Where, like, it's absolutely wild.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  It's pinpointed. You see the fireworks go up and sometimes they have shapes, but it's still very random. It's not exactly as choreographable as, as you'd think if you had more precise control.

• 1:41:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, we're able to get a firework to go off with a five centimeter cube in, in space. It's just incredible.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:40Jordi Hays?

  Where do you, where do you, uh, uh, you don't have to dox to the exact location, but how do you, how do you, how do you properly, you know, test this product when, uh, imagine you have to go far away from.

• 1:41:50Speaker 05

  We do have a, you have a secret location in Colorado, we're based in Colorado, deep in the Rocky Mountains, and it has to be pretty darn deep in there.

• 1:41:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:59Speaker 05

  Because, uh, some of the shows we do will be 3,000 drones and no one's allowed to see it.

• 1:42:04John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:42:05Speaker 05

  Because, uh, if they see it, it kind of ruins the surprise. We really want to, want to.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, and somebody, some, some hiker at some point will walk over a hillside and think it's a

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  Some other drone, some other drone pilot will be, I'm gonna fly my drone over to take some video.

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, somebody's gonna think it's a UFO.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  You're gonna need counter UAS for, for protecting it.

• 1:42:21Jordi Hays?

  Would you guys ever, uh, we, we love advertising here. We're, we're big fans of advertising. Would you ever consider, uh, partnering with, with the right company? Is, is that a vertical that you

• 1:42:31Speaker 05

  We do do sponsor shows. We do, we do sponsor shows all the time. So someone will sponsor a show. Uh, sometimes that, that, that simply means, uh, you know, uh, it's a thank you to, to them. Other times it is, you know, the logo in the sky. It, it just, it just needs to match, match the audience, uh, approach. But it's, but it's, it's, we're all kind of figuring it out here. What, what we're learning with advertisers, they, they wanna do the right thing for the audience as well.

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:56Speaker 05

  They, they wanna be recognized for it. They want, you know, they wanna build their, their, their audience or their, their brand. Well, what's the right way to do this? Well, it's all kind of new. So let's, so you know, sometimes we go over the top and sometimes we're not doing it enough, but

• 1:43:08Speaker 04

  But the thing you wanna do is you wanna learn from what people have done successfully in the past, but also mistakes that have been made in the past. And you know, one of the things I think we would all agree about today is, you know, I continue to love movies, love going to movies. I think it's a singular great experience going to a, you know, with a couple of hundred other people and get on that roller coaster ride of a, of a, of a movie, uh, is very special. But honestly, sitting there for 25 minutes of, uh, trailers and commercials before it is beyond annoying. I mean, it's just.

• 1:43:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it incentivizes you to show up late, right?

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Speaker 05

  Totally right.

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

  So, but let me, uh, just, we should share with you a little bit, like, you know, what's the ultimate goal here? And there's a little story that I've, uh, been retelling here the last, uh, couple of days because, um, it does, you know, sort of give me a, a perspective on this, which is, is that, uh, I remember going to see Elton John for the first time at the Troubadour.

• 1:44:13Speaker 04

  And then I remember 20 years later going and seeing Elton John at Dodger Stadium. And today, you can see Kimball's dream at the Troubadour. And it's pretty amazing and pretty spectacular and you can see the talent and the potential of it. And five years from now, it's not going to Dodger Stadium and, you know, during, you know, seventh inning stretch, having a drone show for 10 minutes. It's going to Dodger Stadium to see a great Nova experience there. A, something with a great story to it, huge production value to it, and as Kimball said,

• 1:44:58Speaker 04

  something that has heart and emotion, something that the whole family can enjoy together. And if you think about it today, there are really two principal uses of the big stadiums around the globe. Soccer stadiums, football stadiums, baseball stadiums. There's sporting events and there're concerts. And our goal, our, that we look at is, is that five years from now, there's going to be a third vertical there, and it is going to be these types of shows that come through on a regular basis. Because once you create a show and design a show, it can be in any language, you can travel around the, you know, like a concert.

• 1:45:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels like something, it feels like something that's can be as immersive as the Sphere, but it doesn't cost billions of dollars to set up somewhere new, right?

• 1:45:51Speaker 04

  You know, it's really interesting because when the camera came on here and I saw you guys dressed in white, the first thing I thought about is you must be going to see the Backstreet Boys.

• 1:46:00Jordi Hays?

  We're always ready, we're always ready.

• 1:46:05Speaker 04

  I figured, okay, these guys are going to the Sphere to see the Backstreet Boys. You got the, you got, you're, you got the right uniform.

• 1:46:13Jordi Hays?

  We do, we're always ready. I saw some videos of the Backstreet Boys. Are you guys, uh, uh, what, what's the, um, well, I have a couple of questions. One, how do you think about form factors in the long run? Is this something 10 years from now, would I be able to hire some local company to set one of these up and for, for like, uh, my son's birthday?

• 1:46:34Speaker 04

  It's quite different.

• 1:46:36Speaker 05

  It's quite different. So the, think about us, we are already operating in 40 countries. We go do events that are more, right now we're filling, you know, 3,000, 5,000 person event venues.

• 1:46:49Jordi Hays?

  So all ticketed.

• 1:46:50Speaker 05

  And then eventually we'll get to Dodger Stadium, more like 50,000 people. But, but the, the folks that'll do something more for a one-off event, you know, which, which will, which will probably get easier over time. Right now it's still very hard to do this, you have aviation approvals and so forth. It'll be someone else. Nova, our goal is to build the next Pixar, or we want to, we want to, we want to.

• 1:47:12Speaker 04

  Although, on the other hand, Jordy, I mean, you know, given the track that you're on, you know, five years from now, you could hire Elton John.

• 1:47:19Speaker 05

  There we go.

• 1:47:21Speaker 04

  Play a birthday party at your house.

• 1:47:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I just, we have, we all have mutual friends that might say it's, it's worth it for me to hire Nova for my kid's birthday party. I'll give you guys, you know, five million bucks.

• 1:47:34Speaker 04

  I spoke too soon. As I understand, everybody does private.

• 1:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everybody, everybody. What do you guys have planned, what do you guys have planned for, for Burning Man this year? I'm assuming you're both going back.

• 1:47:47Speaker 05

  I'm gonna make it out next, next week. Enjoy the week. It's my 27th year. So I'm gonna go out.

• 1:47:55Jordi Hays?

  In a row?

• 1:47:56Speaker 05

  I work with one of the artists and love the, love the event. I did it for the art. It's just so, so wonderful. Have you guys gone?

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  I've never been.

• 1:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Never been, never been.

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  Might have to go if this is gonna be there.

• 1:48:09Jordi Hays?

  We could be the first guys to, I mean, I, I, we can't be the first, the first guy. Would we fit in with, with white suits like this on the playa?

• 1:48:16John Coogan?

  I think they get pretty dirty.

• 1:48:19Speaker 05

  Everyone's still covered in dust, everyone fits in this way.

• 1:48:21Speaker 04

  Everybody's covered in it. You could go there dressed in this and within an hour.

• 1:48:26Speaker 05

  Look like that because the dust just covers everything.

• 1:48:30Jordi Hays?

  Doing the show, doing the show live from the play, I think would be deeply at odds with the ethos. But, but there would certainly be some funny interviews. I'd like, I'd love to interview guys at 2am after you first met. So what are you guys gonna work on together?

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  I have more questions.

• 1:48:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's going on?

• 1:48:48John Coogan?

  So I, I'm interested in kind of like what technology the business is focused on building. Pixar obviously had to invent a lot of CGI technology. And then some of that wound up spinning out and people made other graphics CGI movies. Pixar created Renderman, that became its own kind of product. I imagine that like the software to let an artist actually create on a fully three dimensional canvas, but not just pixels on a screen, actually a, a, a, a physical canvas of drones flying around. There are limitations, there are physical simulations that need to run. I imagine that you'll need to build a system for that. Is that internal? Are you gonna partner with someone on that?

• 1:49:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, so our version of Renderman is called Genesis.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:33Speaker 05

  And so what, what animators do, and we, we, we're recruiting, so shout out to all the animators out there. We're recruiting the best animators in the world. We, we, we, we know how good you are and we want you to join our team. And our version of Renderman is called Genesis. And so what our, what our animator will do is they might use some of the tools they're more familiar with, like Cinema 4D or something to get started. And then they, and they, and they upload their, their ideas and animations into, into Genesis, our version of Renderman.

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:00Speaker 05

  And it converts the whole, whole piece into drone, managing the physics of the drones.

• 1:50:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:07Speaker 05

  And a lot of AI in this process to figure out where, where, where do the drones go? How, literally, how long do the drones get to move? Like if you're, if you're thinking about Mickey Mouse in an animation, it can move like this and it's just no problem. Oh, well now, hold on, drones actually physically move. So the, so the, the, the actual animation changes from, from like this, like this. If I move it a little slower. And then if you do need to move it fast, you'll actually move the the LED lights instead of the drones.

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  Ah.

• 1:50:35Speaker 05

  And it'll actually be an illusion of the drones moving very, very fast.

• 1:50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:39Speaker 05

  But that's all part of our Genesis tool. So so that part is internal to Nova and we continue to develop that and we do we do have ambition for it to to make that level of a difference like Random Man has done for for animation in movies.

• 1:50:52John Coogan?

  That's great. On on the hardware side, what lessons are you taking from your experience with Tesla to this business?

• 1:51:01Speaker 05

  Well, the thing that I know so much with Tesla, I do work with AI a lot there, but it's spatial AI.

• 1:51:07John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:08Speaker 05

  So full self-driving is not it's not LLM. It's a completely different approach to to to to learning models.

• 1:51:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:15Speaker 05

  And it's actually very, very similar to to drone to to moving drones in space, to moving them around in in the in the air. And the the lessons that I'm learning about being able to, this might be a little inside baseball on AI, but using the transformer technology to to do predictive video.

• 1:51:34John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:35Speaker 05

  You learn from Tesla. And then the the scale of the hardware, which has gone from you need something the size of this room to something that that can, you know, be the size of an iPad, to something that for when it gets to be for drones would be, you know, something that would be, you know, half the size of an iPhone. We're we're I'm able to watch that happen. And then, of course, once you get there, then you you you you can imagine what can happen, you can even design for it, but you get the actual hardware has to get small enough. And then and once you get there, then you just start to imagine the magic that's possible.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  Uh, this is a question maybe for both of you, but for sure.

• 1:52:14Speaker 05

  One of the actual goals I have with our drones is to be able to speak to the drones and have the drones react. To you at a scale of 10,000 drones, that's actually possible. You just need inference engines on the drones that that are we're just not at that hardware scale yet, but we'll get there.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Um, on turn, in terms of market structure.

• 1:52:37Jordi Hays?

  By the way, that, that, that, uh, I mean, people, people have been experimenting this with various models, this idea of like, uh, you know, generative imagination. So just imagining something, talking about it and just having the sky react would.

• 1:52:50Speaker 05

  Just 10,000 drones and it will, it'll actually form in a way that responds to you. It's, it's all possible without the, the hardware is not solved yet, but the hardware is just getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  My worry is that you guys are going to get, get the, reach the, achieve this vision internally and then become so addicted to just sitting back and watching your own creation.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  Yes, but the beauty is that you can literally touch, you can literally touch grass while watching one of these.

• 1:53:15Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  You can do it outside, like it's a drive-in movie theater. It's fantastic. It solves a problem. You can, you can, you can enjoy the screen while touching grass. It's the best. Um, on, on market structure, I'm interested to know, right now it feels like the company's extremely vertically integrated. You own the drones, you develop the IP, you might work with someone, but eventually you're building the software, you're running the shows, you're taking in the ticket revenues. Uh, in the long term, do you see that there will be like an AMC or a Lowe's or a theater chain or an owner operator or a franchisee? Is there some world where your focus narrows?

• 1:53:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, our focus is on, on content and technology. So we want to be the Pixar.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:57Speaker 05

  We are very excited to work with ticketing partners or with, you know, Dodger Stadium will have probably Ticketmaster and that's fine.

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:04Speaker 05

  Uh, we work with theater, which is a fantastic promotion partner, uh, around the world. Uh, we are focused on content and technology.

• 1:54:12Speaker 04

  The venue, the venues have been built.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:54:15Speaker 04

  You don't need to build, you don't need to build movie theaters or own movie theaters to be in the movie business.

• 1:54:21Speaker 05

  And you're at the whim of whoever controls the ticketing for that venue. So you do, you do have to work with whoever that is and we're agnostic. We, there's some, some ones that are better than others, but at the end of the day, uh, we, we love all of them and we, we want to, we want to work with all of them.

• 1:54:36Jordi Hays?

  Will you guys partner with, uh, cruise ships? Have you thought about that potential? Are you far out at sea?

• 1:54:41Speaker 05

  We have some, uh, very, very interesting, uh, innovations happening on the cruise ship side, but it'll be unveiled probably about a year from now.

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  Anything else, Drew?

• 1:54:51Jordi Hays?

  No, this is super, super exciting. Thank you guys for coming on and sharing.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:54:54Jordi Hays?

  I just want to ask, be, uh, ma- make sure to be careful flying these over the Amazon. There's some uncontacted tribes.

• 1:55:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know where that idea came from.

• 1:55:06Jordi Hays?

  If the first thing that they see is a, if it is a Nova, uh, Sky Story, I think, uh, it'd be difficult to, to recover. So anyways, great, great chatting with you guys. Come back on anytime.

• 1:55:20Speaker 04

  So send us a selfie from, uh, the Backstreet Boys tonight. So.

• 1:55:24Jordi Hays?

  We will. And send us, send us a selfie from the playa.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:28Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:55:30Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Cheers, guys.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Have a good rest.

• 1:55:31Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 1:55:33Speaker 04

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:55:35Jordi Hays?

  That is just wild. I, I honestly am so excited for those to be everywhere.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:55:40Jordi Hays?

  I want Sky Stories everywhere I go.

• 1:55:42John Coogan?

  And you know what you have to settle for until Sky Story is able to run out of home advertising for you?

• 1:55:48Jordi Hays?

  Adquick.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  Adquick.com, baby. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Actually.

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across.

• 1:55:59Jordi Hays?

  We've talked.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  I know what you're gonna say. If you actually want to do a drone show right now.

• 1:56:03Jordi Hays?

  Drone ads.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Adquick can help you get set up with.

• 1:56:06Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  So you should definitely engage with them. And.

• 1:56:10Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's gotta do it.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  Run some, run some out of home ads. Um, what?

• 1:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Elon says, join XAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macro Hard. Uh, Microsoft, Macro Hard. It's a tongue in cheek name, but the project is very real in principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware. It should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  He's really taking shots at Microsoft lately, coming for Satya. Hopefully this, uh, this, this did not that I see get a Satya reply, but when Satya times.

• 1:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Was so good.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  Satya claps back with the corporate speak that just hits super hard. I'm so there for it. I'm cheering. Uh, it's a, it, it, it's a fun little, uh, Neo and Morpheus are fighting on the timeline moment. Uh, anyway, we have our next guest, Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator, of course, coming into the studio.

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 1:57:02John Coogan?

  Stream, Jessica. How you doing?

• 1:57:04Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 1:57:05Speaker 06

  Hi, am I talking to you now?

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  We're live. To us now, you're live on the internet. We are on X, YouTube, Twitch, we figured it out. We're on Substack. We're even on LinkedIn. Substack, a YC company.

• 1:57:17Speaker 06

  I love it. Hi, guys.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Hi, how you doing? Hey, what's happening?

• 1:57:20Speaker 06

  I'm good. I'm so happy to be on the show and see you. Long time no see, John.

• 1:57:25John Coogan?

  Yes, it's been, it's been years. We probably ran into each other, YC 2018. I went through the batch and we were, we were at a couple, overlapped at a couple dinners. Are you up in the Bay right now?

• 1:57:39Speaker 06

  I am. I am at Y Combinator's office right now. Normally I live in England.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:57:45Speaker 06

  And so I'm here for a couple of weeks this summer. Paul and I are back.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  Give us the vibe check on San Francisco and YC. You've seen so many ups and downs as, as trends have come and dissipated. And people have talked about moving. What's your current opinion or take on just San Francisco and YC as a place to start and build a business?

• 1:58:11Speaker 06

  Well, um, so I come back to San Francisco sometimes just once a year, usually a couple of times, two or three times. So I've only just seen little snippets of it. I was very depressed a few years ago. I came back, um, gosh, it was like three years ago when I went, I, I went to a bunch of like big YC startups, like Reddit and Twitch and all of these, just to go say hi to some of the founders and to get a tour. And it was really grim in San Francisco. Like I never walked around. We were like in the car the whole time. And we went into these startups and no one was there. Everyone was still, you know, working remotely.

• 1:58:54Speaker 06

  And I remember leaving thinking like, what is happening? Like, it was so weird because it was very sudden for me because I hadn't been there during the pandemic. You know, so it was all of a sudden the snapshot was one that felt so foreign to me. And now I feel like it is just vibrant and alive. And there's so much crazy stuff going on in the world, but in this area, the Bay Area and San Francisco, it seems so optimistic and exciting. And Y Combinator is just flourishing there because I'm on, I'm on the board. So, you know, we keep tabs on it that way. We don't come back all the time, but we try to come back for a dinner, a session.

• 1:59:38Speaker 06

  And now there are four sessions a year, four batches. So I think we're going to have to come back four times a year and, you know, talk at the dinners and things like that.

• 1:59:46Jordi Hays?

  It's the NFL Combine of Technology.

• 1:59:48Speaker 06

  I could not be more positive.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No, we, we like to call it the NFL Combine of Technology where everyone who's joining the league, they're, they're, they're, they, once they leave Y Combinator Demo Day, they have a serious business and they need to be evaluated by the scouts, the, and the literal venture scouts. And sometimes the venture capitalists who kind of play a role of scouting the next public company.

• 2:00:09Speaker 06

  I'm hoping to come to, I haven't been to Demo Day in a lot, in a couple of years, you know, years. I'm hoping to come to the next Demo Day, not the one in September, but the one in December.

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  You'll, you'll have to come. We live stream from Demo Day now and be prepared. We bring a lot of confetti. We bring a lot of very air horns and gongs. And if you're not prepared.

• 2:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Very loud.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  One venture capitalist friend of ours came in and Jordy like launched a cannon of, of confetti all over him and he was very surprised, but it was great.

• 2:00:39Speaker 06

  This, that's so cool. You live streamed from Demo Day?

• 2:00:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:44Speaker 06

  Okay, I'm going to watch it in England in September.

• 2:00:48Jordi Hays?

  It's the best, people have said it's the best way to experience Demo Day from England.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So, yeah, we'll send you the previous streams. You can watch, we, we, we go back to back with founders as they come off and have much more unstructured interviews. It's a complete, the opposite end of the spectrum from the prepped Demo Day pitch, which has a particular veneer to it and is, is meant to deliver information at a certain cadence. Our interviews are all over the place. We'll talk about what people are wearing, what they did before, what they did, what they want to do next. We do, we do go into the companies, but we have a lot of fun with the founders.

• 2:01:20Jordi Hays?

  How do you, what do you think your role is in terms of, you know, being on the board of YC, help, you know, continuing to help steward the company, but having so much space from both San Francisco and even the business, right? I feel like. When you can create that space, in this case, it's a physical space. It can help you have a perspective that is unique and valuable, even if you're not in the office every day like someone like Gary.

• 2:01:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of space. I, we moved to England in 2016 and it was only meant to be a year and I took a sabbatical that year from Y C. Paul had already retired, Sam was running it, and it just kept going. The sabbatical was like endless. I never went back. So I've had a lot of distance, you know, both mentally and physically. And I think it, I was really tired when I left. I mean, having started Y Combinator and it was growing and then I had kids at the same time. Like barely took any maternity leave. I was just really burnt out.

• 2:02:31Speaker 06

  And so I think I, I love that I have this space because I feel like I have so much energy and love for startups, but it's not all the time. So it feels like this special thing, like when I do.

• 2:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Feels like going on vacation.

• 2:02:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Going on vacation to San Francisco.

• 2:02:48Speaker 06

  Going on vacation to the Bay Area, totally. And I've, you know, we've been having, but it's a vacation that's very strenuous because I've been having more. I'm busier here than I am at home and we have meetings. I was just, I just toured the OpenAI office right before I got on the show and it's, it's just, that's why I think I'm on such a high. Cause it's just all so exciting and not that it feels novel, but it just feels so different than, you know, having sheep in my yard in England. But it's, it's great to come back. I'll tell you that much.

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. On, on, on Y C, can you help me understand the different eras of what made Y C outperform other groups or investors? I've heard this, someone pitched this narrative of like, the original brilliant insight of Y C was that.

• 2:03:42John Coogan?

  A new grad who was talented could not just walk into Sand Hill Road and get a meeting and raise money. And so there was this unique opportunity to take risk on younger and earlier stage founders. And then the second era, not really era, but second unseen opportunity that everyone else was missing was helping connect international founders to American capital markets and bring companies. And there's a huge amount of companies in the YC portfolio where they're, they built a business somewhere else. The founders grew up there, they're connected there, but coming to YC got them accelerated in the American

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  business context. Do those two stories resonate with you? Or is that completely apocryphal storytelling? Or is there something there? How would you kind of noodle on that?

• 2:04:35Speaker 06

  Well, the first part of it 100% is true. That was our raison d'etre. I mean, we started Y Combinator in the beginning of 2005 in Boston. So there were not many angel investors. And so if you wanted to raise money, you had to have a business plan and you had to go in and pitch VCs who of course only wanted to invest millions of dollars in you. There wasn't really an easy or efficient way to say, hey, I really just need like $50,000 to pay the rent, quit my job and sort of experiment with what I'm working on. Also remember at that time, you know, server costs were coming down. You kind of just, if you

• 2:05:17Speaker 06

  wanted to do a software company, you just needed a computer. And so, you know, Paul and I thought, you know, we're in Boston here, MIT and Harvard. There's all these young super duper programmers and they could easily start a startup now if they just had a little bit of money to cover their expenses. And someone gave them advice and someone helped them with the like really scary business things and legal things like incorporating the company. Because Paul himself was a startup founder and he could handle, you know, the big idea of creating a web-based application, but the thought of incorporating the company paralyzed him. Kind of thing. And so we did all that stuff.

• 2:06:02Speaker 06

  And it was also a time where traditionally VCs would install like a seasoned CEO. You know, they'd get the product going and say, well, you need someone to come in and run your business. Which leads me to what I want to talk about later is Founder Mode series that I've just launched like half an hour ago. They'd bring in a seasoned CEO to run the company. And we kind of thought, well, why can't the founder run the company? You know, back in 2005, we should just train them on the business-y stuff. So that's how we started. And for many years, it was run with that in mind. You know, help the programmers are target. Our audience was always programmers.

• 2:06:44Speaker 06

  And we just brought in people to say, here's how you run the business and get product market fit and all these different things. We had all the guest speakers that would come in. Second part of your question about the international people. Uh, I mean, we always did fun some international people. The point is, we always said, in order to benefit from YC, you need to come to the Bay area. You need to experience it. Even if you move back after the three month batch is over, you need to come here because the ecosystem here is like nowhere else in the world. Even if you lived in Chicago, we'd say, come, you have to come and be present at Y Combinator.

• 2:07:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever, were, did you guys ever explore, were you motivated to try to, like, the, I can't think of the, the, the YC of the UK, right? And you guys are there. I'm sure you have reasons why that maybe doesn't exist, or maybe it does exist, it just never broke out in a way. But was there always a commitment to San Francisco and not wanting to frag, fragment kind of the magic of the Bay after you moved there? Or was there any?

• 2:07:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, what we always got was, why, yeah, why don't you have the YC of other cities? Especially like New York. They always thought we were going to come to New York or, or Boston. Well, remember when we first started, we, Paul and I were bi-coastal. So we'd do summer sessions in Boston and Cambridge and winter sessions in Mountain View. And we did that for three years. And then when we had our first child, we had to choose. So we chose Silicon Valley. So we were always then in Mountain View.

• 2:08:25Speaker 06

  Why don't we branch out, why don't we do Y C in other cities? Because we want people to come to Silicon Valley or to San Francisco. Because like I just said, the ecosystem here is like no other. And, you know, they can do a startup in London. There are some startups that are doing very well in London. But I don't think we, I think we need to be in Silicon, we need to be in San Francisco. I keep saying Silicon Valley because I'm so old school.

• 2:08:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know, it's San Francisco.

• 2:08:52Speaker 06

  But I'm sorry, it's San Francisco now.

• 2:08:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, do you think things have changed with the, the Mountain View to San Francisco switch? I remember when I first went through Y C in 2012. I was actually part of Imagine K 12, which then kind of merged in. And I was living with another proper Y C company. And we lived in Sunnyvale in a, in a rundown house. It was pitched to me, the pitch was amazing. They were like, it's just like the house in The Social Network. It's got a pool, it's got a jacuzzi. It technically had a pool, it was filled with algae. It technically had a jacuzzi, it was full of leaves. But what this gave us was the opportunity to basically just spend all day working. Because there was nothing else to do. So we never were, we weren't throwing pool parties, we were just grinding. And, and I learned Python and I learned C.

• 2:09:39John Coogan?

  And I taught myself a bunch of programming languages, built a bunch of products. Everything flopped, it was a disaster. Eventually I learned to, you know, do other stuff. But, but there was something about the monastic building in, in Sunnyvale that I really enjoyed. And I'm wondering if there's some sort of like defenses that next generation of founders who might be in San Francisco where they get funded with more money upfront and they can afford a, a, a more distracting lifestyle. Like, is there any advice that you'd give for someone who can snap their fingers and be living in a nice apartment and have time to throw pool parties on the weekend?

• 2:10:16Speaker 06

  No one would ever take my advice. We've been telling for three years, like, just stay down in Silicon Valley. Yes, it's boring, but you will get so much work done and you'll be so focused. And I think people who've gone through YC in the old days would agree. But what did they do after the three months? They got funding and got an office in San Francisco. So you can only, you know, we're not going to be able to stop people. San Francisco's so much more fun and everyone wants to live here. And certainly, all the young people want to live here.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  Literally, as soon as we raised money, we actually moved to LA, but we got a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and we're throwing pool parties constantly.

• 2:10:52Speaker 06

  Well, you shouldn't be doing that.

• 2:10:55John Coogan?

  I know, it was a mess.

• 2:10:56Speaker 06

  I'm now confused. How many startups did you do through YC? I remember Soylent.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  So Soylent went through in summer 2012. I was part of an Imagine K-12 team that merged in, so I became a co-founder of that C corp and added to that cap table and board. But we didn't go through YC again. Sam said, like, you could go through again, but we were like, we could just raise a seed round. So we built that business. And then I started a second YC company, Winter 18, and went through again properly. So now I'm like officially a YC founder, not this like retcon fake YC founder that got Aqua hired in and given the, given the title of co-founder later on.

• 2:11:35Speaker 06

  You're gonna have to come on the social radars then, because I feel like I'm sitting here talking to you guys, but I have a lot of questions about your guys' lives.

• 2:11:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, come on, we've only done one podcast this year.

• 2:11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, Odd Lots, that was it. Yeah, we'd be happy to, any, anytime. Yeah, yeah. I mean, when, when you're live three hours a day, it's really, really hard. And also, we both have young kids. And so the schedule requires like turning down just a ton of events, which has been frustrating. But I'm sure you're in the same boat where people invite you to stuff and you're.

• 2:12:07Speaker 06

  I used to turn down everything.

• 2:12:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Would you have predicted back in 2005 that being a founder would one day be high status, something that, that young people like thought would be the cool thing to do?

• 2:12:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Or was that not on your radar, given, at least at that time, when it was hard enough to incorporate your business, much less build something successful?

• 2:12:31Speaker 06

  I think Paul might have envisioned it. I, I, I don't, joking aside, I don't, I don't think so. I mean, it was such, it was such a narrow thing. Doing a startup was not the norm. Everyone either got a job in finance, or went to graduate school, or got like a real job. It was only sort of the weirdo, sort of people who didn't fit in hardcore programmers that did startups. It just wasn't the normal option. And, and actually, and then when we came to Silicon Valley, there were more people that did it. And so there was this, then all of a sudden, it didn't seem so weird. And when we first started, as you guys probably know, we only had eight startups in the batch.

• 2:13:13Speaker 06

  It was tiny. And, but it grew consistently over the years. And as more startups got going, more people heard about them. And then I remember specifically, it was like when the Social Network movie came out. I don't know what year that was. Was it like 2011 or something?

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, 2010, 2011.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Somebody should try to do an analysis and, and on how much economic, how much EV that movie created.

• 2:13:39John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 2:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Because it has to be in the, I would have, it could easily be in the hundreds of billions.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  Even though it's sort of the wrong reason to do a startup, lots of people just did it anyway and built businesses.

• 2:13:49Speaker 06

  No, because parents, and of course, Facebook itself was made, made startups more popular. And parents, I mean, we used to have parents who sort of disapproved of their kids doing YC because you got into Stanford grad school. Why on earth aren't you choosing that over what's this Y Combinator? And then all of a sudden, startups became seen as like this interesting thing that people actually did. I mean, I'd like to say Y Combinator had a bit of an impact on the number of startups that got started because we hopefully made it really easy to do. So people who wouldn't have started, started them, did. But yes, that movie I do believe had a big effect, at least had a big bump in the YC applications.

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  Also, just the, the, the press machine, some of Paul's writing around how to do PR, some of the internal resources, that also made it more acceptable. One of my co-founders dropped out of a PhD program at Caltech. Both of his parents are professors, so that was a big negotiation. But fortunately, like TechCrunch was there and had written about us. We were profiled in The New Yorker and the, the business just felt a little bit more real. But in the early days, even going through YC, you tell someone, I'm doing a startup. Hey, it's actually kind of real. Like I'm in this YC thing. People would be like, what are you talking about? Like you are crazy. Why don't you go work at a bank or consulting firm?

• 2:15:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, people didn't get it.

• 2:15:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:13Speaker 06

  And so we just happily and quietly like did our thing, appealed to this small group of users that loved us and just kept growing every year.

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:23Speaker 06

  And now like everyone's doing it.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  The, the flip side of this is I'd, I'd love your thoughts, both as a founder and a mentor to entrepreneurs and also a parent potentially on this, this concept of get your bag culture or this idea that, uh, Gen Z founders are potentially optimizing for short-term economic gain at a higher rate than previous generations. Do you disagree with the premise? Do you think there's an antidote? What's your thinking about that concept?

• 2:15:55Speaker 06

  Hold on, John, what is, did, what kind of culture did you say? This is how out of touch I am.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  So, so they, uh,

• 2:16:01Jordi Hays?

  Explain it like she lives in London, in the English countryside.

• 2:16:04John Coogan?

  Get your bag culture. A bag, of course, is a bag of money and getting the bag is a liquidity event typically reserved for IPO-ing a generational company.

• 2:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, and so, and, and so you can compare this to like the, the origins of YC, which is maybe hat more hacker culture, people that were in it to just tinker and build.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Build the product and satisfy the user.

• 2:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Experiment or maybe build something for themselves.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  Make something people want.

• 2:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Now there's a category of founders that I think people rightly categorize as people that are purely in it to make, to try to make quick money.

• 2:16:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, I call them carpetbaggers.

• 2:16:40John Coogan?

  Carpetbaggers.

• 2:16:41Speaker 06

  Yes. That's like a really old term.

• 2:16:45John Coogan?

  It still uses the term bag, so I like it.

• 2:16:48Speaker 06

  Yes, yes, okay. I think, I don't think that it's sustainable if you're after the money. You can't start a startup just to make money unless you're really good. You need to have some sort of genuine interest in what you're building because they're so hard that in order to get to that, whatever kind of liquidity event you can get, in order to get there, you have to go through so much difficulty and stress and hard times that I think it's hard to do. I think people have done it, but I don't think, it's not as easy as it sounds to like, oh, go get that funding. And it's a long haul.

• 2:17:30Speaker 06

  It's like, I tell people, you got to at least be ready to devote the next decade of your life to this. I mean, maybe you can have a liquidity event earlier than that, but I don't believe in that.

• 2:17:43Jordi Hays?

  How have you thought about protecting the YC brand over the years? Because YC has this interesting challenge where...

• 2:17:52John Coogan?

  Always orange, never red, never yellow.

• 2:17:54Jordi Hays?

  And I don't mean visual, but in the sense of YC now accepts hundreds of founders in every year that get the opportunity to be a part of this program and the community and the institution that is YC. And that ultimately creates people that love the brand, that promote the brand and all these positive things and become part of this community that is part of the value. But you also have to reject thousands and thousands of people every single year, right? People that don't make it in. And the dynamic...

• 2:18:23Speaker 06

  That's the hardest part of YC, by the way.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  The dynamic that I've witnessed is anytime, almost every time I see somebody talking poorly about YC, it is somebody that won't overtly say that they were rejected, but I know deep down, it's like, you applied a couple of times and you were rejected. And this is you kind of lashing out, rejecting this institution. And it's never the founders that actually went through it, right? I've literally never, you know, a founder could go through it and say, oh, I went through YC, but it wasn't the reason, and it wasn't the reason that my company worked. Maybe you could make that argument. Or I went through YC and I didn't necessarily fully connect with my group partner, but I love the community, right? Like, they always get something out of it.

• 2:19:10Jordi Hays?

  But it's this hard challenge of having to... Ultimately reject people that are a part of the community and the industry that you're in.

• 2:19:17Speaker 06

  Well, you're making a good point. We always want people to think good things about us. And certainly if we reject you, we want you to apply again if you're still going. It's not like, oh, we don't like you and we never want you to come back. Maybe we just thought your idea seemed bad and you wind up pivoting and reapplying. I honestly think, I think we do a really good job advising everyone. Even, even the startups that are failing, I mean, sometimes I used to kid Paul, like, he was so devoted to the startups that even the ones that were like clearly failing and needed to just call it a day on their startup, he'd be like, no, we can make this work.

• 2:20:00Speaker 06

  Have you tried this? I really think our advice is exceptional. And anyone who goes through the program will think, even if my startup failed for whatever reason, it was still a valuable use of my time and I learned so much and I'm part of this amazing community, which just gets better and better because more people join.

• 2:20:21Speaker 06

  We can't do anything about the people who like say bad things. They're mostly people who have never been through the program and so, or people we've rejected. You're right. Yeah.

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  Are there particular red flags that pop up for people who see YC as a resume bullet point to add?

• 2:20:43Speaker 06

  I'm laughing because the answer is yes.

• 2:20:47Speaker 06

  A lot of people and, you know, one of the YC partners, you know, who looks at all the applications now, I don't look at the applications really anymore, but you can definitely tell people who are like building their resume and just want to put it on like their LinkedIn. And in fact, I think we had to like do something to prevent people from saying like, Like, um, Y C founder on LinkedIn. We had like, as in like a type of education.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:14Speaker 06

  You know?

• 2:21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't go in the education section. It's an investor. Like, it goes, it goes in the investor list of your company, which you will continue to build forever, hopefully.

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  But I mean, that's also, that's also what every brand would hope is people value our money so much that they, they, they put it as part of their education.

• 2:21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's an interesting trade off.

• 2:21:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a, it's a good problem to have, right?

• 2:21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have a friend who I went to high school with and like phenomenally tracked individual, perfect S A T scores. Ivy League education, rejected from Y C like 10 times. I think literally 11 times. Got in, uh, starts a company, an A I company before the chat G P T moment. And it's just absolutely taking off and has been doing fantastically and has turned it into his whole life's work, which is fantastic. Um, and

• 2:22:05Speaker 06

  Oh, I love that story. He was rejected 10 times?

• 2:22:08John Coogan?

  It might've been 11 times. I, I need to, I'll, I'll text him and confirm the exact number, but it was, it was way over five. And it was, this was back when Y C was only doing two batches. So this was a five plus year process of facing rejection and continuing to build and getting through. And so, uh, yeah, to the people that think that they want to take to their anon X accounts and, and talk some trash. I would say just, just continue to

• 2:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Apply the 11th time.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah. And then, and then talk some trash.

• 2:22:35Speaker 06

  Apply the 11th time, like

• 2:22:37John Coogan?

  Absolutely. I was rejected.

• 2:22:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, even, even I was, so, so, uh, my last company, I was, I was rejected and it was even after we had raised from, uh, I was, uh, no, but I get to cover demo day now with, with John.

• 2:22:48Speaker 06

  Jordy, I feel guilty.

• 2:22:51Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no. It was for good reasons. The exact reasons that Michael laid out in the rejection were the reasons that my company, my last company, like our hardest moments were all, he like, he saw it, like he had a crystal ball.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:02Jordi Hays?

  And he saw the struggles that we were going to run into. We eventually pivoted.

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:06Jordi Hays?

  But it was, uh, I appreciated the advice.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:08Jordi Hays?

  And then I still feel like Y C is great because you just, you, you, uh, not to turn this into, uh, just a praising, uh, Y C the whole time, but, uh, all of the, the core, uh, lessons are just all available online.

• 2:23:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:24Jordi Hays?

  Right? And if you actually, if you don't just read them, but you actually But you actually apply them. I mean, the lesson that I think a bunch of companies right now are going to learn, scaling headcount rapidly prior to true product market fit, right? We have all these early-stage companies, seed, series A companies. If you get up to 30, 40, 50 employees with like, some market pull but not true product market fit, good luck going through a real pivot. Like, bet the company pivot with 50 people on your team. Like, it's so much harder than if you, I think YC's standard advice is keep it like, if you have like, you know, under seven-ish people, if I can remember.

• 2:24:09John Coogan?

  A two pizza team can potentially pivot. Once you're at 50, it's going to be really, really hard. I don't know.

• 2:24:15Speaker 06

  And you should always stay small before so you conserve money. Because if you don't have product market fit, what if you have, yeah, what if you have to pivot? You can't do it as a big organization very easily.

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about finding product market?

• 2:24:31Jordi Hays?

  The other thing I will say that from the 2021 era was that there was advice from investors broadly, and this is like due to just like this pressure around delivering markups, but there was this advice broadly of like, if you want to raise money, you need to have best-in-class growth, which means that if you're a seed-stage company, you need to go from, you need to get to a million dollars of ARR. This was the 2021 era of like, that's what gets your series A done. And you need to basically do it in less than a year. And like, there's this extreme pressure to do that. And I think that was at odds with YC's philosophy, which was, it's not about how fast you get to, like, the company that gets to a million dollars in ARR,

• 2:25:16Jordi Hays?

  the fastest is not the one that gets to a billion the fastest, right? And I just, time and time again, when I talk to early-stage founders that aren't in YC, I just say, go like, read, read everything you possibly can that has been created from the people that have been a part of that. Study the blade.

• 2:25:36John Coogan?

  Sorry, that's going to be a long reference.

• 2:25:37Speaker 06

  Study the blade.

• 2:25:39John Coogan?

  That's another meme. Sorry.

• 2:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Study Jessica's blade.

• 2:25:41Speaker 06

  I gotta get up to speed on these memes, you guys. God, memes for old people.

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  We throw them fast and fast.

• 2:25:48Jordi Hays?

  We'll make YC for memes. You can come through it. We'll accept you.

• 2:25:51John Coogan?

  On product market fit. Talk about what product market fit looked like in the first batch. And now I want to apply some of those takeaways from like, we're in this weird era. There's a current discussion around AI inference reselling as a potential way to spike revenue growth. That is not a true, true example of product market fit because you are effectively selling a dollar for 90 cents and people will just take that all day long. And that's not actually product market fit. And I want to know how you tussle with that in the various companies that you saw early on, like false signals for product market fit.

• 2:26:35Speaker 06

  Well, we didn't have that much product market fit in the first batch. I think the only one was Reddit.

• 2:26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:42Speaker 06

  And even that was sort of slow going with maybe some fake accounts and things. But I mean, I always think of it, and I am probably not the best person to talk deeply about product market fit. But what always sticks with me is something Paul Buchheit used to say, which is it's better to make like a small group of people love you than a whole bunch of people just like you. And I think if you can make that small group of people love you, you can, you usually always can expand that group of just avid users. If it's, if they just like you and are just coming to your site now and then, or won't pay for something, those people aren't going to stick.

• 2:27:24Speaker 06

  You can't, that's not something you can build a long-term business off of. And I think, you know, YC were always just like, find people who love this product and will pay you for it. That's the best way to determine if they love you, right? Because a lot of people will say, oh, we're starting this idea. Our friends, you know, say they'll use it. We're like, really? Are they just, are they really going to use it? Or are they just saying they're going to use it because they're your friend? You know, like they really want to know what local events are going on in their neighborhood that night? No, they think they do maybe, but they won't actually use it.

• 2:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Talk about your new series, Founder Mode.

• 2:28:01Speaker 06

  Oh, yes. Founder Mode. Okay, so very briefly, literally just launched it like in the last hour.

• 2:28:10Speaker 06

  So Carolyn Levy, who's our legal counsel here, we're co-hosts of the Social Radars, which is a podcast, and we interview lots of YC founders about anything. It's very, sometimes very random. Sometimes we talk about how they got started. Sometimes we talk about what's going on now. It's very unscripted and fun.

• 2:28:30Jordi Hays?

  You'll even interview like a nonprofit CEO, too.

• 2:28:33Speaker 06

  Yes, we've had Edith from Nora Health was on it.

• 2:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 2:28:38Speaker 06

  Yes. So the only thing is we try to do YC founders.

• 2:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:28:42Speaker 06

  Although Tyler Schultz, the whistleblower at Theranos, was not a YC founder, but his episode is so interesting. But anyway, so we're interviewing YC founders. So last week, Gary hosted a Y Combinator Founder Mode Retreat up in Sonoma Valley. And what did you just do?

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  We have a soundboard.

• 2:29:06John Coogan?

  And one of the soundboard cues is Founder Mode in a very serious Quake 3 or Doom video game voice.

• 2:29:14Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt.

• 2:29:15Speaker 06

  No, I love that. So he had the Founder Mode Retreat, and so Carolyn and I said, since everyone's there and we're thinking about Founder Mode, let's grab people and do very, like, short interviews, like 15 minutes each, about what does Founder Mode mean to you, and when have you had to do things like that? Because it all started a year ago when Brian Chesky gave this famous talk at our other retreat from last year. And I mean, I left with my mind blown. You just sat there for an hour, like, with your mouth open, listening to him just go on and on, and this happened, and that happened, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, talking about how he was gaslit and all this stuff, and it was fascinating.

• 2:29:55Speaker 06

  And every founder in that room was like, gosh, I sort of have been secretly worried about these same things. So... Paul then wrote an essay called Founder Mode. He defined what that me-

• 2:30:07Jordi Hays?

  Founder Mode.

• 2:30:09Speaker 06

  He defined what that me- meant, but we need to collect examples. So that's what Carolyn and I are doing. You're making me laugh with that. We're collecting examples. So we have like 10 different episodes coming out with a bunch of different YC founders. Today, we launched Brian Chesky, Gary Tan, and Paul Graham. And then we'll dribble them out over the next couple of weeks. But it was really fun hearing these stories because there's themes that are similar, but everyone has their own different stories.

• 2:30:37John Coogan?

  Well, we like to collect KPIs around here. We have a tradition where we ask our guests to give us a number. Maybe the number of years they've been in business, total amount of money they've raised, total downloads, or number of episodes that you've done for the show. Any number, and then we ring the gong for numbers. Is there anything you can share with us that can quantify your career? Anything, any number that sticks out to you. It can be anything, any number at all.

• 2:31:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, I'd have to say 20 because we founded Y Combinator in 2005.

• 2:31:10Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Best year yet.

• 2:31:15Speaker 06

  Alright, thanks you guys.

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  It's not all digital soundboard. We also embrace the analog.

• 2:31:19Jordi Hays?

  We're all gonna go listen to the Founder Mode series. We encourage the audience to as well. And all that we ask is at some point in the future, come and do the demo day stream with us.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  We would love to have you live on the demo day stream. It's a quick interview.

• 2:31:33Speaker 06

  If I'm here, I'll stop by in December.

• 2:31:35John Coogan?

  That'd be fantastic. We'd love to talk to you more. Have a great rest of your day and a great rest of your trip to San Francisco.

• 2:31:41Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thanks so much. Bye, guys.

• 2:31:43John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about Bezel. Getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And our next guest is already ready. He's in the restream waiting room. He's coming into the TVPN Ultra Dome. We have Zach Bookman from OpenGov. Let's bring in Zach. How are you doing?

• 2:32:05Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:32:06Speaker 07

  What's up, John? Hey, Jordy.

• 2:32:08John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:32:09Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:32:09Speaker 07

  I'm fantastic. I'm happy to be with you.

• 2:32:11Jordi Hays?

  It's Friday. We're close. I feel Monday is right around the corner. I'm so excited.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, Monday is right around the corner.

• 2:32:17Speaker 07

  Can I just get real with you guys for a second? It's, it takes a lot of stamina to build a company and to lead and to be a CEO. And like what you're doing must take so much stamina too. How do you?

• 2:32:31Jordi Hays?

  It's a daily marathon.

• 2:32:33John Coogan?

  It's the, it's the entire.

• 2:32:34Speaker 07

  Come on, get real. How do you do this hours a day performing?

• 2:32:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we joke, anyone is welcome to compete with us, just be willing to produce 20 hours a week of live content.

• 2:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Be willing to spend a meaningful amount of your waking life.

• 2:32:49John Coogan?

  Live.

• 2:32:49Jordi Hays?

  On the internet.

• 2:32:51Speaker 07

  And, and on Diet Coke, which is prominently.

• 2:32:54John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. We've been rotating them out a little bit, but uh, yeah, Diet Coke's the current.

• 2:32:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the real secret.

• 2:33:00John Coogan?

  He's got the mateina.

• 2:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Huberman's Yerba Mate Mateina.

• 2:33:05Speaker 07

  Oh, that'll jack you up.

• 2:33:06John Coogan?

  I drink two of those before the show every day.

• 2:33:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's where, that's how John warms up.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  I call it podcast in a can.

• 2:33:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a podcast in a can.

• 2:33:13John Coogan?

  It's a podcast in a can.

• 2:33:14Speaker 07

  So you're asleep like half the weekend.

• 2:33:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. That's exactly what happens.

• 2:33:18Jordi Hays?

  That's the big issue. We're, we're on like insane caffeine levels Monday through Friday. And then on the weekend, our wives will be like, what's going on? Like, wake up, like you're doing.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  I finally was like, the secret is stock energy drinks and then I'm, I'm ripping.

• 2:33:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at least 500 milligrams Saturday and Sunday.

• 2:33:35Speaker 07

  Well, you're getting the most exciting guests too. So it's.

• 2:33:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had some good ones.

• 2:33:39Speaker 07

  The adrenaline with no performance even, you know, yeah, it's really cool.

• 2:33:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? I, I'm familiar with the story of the company, but I'd love to just introduce it to the audience.

• 2:33:50Speaker 07

  Sure. I'm Zach Bookman. I'm, I'm co-founder and CEO of, and it's an enterprise software company called OpenGov.

• 2:33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:57Speaker 07

  It's vertical software. So we sell, uh, we sell software to modernize all of our nation's cities and counties, state agencies.

• 2:34:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:08Speaker 07

  This has, so I started the company with Joe Lonsdale and two amazing young Stanford engineers 13 years ago.

• 2:34:16Jordi Hays?

  Can you explain, uh, who's Joe, who's Joe?

• 2:34:19John Coogan?

  Who's Joe Lonsdale for those?

• 2:34:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, Joe's co-founder, okay, okay, okay. Co-founder, pal, here, buddy of yours. Um, hey, your audience is getting so big, there's people not in valley here. Okay, so.

• 2:34:30Jordi Hays?

  They've been living under a data center. If they don't know, if they don't know Joe.

• 2:34:33John Coogan?

  13 years, incredible run. Uh, I, I felt like.

• 2:34:37Speaker 07

  13 year overnight success.

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  Of course. And I feel like this company kind of came out of nowhere. Is that, was that intentional? Were you building like behind the scenes or is that just a function of the market?

• 2:34:48Speaker 07

  Well, a little bit of both. Well, and there's a third one, which is called the long series of painful mistakes. So those who don't know, we sold the company last year for 1.8 billion dollars to a very large

• 2:35:07Speaker 07

  It was the largest, I think, private software transaction of the year, and maybe one of the largest of the last few years.

• 2:35:18Speaker 07

  I just keep going, this is fun.

• 2:35:21Jordi Hays?

  You're on a roll. You're on a roll. This is, we designed the soundboard for this kind of interview, and you're really, really great.

• 2:35:33Speaker 07

  We, we, we saw all these governments using like green screen software, you know, more than a decade ago. This is after the Great Recession. There were three cities that went bankrupt, 12 that were predicted to go bankrupt. And we were like, we're gonna pay taxes for the next 50 years. Where's our money gonna go? We saw the state, uh, the state of California using an accounting system that ran on Cobol. And they entered into a hundred million dollar agreement with Oracle and Accenture, which ballooned into a billion dollar deal that was seven, that was seven years

• 2:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the shareholders.

• 2:36:09John Coogan?

  Well, transfer from taxpayers. I'm a California taxpayer. Just write the check to Larry Ellison next time.

• 2:36:16Speaker 07

  And, and we saw that the, the city of Palo Alto was running an ERP system that was delivered on 20 discs and had green screens from a German software conglomerate, SAP. And they paid 10 million bucks for it. And we were like, there's, we, we have to be able to do good for our communities, our country. It was super mission driven. Our mission is to power more effective and accountable government. And we thought there's a pretty good business here. And it turns out there's a, your, your investor, uh, audience would know, there's a company called Tyler Technologies. Most ordinary people haven't heard of it. They do about 2 billion in revenue on software and services for state and local governments. And they are the, I think, 10th best performing stock of the last 20 years. They're on the S and P 500.

• 2:37:00Speaker 07

  They print like well over a quarter billion dollars in cash a year, probably 3, 400. And so we got out of the gate, had a little bit of hype. Yours truly made basically every entrepreneurial mistake in the book.

• 2:37:14Speaker 07

  Built the wrong products in the wrong order, hired the wrong people, raised too much money, spent too much money. Had to learn enterprise selling on the job. And we managed to get some outstanding star studded investors and board members. Mark Andreessen was on the board, John Chambers, obviously Lonsdale. Catherine August, who helped build First Republic. And you know, folks like Loreen Jobs and Scott Cook. So people are very attracted to the mission. I used to have hair down to here, so maybe you know, there's like the long haired and crazy founder thing. And with all these mistakes, it was hard times from like literally probably 2015 to 2019. Almost not raising around. You know, Uncle Joe rescued us once or twice.

• 2:37:59Speaker 07

  And you know, Mark would joke with me, he's like, you know, and then it's kind of started to work. And he'd be like, this is like little engine that could. And this is in, you know, then it turns into like 2021, zerp. Every company's growing like 80%. And my shareholders like bored, right? They're like, we're just like a good little company. And literally right up until, I could see they were a little tired and right up until the sale. We were, people thought we were worth about half of what we were worth. So things had really started to work. Cox was diversifying their 125 year old family business. They do, you know, couple dozen billion in revenue. And are trying to move away from cable, automotive and other businesses. And they said, you know, we like government software and we built a relationship over three or four years.

• 2:38:44Speaker 07

  And, and the company's actually accelerating now. So it's, it's getting exciting. Incredible.

• 2:38:49John Coogan?

  What, what's like, what are some high level? Kind of, I don't know, contrarian insights or unexpected things that you could share about like? Lessons from the way the government runs. Maybe everyone thinks it's because of this, but it's actually something deeper. Just the way people understand the government, they understand it in one way. How, how has your perspective changed? Cause you sit in such a unique position.

• 2:39:14Speaker 07

  One obvious, almost contrarian take is folks like us in particular, we love to sit around and bash the government.

• 2:39:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:39:20Speaker 07

  And you know, where's our money going? These idiots, the $10,000 toilet. Like many years ago, I did this with Calacanis and, and he went off on it. And I said, look, I said, what's ironic is we are the government.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:32Speaker 07

  He's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, you can raise your hand and go sit on the town council.

• 2:39:39Speaker 07

  Why don't you? Yep. It's a lot easier to just to complain. And the reality is, the people running our nation's state and local governments aren't all idiots. They're not all wasteful, fraudulent and crooked. Many of them are accountants, lawyers, professional managers. They're actually working really hard, day in and day out. They do it, they could get other jobs. Yeah. They do it because they, they want a mission and they want to help and they like being involved. And the, the problems are very complicated and they're regulated like heck by you and me. Mm hmm. Every time there's a little scandal, and there's plenty of scandals in companies. We know this, but every time there's a scandal in the public sector, we put more regulations on them. So we complain about procurement, we complain about their actions and yet we govern them. And they have to follow the rules that we set.

• 2:40:24Speaker 07

  And so what we're actually complaining about is our political culture. It's not the administrators and bureaucrats that are in our government. So that's one contrarian take. Another is few people think about how important these entities are. We always, we want to talk about federal government or international relations or security or what have you. And the reality is, most of your services are done by local and state governments. Literally, the roads you drive on, the water you drink, you flush the toilet, the flick the light switch on. All of this stuff is typically done by local and state governments. And we rarely think about who we're going to call in the middle of the night if someone's breaking in. And are they well resourced? Are they well trained? Are we interacting with them?

• 2:41:09Speaker 07

  Are we governing them correctly? Uh, so I don't know if that's another contrarian take, but it's like, this is really important stuff. It's super mission driven and it's got to be right. And they operate in glass houses and we all get to throw stones at them all day. Could you imagine running a company? If you had to, uh, every little piece of software you wanted to buy, you needed to have it approved by your board? That's an example of a rule. We put on our local government, if it's over 25K or 50K, make sure we get to a

• 2:41:35Jordi Hays?

  It's hard enough to get your board to look at your board deck.

• 2:41:38Speaker 07

  Marky Greason would laugh me out of the room if I was like, I need to upgrade Salesforce and, you know, can I have 80 more K to, give me a break. Are you the CEO or not? But we don't give those authorities.

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  How have you thought about maintaining this, maintaining, you know, the culture of open gov, which feels like, you know, it's Silicon Valley take on, on, on the category. How have you thought about maintaining and kind of like figuring, you know, because I, because I think you went in, I'm sure, early days, bright eyed into this business, being like, we're going to fix all this stuff. It's going to be like, we're just going to move fast and make things. And then I'm sure you were kind of battle hardened by, by the reality of building and selling into these types of companies. But, but now, post, post-exit, you want to maintain that original kind of like spirit.

• 2:42:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's a couple of things. I mean, we started early and there were a few important insights. One, we're apolitical. Our customers can, can do the politics. They got to fight in the arena. We provide technology. So we, you know, we're here to support. We make them the heroes. Number two, we never play victim. It's a very hard business. It's a, it's a get rich slow scheme, as I sometimes joke. And if we, you know, can't get a sale over the line or something, you know, a wrench is thrown in, it's very easy to be like, these people are idiots. They're so dumb. They don't get how good we are. And we just cut, I cut that off at the knees, like literally in 2012. We don't play victim. We go back to work. We build a better product. We build a better go to market.

• 2:43:18Speaker 07

  We hold ourselves to a higher standard. We're going to win because of the quality of our products and services and so on. And we've kind of held strong to that. The culture's getting stronger than, than ever. By the way, we came back to the office and that's hard for a lot of people, but like, I don't know what I was thinking, staying remote, virtual and distributed for so long through the COVID crisis.

• 2:43:42Jordi Hays?

  But you recommend it, you recommend it to your competitors, right?

• 2:43:45Speaker 07

  I, I, I would, I'd do anything to help my competitors be fully remote, virtual.

• 2:43:51Jordi Hays?

  Fully distributed, fully distributed.

• 2:43:53Speaker 07

  In fact, maybe I should write a handbook on how to make the announcement at your all hands and say, move to the beach, move home with your parents, keep your salary, we support you because we're so inclusive.

• 2:44:05John Coogan?

  This is my hot take, you gotta write a book, The 20 Hour Work Week and sell it to as many people as possible. Yeah, just like 20 hours.

• 2:44:13Jordi Hays?

  How to win, how to win selling into the government, the 20 hour work.

• 2:44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, just 20 hours.

• 2:44:17Speaker 07

  Run your whole company on Slack and email. Like, you don't have to talk to people.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:22Speaker 07

  Maybe do it from the putting green too. So, culture wise, we're very hard charging. We, we call it like donuts and doorbusters. We'll like, we, we show up with donuts and we'll kick down the door in the, of the local government and sell literally door to door. So this is very high energy, high evangelism. We're literally trying to make change among these old line bureaucratic entities and drag themselves into modernity and into an AI first future.

• 2:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, I want to talk more, but John has to get.

• 2:44:57John Coogan?

  My plane's leaving in 40 minutes and I have to get to Burbank, so I have to run.

• 2:45:02Jordi Hays?

  Headed up.

• 2:45:02John Coogan?

  I'm going to San Francisco. You want to hang out a little bit? I'll be there in a couple hours.

• 2:45:06Speaker 07

  Well, next time you come up, come by Open Gov, I'll give you a tour and we'll hang out.

• 2:45:10John Coogan?

  Sounds awesome.

• 2:45:10Jordi Hays?

  Come back on anytime. I really enjoyed this. You're our new local government correspondent and expert.

• 2:45:17Speaker 07

  The space has gotten hot, guys. I'm sure you, I'm sure you hear about, you know, all the P E firms like hovering and VCs are trying to, you know, and Y Combinator are trying to figure out how to kill.

• 2:45:28Jordi Hays?

  I don't want anyone else bringing AI to my local government except Zachary Bookman.

• 2:45:34Speaker 07

  Very kind of you.

• 2:45:35Jordi Hays?

  It makes me sick to think that other people think they can compete in your category.

• 2:45:39Speaker 07

  Competition's good.

• 2:45:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:41Speaker 07

  It's all good. Although I think a lot of people are in for more pain than they might realize.

• 2:45:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, anybody's welcome to compete if they're willing to slog it out for a decade.

• 2:45:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, great hanging. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:45:53Jordi Hays?

  Great hanging.

• 2:45:53Speaker 07

  It's an honor to see you guys.

• 2:45:54John Coogan?

  See you guys.

• 2:45:55Jordi Hays?

  Have a great weekend. Thanks for joining.

• 2:45:56John Coogan?

  Bye. And that's our show. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and thank you for watching.

• 2:46:01Jordi Hays?

  Get to the airport.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  Only three days till Monday.

• 2:46:04Jordi Hays?

  Only three days till Monday. Everybody wish John good luck getting to his flight is a good show.

• 2:46:09John Coogan?

  I think I'm gonna be in a white suit on the plane.

• 2:46:11Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:46:12John Coogan?

  See you later.

• 2:46:12Jordi Hays?

  Have a great weekend, folks. Love you. Bye.