X Under Attack, Dom Day, Yardsale Thesis, Manus, Bread and Taxes, DeepSeek

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, March 10th, 2025. We are live from the

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We are under attack, folks. Hackers have been attacking X. They've seen what we've been doing with this show. They know it's too powerful. They're coming for you. They're coming for us.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  They came for the whole platform.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Be afraid. What is going on?

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Elon, Elon says it's a cyber attack by a nation state.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  He does.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  We have, we do have some.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  We have a post. We already printed it. It went up and we printed it immediately. Elon says there was, there was slash still is a massive cyber attack against X. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources, either a large coordinated group or a country is involved. He's tracing it. And then someone in the comments says they want to silence you and this platform. And he says, yes, so we know the truth. This platform, we are part of this platform. They're trying to silence us, but we can't be stopped. We're still streaming. We're still live. We're still reading posts out loud. But first, we got to talk about this weekend. I went skiing in Lake Tahoe. It was fantastic. And we wanted to break down what's going on. If you haven't followed, the market's in turmoil. It's in freefall. And

• 1:14John Coogan?

  we have a thesis for what's, for what's going on. And we have a bunch of evidence to back this up.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  We do, we do.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  What are we calling it, folks?

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  The yard sale.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  The yard sale. It's a yard sale.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  For those that don't know, yard sale is when you're skiing and you have, you have a bad enough accident that all of your gear basically just gets rejected off of your body.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Both poles and both skis.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and oftentimes the helmet, goggles and gloves.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  And so they get spread out over the mountain and you have to go and kind of collect yourself.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Because everything's laid out for you to pick from.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Today is, don't check your public account.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  Just don't even look at it.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Don't even look at it.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  Just watch, stay, stay with us. But it's an absolute.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Maybe it's a good day to teach people that dollar cost averaging.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Right? And not trying to time the markets.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Never works. So that's what we'll be talking about.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I actually have to, when, when Nvidia, after DeepSeek announcement and Nvidia went down tremendously, I was down 15%. I just, you know, instantly bought it.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm guessing of round share.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  But for a minute there, for about a month, I looked like a genius.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  You look genius.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  I looked like a genius. Okay, so we, but anyway, so this is John's working theory. He was skiing this weekend and he sort of figured this out, but the yard, the yard sale thesis.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, the yard sale thesis.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  What is the genesis of it?

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Talk to the audience about that.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  So the yard sale thesis is essentially, as everyone knows, during ski season, all the greatest capital allocators in the world head to the slopes. They're sitting on ski lifts. And what's unique about ski lifts? It's almost, it's very much like a sauna, in that there aren't, there's no one that's eavesdropping on you. There's not a lot of technology around. People can speak freely. And you also wind up with somewhat random people, but everyone's kind of in the same milieu because they're all paying $2,000 a day to ski at some Icon Pass or Epic Pass location. And so.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  $2,000. Are you talking about room and board and, and everything?

• 3:05John Coogan?

  I mean, I'm pretty sure the lift tickets are like over 600 now a day. They're like a one day thing. So, yeah. So, so, so there's this filter that basically says, you know, there's this economic floor that basically you have to be a capital allocator to get on the slopes these days with the prices where they are. But that creates a lot of, of random chance interactions between folks who have different insights into different pieces of the market.

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  And they're moving size.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  They're moving size, for sure. And they're speaking freely because they're just like, I'm up here, I'm cold, I'm trying to just bond with someone on this ski lift. And I'm not worried I'm being eavesdropped on because I'm not in an office. I'm not, I'm not at a crowded coffee shop.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  I'm on a, I'm on a ski chair lift. And so, so the rumors start flying. The rumor mill happens on, on the ski lift. And if you'll see at the end of the ski lift, there's always a sign that says tips up. It's like, it says like, put the stock tips away, guys. Because you don't want the stock tips going out once you're, once you're off the ski lift. You want to keep.

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  Because you don't want the, you don't want to be getting a notification that says the market is down 20%.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Tips up.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  Tips up.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  And so you.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing, the other factor is even on gondolas.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  There's a big issue where, let's say you're skiing with a buddy.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  You get on a gondola, maybe it's a six person gondola. Everybody's got their goggles on, their helmets, a couple, you know, two guys think they're just having a regular conversation. They don't know that somebody that has 10 billion of AUM is two seats over picking that up and trading.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  This, this happened to me. Cause I would get on, I was in full gear. You couldn't tell who I was and, and I would overhear people saying, oh, there's like TBPN. It's like the biggest thing. Like it's the best thing ever. Like it's taking over the world.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  I wish they did seven days a week.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. A lot of people were saying like, I used to be a podcaster. I'm actually shutting down because of what's going on with TBPN. So, but they probably wouldn't have said that if, if they knew that I was sitting right there.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  So that, those types of conversations.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  It's because they don't know you're 6'8".

• 4:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  There's not that many 6'8" people skiing if they, if they knew you were 6'8", but you're sitting down all the time on the show. So it's hard to tell.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So, uh, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of stock tips flying around and you know, sometimes someone has a little tip, hey, maybe Silicon Valley Bank isn't so hot. You hear it on the ski chair. You go, you take a short position. One thing leads to another and the whole company collapses. Uh, but you think we're crazy. You think this is some weird thing that, oh, really? There should just be like the average amount of financial collapses and frauds are discovered during ski season, right? It's only a couple of months, but we have a list here for you of financial frauds that happened during ski season. And when you hear this list, you're gonna start believing in the yard sale, the yard sale theory of finance. You're gonna believe us because look, Black Monday, the global stock market crashed.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Right, right when the mountains around the world are starting to open.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  October 19th, 1987, the Dow Jones plunges 22.6% in a single day.

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Like, I mean, yeah, it was probably early, early snow, but you're getting out there.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  You know, oftentimes the mountains not open to everyone. You gotta have a special relationship, you know, be.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and, and so the only people that would even be skiing then.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  Are the most important allocators.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  Are the heaviest setters.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Definitely. Yeah. Uh, the bearings bank collapse, February 16th.

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  Smack in the middle. Yeah, yeah. There's no other way to explain this other than.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  And this was a 20, 233 year old UK-based merchant bank. They failed after a rogue trader's unauthorized losses. Those, those losses, 830 million bankrupted the firm. Those could have been hidden for months more, but of course rumor mill comes out on the ski lift and boom, gone, dead, February 26th.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  We gotta figure out more about this because it's a 233 year old company and one dude goes rogue.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Oh, there's a movie about it. It's great.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Maybe because he wasn't invited on a ski trip.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  He was in Singapore. They don't ski there.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's probably what happened.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, the rest of the firm back in the UK was going to Switzerland. And he, he got a, was it, did they even have email in 90?

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  So he gets an email. He says it's an auto-

• 7:00John Coogan?

  I know, I think they might, they might have faxes, but not many emails. 95? That's like right on the cusp of email. Yeah. Well, speaking of email, dot com crash, March 10th, 2000. That, that's actually 25 years ago today.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  It became, by the 2000s, it was ubiquitous.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  Mid, mid 90s, they were definitely using. So he probably sent an email to a client.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  Auto, or not a client, his coworker auto response.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  Hey, I'm in Switzerland this weekend skiing with the firm. And he realized that, he just goes rogue.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  He just goes rogue. He's like, I, I, I, I gotta make more money because I gotta be able to get on these ski trips.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's for sure what's happened.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  So bankrupts his 233 year old company.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  It is the, can you believe it's the 25 year anniversary of the dot com crash, March 10th, 2000?

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  There was a 78% index drop by 20, by 2002. Just total, total sell off. And everyone's like, oh, it's so telling. Like there's a minor drop today. It's, you know, forecast. But it does feel like that. It feels crazy today. Anyway, Enron scandal, December 2nd, 2001. The Argentine economic crisis in December of 2001.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  The Parma Lot bankruptcy, the Enron of Europe, December 24th, 2003, early ski season.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  It was a dairy giant.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Dairy giant.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  There was a bubble.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Sterns collapsed during ski season. Bernie Madoff was discovered during ski season. You know that that has to be a ski season tip.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Right? That, that has chairlift tip all over it.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  Somebody said, hey, I tried to, you know, pull my funds out.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  He said, uh, you know, give me, give me a few years.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Theranos was discovered March 14th.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Gosh.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  You know, John Kerry Rue was probably on the slopes, picking something up from some investor who passed and saw the, saw the data room. The COVID-19 market crash, I mean, really, clearly, really the fault of ski season. Evergrande, FTX, SVB, and Credit Suisse all happened during ski season.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  That last one makes total sense.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  Because I'm sure that deal, this was a rescue, but I'm sure that deal was getting done. In Switzerland on the slope.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  Definitely.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  So it's one of those things.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Definitely.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  The catalyst for these crashes are happening on the slopes and then the fix is also happening on the slopes.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  You know, interesting scenario.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Anyway, stay sharp.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  Did you get any, did you get any tips this weekend?

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Not, not too many tips.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  Just the usual like rare fish, rare birds, you know.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  Perpetual alpha.

• 9:38John Coogan?

  Putting, buying mice in a five to one, female to male ratio and releasing them in your competitors.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Office, that, just the usual.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people on your trip were probably doing that years ago.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. It's kind of priced in at this point. Most competitors have mice defenses at this point.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  It's priced in.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  I heard there's a rumor that there's a firm building a Godzilla sized humanoid robot and sort of shaking up the market.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Kind of Pacific Rim, going Pacific Rim mode?

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's part of why Tesla's down.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Tesla this year, at least Tesla is down over 36% in the last month. And some people are saying it's because somebody came out and they're making a humanoid, a humanoid that's a hundred times bigger than Optimus.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, market obviously pricing that in.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the real, the real risk is the dripped out humanoid, right? As soon as someone puts it in.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Balenciaga.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Balenciaga, then it's truly over.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Speaking of it's over, I have a funny post here from David Holes, founder of Mid Journey. He's quote tweeting Intel that just tweeted AI and then he quote tweets and says, it's over. It's so over.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  It really is. They didn't quite top tick yet, but they, they, they marked like the last sort of potentially the dying breath of the bull market.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  It's, it's pretty powerful. Like if you're running that brand, like, and you're self-aware and you understand that by, by, you're going to, like the read on you posting, that is going to be top.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Maybe you should move Intel's entire treasury into a short position and then tweet AI.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  That's a really powerful move.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  You need to make a quick buck. You're not really making much.

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that's.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Semiconductors anymore.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Saying Chip Sack going away. We need a different source of capital for this.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, become a hedge fund.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Just know that that by by being extremely cringe on the timeline, you can move the market, Intel.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they did it.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  They did it.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  They did it.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  They did. Anyway, should we move on to some of these, some of these more serious stories?

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  It is. It is interesting. I'm sure somebody out there has a ridiculous conspiracy theory that requires a tinfoil hat that basically says that if you were a hedge fund that was needing to unwind a lot of positions and you knew that like a lot of trading activity was catalyzed by like general, you know, the retail traders are on X being like, what is happening? Like the market's down and you needed to unwind like one, if you needed like to buy, you know,

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, cause.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  A day. Just, just take down X. You start, you know, unwinding those positions.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Totally, probably, you know, unrealistic, but it's funny to think about.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I mean, my, my experience on X today has not been that bad. I've been seeing most, most things, I feel like. You say it was really bad for you.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  Terrible. Yeah.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  But maybe they're targeting you because you're too powerful.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  But I think it could be there. They could be faking it. One, to elevate their brand. We're so important that a nation state would attack us and two.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Faking it?

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And two, to remind us how good the app is.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  And to say like, we can take this away at any time.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  Pony up an extra.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 13:02Jordi Hays?

  $10 a month.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  I still, I still think the leading theory is they're coming after us.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Anyway, China Autonomous Agent Manus changes everything. Article in.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Can we, can we create a?

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Forbes.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Manus? I'm going to call it Manus.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Manus.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 13:21John Coogan?

  Manus?

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  Manus?

• 13:22John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  I think you're right that it's.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, there's a profile in Forbes about some AI mumbo jumbo.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  This was shaking up the timeline.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Jordi Hays?

  Last week.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Shaking up the timeline.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  Why don't we read through it and then I have some other supporting posts.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  One recent evening in Shenzhen, a group of software engineers gathered in a dimly lit coworking space. You know, you're in the journalistic trenches when you're writing about dimly lit coworking spaces. Everyone, if something's dimly lit.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  We need to get.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  It's making it into the profile.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  We need to get some rats.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  Get some rats.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Furiously typing as they monitored the performance of their new AI system. The air was electric, thick with the hum of servers and the glow of high resolution monitors. They were testing Manus, a revolutionary AI agent capable of independent thought and action.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  Who wrote this? Who wrote this article? Do you?

• 14:09John Coogan?

  It says it was written by Manus AI for journalism. No, Craig Smith.

• 14:16Jordi Hays?

  But what, do you know what publication this is from?

• 14:18John Coogan?

  This is in Forbes.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay. So they paid for it.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  I mean, it is crazy that Forbes has like a contributor section that you can just post anything.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  It's like Forbes, Forbes is also like a magazine that has like some pretty legitimate writers and then it's also just like a forum.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  With anyone that can post. So within hours, it's March 6 launch would send shock waves through the global AI community, reigniting a debate that had simmered for decades. What happens when artificial intelligence stops asking for permission and starts making it on its own decisions? Manus is not just another chatbot, nor is it merely an improved search engine dressed in futuristic branding. It is the world's first fully autonomous AI agent, a system that doesn't just assist humans, it replaces them from analyzing financial transactions to screening job candidates. Manus navigates the digital world without oversight, making decisions with a speed and precision.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  This is an insane article.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  It is.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  Especially once we get into the actual like how this product is built.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  I love it. That's why you come here, folks. We haven't read the article yet, but we will tell you that it's insane if it's crazy.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, it's crazy and I'll just jump to it.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  This account, @geonxliao says, so I simply asked Manus to give me the files at slash opt slash dot Manus and it just gave me their sandbox runtime code. It's Claude Sonnet with a bunch of tools on top of it and it uses like an out of the box. Like YC company for the browser.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's basically like a turbo wrapper.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  And, and I mean, what, okay, so.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  So they, and, and they intentionally like obfuscated the code where they're trying to not make it. They, they intentionally tried to hide that it was running on browser use with Claude. But it in fact is.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Okay, so let's read a little bit of this. Let's, let's read more of this article, but I want to know. I think as much as we're joking about like, oh, it's paid for. I don't think that's necessarily what's happening. There is another possibility here, which is just genuine, genuine rizzing of the journalist, which happens all the time.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  You can totally bring in a journalist and be like, like, I mean, I know someone who like, I mean, we see it all the time. We see it all the time with like, you bring a journalist in and you're like, the, the, the, the, the value is in the box.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  This isn't a future.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  The computer.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  This isn't a futuristic.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  You show them like, like, yeah, yeah, you show them like RGB keyboards and they're like, what? Like, no way. The computer is lighting up. And so like, like it is possible just to like, wow, a journalist. The good ones, you're not going to, you're not going to slide this past Ashley Vance, one of the greatest journalists in history.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  But who knows? But at the same time, maybe there's something real here. Let's dig in. Since we're only a paragraph in it, we're already judging this book by its cover.

• 17:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, we're having fun here. Craig, I love you. Good luck. Anyway. How did China, often perceived as trailing the United States in foundation AI research, produce something that Silicon Valley had only theorized about? And more importantly, what does it mean for the balance of power in artificial intelligence?

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  It's really funny.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  This is extreme riz.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  I know, extreme riz.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  We're already going so hard on this and we haven't even popped the bottle of Dom, Dom Perignon. It's a Dom, it's a Dom episode, folks. If you haven't, if you haven't seen our, our post yet today. The second deep seek moment they're calling it, which I don't buy at all, because I didn't actually see this take over the timeline like deep seek at all. Did you? I mean, I saw some memes about it and like some people talking about it, but not, it was not like dominant in any way like deep seek was. So they give some backstory on deep sea.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  This is great.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  Moment.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  By the way, so the, this article is called China's autonomous agent Manus changes everything. Built, you know, entirely on, on US.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Technology.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Technology. And then tech crunch, tech crunch.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Anthropics in the UK, right? Aren't they? Wait, why do I think that? Why do I think they're a European company? I don't know. Anyway.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  You were skiing, maybe you banged your head. John, John hit his head.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  They just have like, they just have like a European aesthetic to them, I guess.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they do have a state of mind.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  But I think they might literally be in San Francisco.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then TechCrunch publishes an article that says Manus probably isn't China's second deep-seak moment.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Okay, wait, oh, TechCrunch did?

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Ooh, TechCrunch.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  And Axios, Axios, who's always sort of very bearish on Texas, new Chinese AI agent draws deep-seak comparison. Maybe they were referencing.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  That's true. Like, that's, that's like literally what happened. But Manus represents something entirely different. It's not just another model. It's an autonomous agent. An AI system that thinks, plans, executes tasks independently, capable of navigating the real world as seamlessly as a human intern with an unlimited attention span. And so, I mean, I guess if you're a Forbes reader and you've never heard of an AI agent, this is like informative. Manus is unique in its ability to deliver end-to-end results across diverse domains without human prompts, while most other AI systems require some level of human input or operate within narrower scopes. Manus acts independently, offering a seamless self-directed experience. I mean, there is something real about autonomous agents and stuff, like it just depends on, you know, how far are we going with this? Because they're like, it doesn't require any input. And they're like, if you tell it to do this, it will do it. It's like, well, that's an input, right?

• 19:28John Coogan?

  Autonomous agents already exist in narrow domains, think trading. Wow, typo. Trading BTOs, clearly trading bots. This was hammered out.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  I guess they didn't.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  But you know what's not AI? You know it's not AI. That's the beauty of this. You know.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  Maybe this, maybe this entire article.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  My respect for this article just went through the roof.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  But Manus multi-agent architecture enhances its ability to manage complex workflows by deploying specialized subagents for various tasks. That's pretty cool. A feature not yet standard in most autonomous AI systems. I don't know if that, if that's actually true. I think there are subagents in some systems, but anyway.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, this entire article. Is written like they took all the talking points from a PR team and just wrote it out.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  I mean, this is an open secret that like companies write Forbes articles sometimes.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's not as open as it should be.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah. This is what sets Manus apart from its Western counterparts while ChatGPT 4 and Google Gemini rely on human prompts to guide them. Manus doesn't wait for instructions. Instead, it is designed to initiate tasks on its own, assess new information and dynamically adjust its approach. For instance, given a zip file of resumes, Manus doesn't just rank candidates, reads through each one, extracts relevant skills, crush references them with job market trends and presents a fully optimized hiring decision.

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because OpenAI could have come out with Operator and done exactly this.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Oh, 100%.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Because it would be, it just wouldn't work.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Exactly. Everyone would be like, oh my God.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  And so I will actually be highly impressed with Manus and give them credit if we can see evidence of American users being like, this is super valuable.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm using this for the XYZ task.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, like maybe, maybe Operator needs a puff piece like this, like to actually break through. That'd be, that'd be good.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  It just, yeah, the only thing standing between Operator and world dominance is a Forbes.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Let's call Sam. Hey, you know, quit the going direct stuff. Quit, quit, quit the beef. You just need puff pieces from here on out.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Time to puff.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Time to puff. Yeah, we need the inverse Lulu. Don't go direct. Just, just puff. Pure puff.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  Anyway, Manus operates like an executive overseeing a team of specialized subagents. Probably cool and good. This is called the multi-agent architecture. I think this is going to be a real trend. It's cloud-based asynchronous operation is another game changer.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Game changer. I love it. Traditional AI assistants need a user's active engagement. Manus does not. It runs its tasks in the background, pinging users only when results are ready, much like a hyper-efficient employee who never requires micromanagement. I want, I want Scott Wu from cognition on the show so badly right now because he's been.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  We should have him on this week.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll text him and see if he can come on because like he's probably reading this being like.

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  He's not reading this.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  He's not reading this, let's be honest.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  The only article you should be reading in Forbes this week is Justin Marres, the Roth King.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Yes, very good profile.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  Who will be coming on the show on Thursday.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. So we love Forbes.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  But that's like an actual Forbes article. It was like a profile with a real writer.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Who like went and hung out with him.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Instead of just like took the talking points and printed them.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Used Manus, they used Manus to make this article.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Okay, here, let's go to Rowan Chung, a tech writer who tested Manus by asking it to write a biography of himself and build a personal website. Within minutes, the agent had scraped social media, extracted professional highlights, generated a neatly formatted biography, coded a functional website and deployed it online. It even troubleshooted hosting issues without ever asking for additional input. That's a pretty cool use case, if that's doable.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  No, that is the real potential of this technology and it's amazing and people are gonna do it.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  I only have issues with how it's being framed.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. A shock to Silicon Valley system. For years, the dominant AI narrative has centered around large US tech firms, OpenAI, Google, Meta, developing more powerful versions of their language models. The assumption was that whoever built the most sophisticated chatbot would control the future of AI. Manus disrupts that assumption. It is not just an improvement over existing AI. It's a new category of intelligence, shifting the focus from passive assistance to self-directed action, and it is entirely Chinese-built. It has triggered a new wave of unease in Silicon Valley where AI leaders have quietly acknowledged that China's aggressive push into autonomous systems could give it a first-mover advantage in critical sectors. Like.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Break out the, I was gonna say break out the DOM because I just wanna distract myself from this terrible article.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  This is ridiculous.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, continue.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Yet Manus raises profound ethical and regulatory questions. What happens when an AI agent makes financial decisions that cost a company millions, or when it executes a command incorrectly leading to real-world consequences? Who is responsible when an autonomous system trained to act without oversight makes the wrong call? Well, it's the person that initiated the system very clearly. But I'm sure there'll be plenty of legal court cases around that. Chinese regulators historically are more willing to experiment with AI deployment, yet have yet to outline clear guardrails for AI autonomy. Meanwhile, Western regulators face even greater challenge.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  They can do whatever you want. Just don't mention the Uyghurs.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty simple guardrails.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, the era of autonomous AI agents has begun and China is leading the charge. The rest of us need to rethink what it means to work, create and compete in a world where intelligence is no longer a uniquely human asset.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  Last line is.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  What you got?

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Last line's fair.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  I think that's, that's the only.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Only sentence that I didn't have to put in the truth.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  There's plenty of fair lines and there's all, it's all junk.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's another, there's another.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Reactions.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, guy Philip Schmidt from the AI, he's at, uh, Google DeepMind, so he's conflicted. So he said hype versus reality, it's built on anthropic Claude's sonnet, not their own foundation model, has access to 29 tools and uses browser. Uh, browser use, which is a browser control product.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  The user communicates with the executor agent and not the planner and other agent. Each user gets an isolated sandbox environment and it outperforms OpenAI deep research on the GAI benchmark. And he, his, his take is building AI products doesn't require training your own foundation model. We're probably just scratching the surface of what existing models can do with the right tooling and integration. And this was the big point, I think it was Sarah Guo who was saying this, where like, even if all the models just like ceased to get smarter and.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  There's still so much low hanging fruit.

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's still just all this low hanging fruit.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Ashen Brenner, like the unhobblings, like you give it access to Python, you give it access to the web browser and you give it access to databases. And once it has that, it's going to perform so much better. It is funny that, I mean, this whole narrative would be so much, so much stronger if they were using DeepSeek. Then it would really feel like, oh, wow, like, you know, like, like, like the Chi, yeah, yeah, like it might be two different Chinese companies and they might be built on, it might be a DeepSeek wrapper. But it's like, there's something serious going on over there in China. Uh, this is like, kind of silly that they built it on, on Claude, but I guess they gotta go with the best. I mean, it's kind of a bear signal for DeepSeek too.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Odd. Yeah.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Anyway, should we pop this bottle of Dom Perignon?

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's do it.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  If you, if you, if you're not following along, we open a bottle of Dom Perignon every time we double the show.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh my gosh.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  You don't need to cut away from that.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  We open a bottle of Dom Perignon every time we double the show's audience and size. We've been on an absolute tear lately, if you haven't been following. We crossed 16,000 followers.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  This was, this was a while ago at this point.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  This was a while ago. We, we, there was a lot going on. We were doing guests, so we didn't have a lot of time to actually do a proper Dom episode. But those who have been with us from the start have seen four or five at this point.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  So the next one, the next one is going to be at 32K and we just made a new hire, which we haven't formally announced yet, but I think we're going to hit that 32K mark fairly quickly with where things are going. Thank you, sir.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  And every time I open the Dom, it goes everywhere.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  That's part of life.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  It is.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  It's part of champagne.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  It is.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  John, cheers to you. Cheers to the show. Cheers to Ben.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  It really is going fantastically. We like to say that exponential growth is the most powerful force in the world.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  And.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Delicious.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  And also.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  Ben, do you want some?

• 28:10John Coogan?

  The only, the only thing you should. Stay locked in.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  He's staying locked in.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and the only alcohol you should drink is Dom Perignon.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  I stand by that.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let's move on to another AI story. Sam Altman's other startup is building an app to compete with Elon Musk's ex. Talk about, they are competing in every possible realm now.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  This is.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  This is just.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  The CEO of OpenAI imagines a future where you'll, where you'll constantly demonstrate that you're not a robot. His everything app is the answer, but first he needs to look deep into your eyes. From Christopher Mims, an actually great journalist.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Love Christopher Mims.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Mim.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  And yeah, this is obviously built on top of WorldCoin, the eyeball scanner, very controversial. But at the same time, there's a ton of bots. I don't know if you saw Nikita Beer talking about this over the weekend.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Saying like, you know, anytime you get some weird reply, just Google the person's name.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  No, not even weird, just any reply.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Any reply, yeah.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  See if they're a real person. Oh, the interesting, uh, relevant example to this was there was a woman that just was hyping Manus just over and over and over, super aggressively. Uh, this woman named Jen Zhu and I, she says she's an investor. She has a TED Talk.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which, which is real.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  But then you go to her fund.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  But to be fair, Sam Hyde also has a TED Talk, so.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  That's true. It's not.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  The bar is pretty low.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  Anybody can have a TED Talk these days. Everybody gets a universal basic, basic TED Talk and Forbes article.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so anyways, I, I look, uh, I look up her fund and on LinkedIn, there's, there's nobody that works for the fund, not even her.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  Weird.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  So, and it's an AI generated image. She's got a bunch of followers. It's like, clearly, you know, you know, if she's a real person, Jen Zhu, come on the show.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  You're welcome. Would like to talk to you about Manus.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Is like, there's clearly a real person behind the bots. So like, why don't they just use their own photo and name?

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Like, it's very odd. Anyway, uh, let's read a little bit of this and give you some backstory on, uh, on what Sam's thinking with a social network that is bot-free. Uh, Mims writes, "These ubiquitous orbs would allow us to do anything requiring identification, online or in real life, from buying bread to paying taxes." Very interesting example there. Uh, "It's a vision reminiscent to other efforts."

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  It's like the most dystopian example. You're gonna use your orb.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  You're gonna use your orbit when you're in the bread line.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  When you're in the bread line and when you're, when you're paying Uncle Sam.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Paying taxes and the future is just buying bread and paying taxes. It's not like, it's not like, it could be so much more optimistic.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  You could be sports betting. You're gonna need this.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  It could easily be like, yeah, you need this to log into your flying car. Like, you know, when, when, when you get through customs on the moon, like, you could be so much more optimistic. Instead, it's just buying bread and paying taxes. That's the future. What do they say, death and taxes? Bread and taxes, that's the future. It's a vision reminiscent.

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  Not even bread and circuses.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, not even bread and circuses. It's a vision reminiscent of other recent efforts, including Amazon's attempt to replace credit cards with our palms and Ant Group's efforts in China to make it possible to pay with your face. The big difference, the builders of an app called World, including chief executive Alex Blania and his co-founder Sam Altman of OpenAI fame envision a time in the not too distant future when you can't do much without an ocular check-in. AI agents will be so prevalent and so human-like that we'll need to repeatedly prove we're human to prevent those AIs from masquerading as humans on everything from payment platforms to social networks. I think that there is something legitimate here. Rune had a good post about like the, the, the variations in understanding how much AI is between you and the person that you're interacting with.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  And it's like, it's like, because there will be, you're, you're interfacing with like a humanoid robot, but there's, uh, there's a human teleoperating it and you're hearing a real voice versus the opposite, which is like, you're talking to an actor, but everything, all the lines they're saying are chat GPT generated or something. So there's like, all these weird edge cases.

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  Or, or the humanoid that you're talking to in English is a AI agent that is just generating.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Totally. You know, and I mean, we're like, clearly this is coming. Clearly there needs to be some sort of counterweight to this, whether it's regulatory or technology. And I like the idea of a tech-based solution here as opposed to something like, oh, we're scared of bots online. Let's ban them or like, let's make it illegal to, to use, you know, AI-generated text.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, everybody that's traveled at all, it's now the facial recognition is technically not required, but it is so aggressively pushed that people don't realize it's not required when you're at, when you're in the TSA.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Security.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  You can just say, I don't want to do a facial recognition scan today. And they go, okay. And they just look at your ID and you can go through. So it's still opt in, but they've been sort of training the citizenry on, you know, this technology.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  And yeah.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  I always opt in. I want to prove my loyalty to America.

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  And, and the deep state specifically, I want them to know I'm on their side.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm on your team.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  These are my guys.

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. John's guys.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. AI agents will be so prevalent.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  Future member.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. To accelerate adoption.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  Hall of Fame.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Let's just make sure we keep politics out of the deep state, folks. To accelerate adoption of what the world calls its autonomous proof of human system. The company recently launched a mini app inside of its app, which is available for iPhones and Android devices.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  World's mini app is part of a broader strategy to create an everything app. These apps, so-called super apps are common throughout Asia. World's mini app store, which currently includes services to send and receive cryptocurrency, chat with verified humans and access microloans is a first step towards creating what Altman, Blania, and their team hope will be a vast ecosystem, reaching more than a billion people. As, and as the company's identification system expands, they anticipate their main competitor will be Elon Musk's own attempt at an everything app X. I think it will take a while until we seriously collide. Blania told me on Tuesday, given that X is now primarily a social network, the app formerly known as Twitter has yet to launch a payment service.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  So here's the crazy thing.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  And world has yet to launch.

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  I do believe that OpenAI will have significantly more monthly actives than X by the end of the year.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  Which is a wild situation where, so Elon is competing with OpenAI by, you know, forcing you to use Grok in these various ways, which is smart.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  But then Sam Altman could. catalyze his own competitive product to X by funneling people from chat GPT into the world everything app, whatever.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting dynamic.

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so the orbs have not launched in the United States there, but there are pictures of them all over in like foreign countries, which is kind of an interesting strategy. I mean, most of the time, like you want to launch in the US first and then kind of broaden out, but they're kind of doing the opposite. Within about 12 months, however, Blaney believes the two services will start to compete in earnest. If so, it would be notable development in part because making everything apps work in the West has proved extremely difficult. The bottom line is that for most people with an Android phone or iPhone who haven't grown up in the tech ecosystems of Asia, those app stores already offer the versatility and flexibility that everything apps do. Sam Altman's involvement in world might also encourage competition between world and X.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  It's so hard to.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Pugliestic nature.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  It's so hard to kickstart an everything app because imagine if you go and you get Uber, DoorDash, you build your own messaging, you know, you need some sort of like WeChat, for example, has some core like calling,

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  browser, chat, et cetera. And if you go to an American user now and you say, hey, I'm going to give you messaging, a browser, chat, and I'm going to give you like Uber and all these other and games and all these things. They're going to say, okay, I have all of that.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  So potentially the only way to actually get somebody to switch over is be like, I'm going to pay you to switch. Like, yeah, because like the value trade is just not there.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  That's kind of what's happening, right? Because if you get on WorldCoin, they give you some WorldCoin, then they can moon and it's like the same.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  So it's possible.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Economics.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So it's just, yeah, unless you're literally paying your users.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  I mean, the flip side is like, is like, you could, you could very easily imagine this working if Apple somehow, I don't know, like acquired it or like built it in because when you think about like, like, you know, you need to be scanning all the time. You need very deep access to the camera APIs to make sure that you're getting like real images instead of like images that have been passed through some sort of extra layer or something. All the different biometrics in the face, in the Face ID system. But I don't, I don't think like Face ID is just a, is an API you can plug into.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  We need a, we need an orb to figure out if these are real images of JD Vans or not.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  So few people in the US have heard of World, formerly known as WorldCoin. If they have, it's probably on account of the company's unique biometric identification system, the orb. So far, orbing millions of people hasn't proved popular with governments around the world, as more than a dozen have either suspended its operation in their countries or else examined its handling of personal data. World investor and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz said on a recent episode of his podcast with Marc Andreessen that the loosening restrictions on crypto companies in the US, he anticipates World will become legal in the US this year. At present, the company doesn't scan eyeballs in the US or allow Americans to hold its WorldCoin token for fear of regulators, Altman has said.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  When asked how long it will be until World sets up locations in the US where people can walk in, present their irises and become part of the network, Blanier declined to say, but he adds the effort is top of mind for him. In general, Blanier brushes aside concerns about regulators, both in the US and abroad.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so this is a crazy statistic. World and its orb Eyeball Scanner have verified 11 million people. They've scanned the irises of 11 million people. That is very impressive, just from a logistical standpoint to get that done.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  And I wish we had more footage on the ground of how this is happening, because I'm imagining they show up in a small town and it's just one dude with an orb and he's like, okay, like, you're, come get your eye scan, we're gonna, you might get money in the future. It seems like probably the trade.

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, basically you get a token drop.

• 38:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  And maybe those tokens are liquid, you can sell them immediately.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  No, but I don't think there, anybody's getting airdropped the token yet.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  No, not if you scanned. I thought there was one way to get access. I thought you could also just buy the token right now, but I don't know.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  You can just buy it.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  It's at a $7.5 billion valuation.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  Not bad.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  Fully diluted, with a market cap of 800 million if you just look at the circulating.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  So significantly lower than Trump Coin.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, I haven't looked at Trump coin.

• 39:26John Coogan?

  Is Trump coin gonna offer eyeball scanning?

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Official Trump.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  It really should.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  Trump is down to a $2 billion mark.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  $2 billion?

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, so Trump coin is down less than the S and P.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  It's a better store of value.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  Better store of value.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  Than Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon?

• 39:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I think it's doing better than Mag7. This is fantastic.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Other systems that rely on biometrics have unnerved users and governments in the past. It's easy to forget the hue and cry once raised about Face ID on the iPhone, the face scanning technology most people now use to unlock their Apple devices. When is it introduced? There were concerns about it, both as a potential security liability and because of the way it evoked mass surveillance systems in China that rely on facial recognition. World says its network is anonymous and secure and only proves you're a person, but it could be made part of a broader identity system. One of World's distinguishing features is that it is an anonymous proof of human system. That is, its eyeball scan can verify that you're a human being and not an AI, but without additional software and systems, it can't identify who you are.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  What could drive people to adopt a system like that, Worlds will be the rise of ever more sophisticated AIs that will make doing business on the internet almost impossible. Interesting, yeah, I mean, if the content's good, sign me up, scan my eyeball. I wanna, I wanna see good posts and if there's no bots and the posts are better, I'm a slop pig for the content. I'm willing to share my biometric data if it gets me, you know, a couple funny bangers in the, in the feed. The real question is, is will, will the slop app be more?

• 41:06Jordi Hays?

  John, by the way, has already finished his first, his first glass here.

• 41:10John Coogan?

  Cheers.

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the real question is like, is like revealed preferences. The stated preference is like, oh, I don't wanna, I don't wanna interact with any bots online, but the revealed preference might be, oh, I love when 100 bots show up and like my post.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  You know, so we'll see. We'll see which one people go with.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  There's been, there's been a few of these where-

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the challenge here is that

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  they're mixing, they're trying to do multiple things at once.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  Right? They're, they're trying to build this, in their words, autonomous proof of human system.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Which to me says it's more like this developer product that other applications and services and things in the real world could leverage as a tool to verify identity and prevent bots.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  Simultaneously, they now have this token, which is its own product in itself, right? We've talked about this before, the, the, the sort of the, the product of the token is its price.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  And so the incentive is just to, to just sort of like drive up, uh, drive up the price and, and do sort of, you know, manipulate the market in that way. And then now they're also saying, we're going to also do consumer apps and we're also going to do an everything app. And it's starting to be like, a lot of things have to go right, right? Sam Lawson talked about this last week and I think this is a good framework.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  Which is like, if you're investing in something, how many individual things need to go right?

• 42:31John Coogan?

  What was his phrase, like no bank shots or something like that?

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And so here, like, you know, these, some of these are experiments.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:38Jordi Hays?

  But, and, but, and it's clear they have sort of like user traction on the supply side. They got, they got eyeballs, right?

• 42:46John Coogan?

  They got eyeballs. Mary Meeker would be proud. Mary Meeker would be very proud. 11 million eyeballs during the dot com, that's 10 billion AUM or in market cap for sure.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  Easily.

• 42:58John Coogan?

  She'll, she'll take that public all day.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  And so they got a, a lot of things seemingly, they're trying to do a lot at once.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Jordi Hays?

  And it seems unclear that any of these things are, again, what, what users want.

• 43:10John Coogan?

  I mean, MIMS is, you were, you were impressed by 11 million. MIMS here says, "World has only or verified 11 million people worldwide, despite the fact that it literally pays them via world coin."

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  So they are paying them in real time.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  25 tokens per scan, roughly $25 at today's prices. Now offers 16 tokens per scan. At the launch date for X's money account service is unclear. The company has said that it will count Visa as its first partner for X. X did not respond to requests for comment. And so, yeah, I mean, I wonder, I wonder if they can keep the, the token price high enough, keep raising money.

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  He says here, X has vastly more users than World does, but it's unclear how many people will be eager. To entrust an Elon Musk owned company with their financial lives?

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they trust him to drive them.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:00Jordi Hays?

  Around. So anyways, that seems like a stretch, but but overall X has more users than world.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  But I believe by the end of the year, OpenAI will have more users than X.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so we are you proposing some sort of like, like theory of like, you know, Elon companies? And we should be thinking about like the same companies.

• 44:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm more so saying, I'm more so saying you can imagine a collaboration between OpenAI and world.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  Where they drive world coin usage through the OpenAI app.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  In the same way that X is partnered with XAI and they're two separate companies, but they're obviously deeply integrated. You can see the same thing happening with with world coin and the chat GPT app.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  That'd be pretty crazy, but I but I think that makes sense.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could imagine. So here's something I've thought about before. So a lot of people have said, give me the best OpenAI models, unlimited access.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  One of the challenges there is that you could sort of do that, but then people would build software on top of them. Where they would just be like querying it and using it for other apps.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:00Jordi Hays?

  And so Sam could come out and say, okay, you can use unlimited OpenAI as long as you are periodically doing this sort of like eyeball recognition through through the orb or some something to that effect. Right? So it's like, you're actually using the product. You're not just like software, a bot that's just sort of like using up inference on behalf of other applications. So.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  I want to see, I want to see the the the pen testers and the hackers try and beat this thing. I want to see George Hot's jailbreak a an orb, because when when Face ID came out, people were like, well, if I 3D print my face and then I put it up and I have this mask, like I can still get through. And it's not that big of a deal. People were trying to break it, but obviously like it is a huge vulnerability. If it's like, you know, the FBI sees the phone and they're not supposed to be able to get in, but then they can just like 3D print a picture of your face and then put hold it up and it verifies.

• 45:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it seems like Apple has gotten pretty good at that.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem like it's you don't hear about, oh, the FBI hacked this person's phone by, you know, holding it up.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  Holding it up.

• 46:03John Coogan?

  Was there some story about that where they they hold it up to someone's face like while they're sleeping or something like that? I feel like that's happened.

• 46:09Jordi Hays?

  The the the safety mechanism is that you your eyes have to be open.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  Oh, for for Face ID?

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 46:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  Let me confirm.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  Well, it'll be a knockout, drag out.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, your eyes do have.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Continues. I'm sure there'll be more entertainment. Never a dull moment when Sam Altman and Elon Musk are.

• 46:28Jordi Hays?

  I would like to have, I, I, I would like to get, I'd like to have the WorldCoin CEO on the show.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd love that.

• 46:35Jordi Hays?

  Just have him give the, the full pitch because it's clearly compelling.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  At a, at a high level.

• 46:42John Coogan?

  It does feel weird, but it also feels like something that like, we could look back on and been like, yeah, that was like, that was a novel enough idea that it broke out. Because, because it's weird and different. And so I've been.

• 46:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if I'm ever, if I'm traveling in any exotic lands.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  You're gonna get scanned? 25 bucks is 25 bucks.

• 47:00Jordi Hays?

  25 bucks is 25 bucks. That's, that's a.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  That's a shish kebab somewhere.

• 47:05Jordi Hays?

  You know, Arowan.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  It's an Arowan burrito.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  Burrito.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. With, with almost, you could almost get it delivered off.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  Almost.

• 47:14Jordi Hays?

  Not overseas.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  Almost.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  Not overseas.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  Almost. Okay. Well, should we move on to, to Palmer Lucky in the Wall Street Journal?

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Who is this guy again?

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Palmer Lucky or Tim Higgins, the guy who wrote the show?

• 47:26Jordi Hays?

  Tim Higgins, of course. No, I'm just joking.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Palmer Lucky, they're calling him Donald Trump's original tech bro. He gets his moment in this article.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  Hit him with a slur in the title.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Technology brother, please.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  Original technology brother.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Once and outcast, the Anduril founder's vision for modernizing the government seems possible.

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Opening line of this article, generally tech bros tend to overestimate their ability to change the world.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  It's, I was talking to Solana about this. We're, we're gonna have Solana on the show and, and talk about like the etymology of the tech bro thing. Yeah.

• 48:03Jordi Hays?

  It's a tough thing because we love the journal.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Jordi Hays?

  It's overall fantastic, but to take such a clear and aggressive shot against our culture in the opening line of it.

• 48:12John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, what I'm sure got to mention on the front page.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I mean, I think we, I think we've kind of like retooled and reclaimed this term enough, but it's just very silly because it's such a meaningless term that it really just meant like, anyone who's a male in tech was a bro.

• 48:30Jordi Hays?

  Also, if you think about anybody who ever invented anything.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  A lot of them could be described as. Like, oh, he was a guy that was into technology.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:43Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, there's many more people that that sort of overestimated their abilities and came up short and didn't invent this important thing. But we need the, we need 100 people to try and only one to be successful in order to sort of move the world forward.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, like when this came out, I thought the bar for bro should be way, way higher.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  Like, what do you mean?

• 49:03John Coogan?

  What I mean is that like, like, so there's, there's everyone in tech and then there's everyone in tech who's male, but though not everyone in tech who's a male is a tech bro. In order to be a tech bro, you have to be actively running a technology company that's like building software or hardware, but then also doing keg stands, chugging Miller Lite, like crushing nooners, lots of tattoos, lots of days on the lake, like lots of tank tops, lots of pushups. Like you have to be jacked.

• 49:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like Alexis joined with a tank top.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  You could kind of say.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  And he lives in South Florida.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yeah, I, I, I would forgive the journal for, for calling him a tech bro. But as a term of endearment.

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  This, this picture is, he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like he's, he's potentially the social chair at the top fraternity at his college.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  I think it's really just like up to, up to Palmer. If he, if he's, if he wants to be a tech bro and, and use that, that's fine. But it, but for many years, it was, it was, it was used as pejorative. It was, it was used as a slur. It was used to discredit someone and, and the reason was because the idea of doing science and doing engineering was antithetical to crushing beers with your absolute boys in the frat house. And so by saying, oh, this person's a bro, it meant that they can't be a serious technologist, when that was clearly proven false.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  By Zach.

• 50:27Jordi Hays?

  The Winklevoss brothers.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, all these different folks.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  Running, running a top crypto exchange.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So he goes on to write, Palmer's support of Donald Trump in 2016 got him, according to his recounting, booted from liberal Silicon Valley, pushed out of his job at Facebook and made into a pariah. All that despite the fact that he had sold his virtual reality company Oculus VR to Mark Zuckerberg's social media company for billions and was seen as the OG of VR. I kind of like this writing, actually, it's pretty good. Dejected, he went on to build the next thing, killer AI. It's a hell of an origin story for Anduril Industries, whose initials spell AI. Lucky named the company after the hero's sword in the Lord of the Rings, a weapon also known as the Flame of the West. In many ways Lucky wants his weapons company.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  And that's just.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  What?

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  It's just one of the best.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  Names and stories behind the name.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  In Silicon Valley history, the Flame of the West.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  Flame of the West.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  In doing so, Lucky has become one of the brightest examples of a new wave of ascendant entrepreneurs. They eschew what has made Silicon Valley so powerful, personal gadgets and ad tech, and pour themselves into super hard and sometimes controversial sciences and engineering, as they say, and they say can make America better. Supersonic airplanes, nuclear energy, space travel. These days Lucky likes to tell his origin story.

• 51:50Jordi Hays?

  Because those examples shouldn't really be contro- like, why are they controversial? We should have.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, controversial sciences. I mean, I guess nuclear is a little controversial, but space travel isn't controversial, is it?

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  I guess it is. There's people that say we shouldn't go to space.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  Because of the firm stuff?

• 52:05Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. We have problems on.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Because they're challenging God?

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  Because it's affronting God to try and leave God's green earth?

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  They say, why are you spending all this money blowing up your rockets in space?

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  We have enough problems on Earth. All those hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  Also, very controversial of your flat-earther, this space travel stuff. So, they might be talking about that. They might be highlighting the fact that flat-earthers don't like tech people. Oh, we're gonna go to space. And they're like.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  Doing it over and over again, making movies about it.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. These days Lucky likes to tell his origin story, especially when it became, uh, become cool for Zuckerberg and other tech leaders to be seen as cozying up to President Trump. Zuckerberg told Congress that Lucky's Facebook departure had nothing to do with politics.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of Zuckerberg cozying up to, uh, the American right wing.

• 52:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he was at the UFC.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  UFC.

• 52:55Jordi Hays?

  Saturday night and the stream was really not functioning well.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Really?

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  So Dana, like the pay-per-view.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  So Dana White was streaming from his phone.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Really?

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  And you could hear, he was just, yeah, it was round one. He just had it.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  It's awesome.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Playing.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  And you could hear Zuckerberg talking, being like, oh, where are you streaming from right now? What account are you streaming from? Like he, I could, I think he wanted to go look and like test, like see the quality.

• 53:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Jordi Hays?

  So even, even during the UFC event, he was found remote.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  Wanted to make sure it was during the main event.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  It's cool.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  I love that. All these people have tidied up all of their inconvenient beliefs, Lucky says, which I love. I'm not going to throw it back in their faces and say, oh yeah, but what about this thing that you did eight years ago? It's just not productive. Yeah.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  He said before, it's good. One man.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  That's a little bit different. That's not really an inconvenient belief. That's like a personal interaction. But yeah, we don't talk about politics on this show. Better position now. Lucky is clearly trying to take advantage of the moment that Trump's ascent has created, especially with the Elon Musk led government efficiency effort. Anduril and other high tech companies are trying to convince the Pentagon that their technologies are part of the solution to, for a more efficient, modern government than what's offered by the lumbering giants in defense. The core thesis of Anduril is that we are not a defense contractor, Lucky said. We are a defense product company. We put our own money into building things and we show up not with a PowerPoint, but with a working product. And so the taxpayer isn't taking on the development risk for these products.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  It's great. The flipped model.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Which venture capitalists are.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Makes a lot of sense. Exactly.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  We're grateful for them.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Lucky was dismissed by tech peers as crude and out of touch. Even now, some in Washington remain unimpressed, but for different reasons. What does this guy know about virtual reality? What, what does this guy known for virtual reality know about the battlefield? A rival last year called Anduril the Theranos of defense. I, I, I think I know who they're talking about and it's like, it's like not, not a rival at all. It's not like another entrepreneur, business person. It's like a random poster.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  It's like, it's not like.

• 54:59Jordi Hays?

  An online rival.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

• 55:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But giving him too much credit to say they're a rival.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  Also Theranos.

• 55:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could give it blood, but it would just sort of not, you know, couldn't really do much with it.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  They've shown that they can actually create products that do, you know, they can blow up a truck.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Which by nature means that Theranos is not the right comparison at all.

• 55:22John Coogan?

  It's very silly. Lucky responded on the social media platform X with a photo of his own head superimposed on Elizabeth Holmes' body, a former journalist, a major, before dropping out to work on Oculus in a camper parked in his parents' home. Lucky understands the power of narrative. Even his name sounds like something out of an Elmore Leonard novel, like he should be a loan shark busting heads in Miami rather than an arms dealer holding court in Mar-a-Lago. He's known for his Hawaiian t-shirts, flip flops, and goatee, and a willingness to talk about whatever's on his mind, conspiracy theories, video games, management theories, etc. The first time I met Lucky a few years ago, he talked to me with an incredible enthusiasm.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  It's also so, I mean, this article's funny because it's making him sound really cool.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, like clearly is like, has a negative bend to it.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  Calling him an arms dealer versus a technologist focused on defense.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 56:17Jordi Hays?

  Comparing him to a loan shark busting heads because his name, based on his name.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't get that. This person clearly hasn't studied nominative determinism because there's nothing in Palmer Freeman Lucky that says loan shark to me.

• 56:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Anyway, the first time this writer met Palmer Lucky a few years ago, he talked to me with an incredible enthusiasm about an idea for why people should raise hippos in the swamplands of Louisiana for food. It was something he read about from the 1950s. He said, "I've read this book, The American Hippopotamus. It's a fantastic plan." It actually got all the way to Congress. There was a bill proposed to bring hippos to Louisiana, raise them for food. And, you know, Palmer's here arguing the kind of the same thesis. It was better for land management than grazing cattle on prime real estate elsewhere. Like, you're not going to build a bunch of housing on the bayou. So put the hippos there. They're a little dangerous, but you can like, you know, fence them in and then it's fine. And he says, "Lucky assured me that hippo meat was tasty. It's red meat, though after some

• 57:18John Coogan?

  prodding, he admitted that he had never tried it." Yeah, because it's hard to get a hand on. Andorl was originally backed by Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund and cofounded with Palantir Technology alums, including Democrats.

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  We should give some background on Founder's Fund for anybody that.

• 57:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 57:35Jordi Hays?

  Maybe joined a second ago.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, anyone who's living under a rock. It started out as building sensor towers during the first Trump administration to spot people crossing the border illegally. The company evolved to produce robot drones and then robot submarines called ghost sharks. The gist is to keep US soldiers out of harms way if they all operate with AI. Running on a central operating system, Andorl developed to run across its hardware. That's called Lattice, which we've talked about before.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  This show actually runs on Lattice.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Just the most.

• 58:06Jordi Hays?

  Our Lattice, that should be our new nickname for Ben. Hey, Lattice.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Lattice. Yeah, Jarvis.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this post right now.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  The entrepreneur has proven AI has a place in war and the Ukraine, Russia and Israel Hamas war show that futuristic ideas are becoming commonplace, changing the face of war and how it will be fought in the years ahead. In January, Andorl announced plans to invest almost a billion dollars into a factory in Ohio to build autonomous jet fighters in the US for the Air Force, a contract it won last year. And in February, Andorl said it was taking over Microsoft's $22 billion contract with the US Army to develop augmented reality headsets for the battlefield, a project that marries Lucky's past and present. And I love that. A lot of people are like, oh, what's going to happen there? It's like, he is the perfect person for this. He's like the most qualified person in the world to do VR for the military.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  This is his line. So he made this announcement. He says, whatever you are imagining, however crazy you imagine I am, multiply it by 10 and then do it again. Lucky wrote, I am back and I'm only getting started.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  It is over. We're so back. It's great. I love it. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Anyway, yeah, it's so funny when people come for Palmer is like, oh, he's unqualified for this. It's like, he's, I think he's now like in his 30s and he spent his entire career in like the most powerful rooms in America in like high growth companies, doing real work in every industry. He's met every industry player.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  The consensus view of the future of warfare is sort of if swarms of autonomous, often small hardware devices. So maybe you want to. You want the guy who built like this super complicated VR product and scaled it to millions of sales?

• 59:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:52Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that would be a good guy to.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's like, he's like one of the only hardware founders to be successful out of that 2010s batch. Like, there were a few others that did OK. Smartwatches, scales and stuff, but like, yeah, obviously Oculus, fantastic. So we'll have to have him on the show, dig in more, a little bit of a, a little bit of a puff piece, a little bit of a, just, just like, you know, little tour of.

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  Who Palmer is.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't call it a puff piece.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a little.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Had a very negative.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  It had some negativity, some positivity, but, you know, didn't go too deep.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  We didn't have to put it too hard in the truth zone.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  No, no, no. It was a mild, mild truth zone. Anyway.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna use restroom.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we're moving over to DeepSeek. This is an interesting story. So, uh, obviously DeepSeek blew up and did have an impact on the timeline. A lot of people were following it. And now investors want a piece of DeepSeek, but the founder of DeepSeek says not now. This is from the Wall Street Journal, March 10th. The founder of Chinese artificial intelligence star DeepSeek, which of course spun out of that hedge fund we talked about, has rejected proposals to make quick money from his programs, telling prospective investors that he wants to keep the science project ethos that brought him to global renown. Overwhelmed by millions of users, DeepSeek's chatbot has frequent service hiccups and authorities around the world are restricting its use over data concern, data security concerns.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  The US is weighing measures, including banning DeepSeek from government devices, which of course makes sense because if you're using DeepSeek as an open source LLM that you're self-hosting, you're not sending data there. There's still the question of, is there some sort of Manchurian candidate deep inside the weights? But that's kind of, you know, science fiction right now. But if you're using the DeepSeek app, literally every query, everything that you put into that, uh, that chat, that chat box is going to DeepSeek, which of course, uh, is a Chinese company and, and ultimately responsible to the CCP, uh, potentially. And so. He is also cautious about government linked investors, they said, because he believes the connection to Beijing could make it harder to win global adoption of deep sea AI models.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Liang is at the same, Liang Wenfang has told associates that he isn't in a hurry to get investment. The Chinese company made a global splash earlier this year with its free to use open source AI models. It was the moment deep seek had aimed for since Liang's band of AI researchers began their quest two years ago with words they attributed to French director Francois Truffaut. Be insanely ambitious and insanely sincere. Interesting.

• 1:02:26Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. So I'm just pulling this up. It was my first thought was, uh, deep seek is number 20 in productivity right now. Grok is 31.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  31.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  So Jimmy John's, I don't believe is in the productivity category. Jimmy John's.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  If you weren't following the app store last, last week, the top three apps were chat GPT, Jimmy John's and Hallow.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  A prayer app.

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Big week.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  So you really get to choose your God. You get to choose your AI God, your Christian God, or your sandwich.

• 1:03:03Jordi Hays?

  So Jimmy John's is taking an absolute tumble. They're 46 in food and drinks and nowhere near.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  That's terrible.

• 1:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Not even in the game anymore. They're gonna have to come out with a new sandwich.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Get some, get some for a friend going on there.

• 1:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Or they could say, hey, if you can prove you're human, you can get a $25 gift card to Jimmy John's.

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

  Jimmy John's should do what Nikita does where, where you go to, you go to get your sandwich, you check out, and then afterwards it says like, hey, do you want to know what the sandwich artist that made your sandwich thinks about you? And then you click $5 and it unlocks. It's like, yeah, they thought you were kind of rude.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  They thought you were kind of rude.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Oh, they actually thought you were really nice and you tipped really well.

• 1:03:42Jordi Hays?

  They thought you were dripped out.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  They thought you were dripped out. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Pay to unlock a compliment.

• 1:03:48Jordi Hays?

  Security male loneliness.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  This, this might actually be a good idea. I, I, I think we gotta get Nikita on the line and, and pitch it to him. And then pitch it to Jimmy John himself.

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

  Jimmy.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Who also should come on the show. Liang was invited to a who's who list of Chinese executives who met leader Xi Jinping on February 17th. And his success has prompted a gushing of patriotism in China. You know, this is something we should copy. I feel like if you, if you, if you invent a viral app or a cool foundation model, get, let's get you in the White House. Shake the president's hand, whole tour, you know.

• 1:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they do the same if you, if you are an athlete and you do something.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They always invite the winning Super Bowl team, Presidential Medal of Freedom. You know, if you build a chat GPT wrapper, that just goes crazy.

• 1:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need the Medal of Innovation.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly, exactly.

• 1:04:38Jordi Hays?

  And the Medal of Slop.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The worker 17 guys from Y C. Get him in the White House shaking hands.

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  How you doing with that Dom Perignon over there? Why don't you polish that off? I'll refill. The state-owned Bank of China has offered to grant.

• 1:04:53Jordi Hays?

  That was just John not wanting to.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Double down. The state-owned Bank of China has offered to grant a low-interest loan to the company. People familiar with discussions said, in interest, in recent weeks, executives from Chinese technology companies, including Tencent and Alibaba, have met Liang to discuss potential cooperation. I'm sure they want a stake of this company. Said people familiar with the companies, those people said Liang didn't want to charge for DeepSeek's core AI models, which are currently free.

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  If your model's, if your model's so good, why don't you, you know, why are you afraid to charge money for it?

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Startup published techniques it's used to train its AI models using downgraded chip Nvidia designed for China. It aims to release its next using model. Designed for solving complex problems as early as April. So stay tuned for DeepSeek V4 probably. We'll see if that's a bigger model. Be interesting to follow. Rise of the high flyer, Liang born in 1985. We already did a deep dive on this guy. You can go find it on the channel. But founded a hedge fund known in English as High Flyer in 2015. Its Chinese name alludes to an ancient Han Dynasty diagram with a magic square. A mathematical peculiarity in which the rows, columns, and diagonals of the square all add up to the same number. Going Sudoku mode.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  Sudoku vibes. I like it. Liang was proud that Chinese sages discovered the concept long before the West, said people who know him. In its hiring advertisements, HiFlyer sounded more like a technology firm than a hedge fund. This is pretty common with what's going on with Jane Street and Citadel. It even tried to put the word technologies in its name before regulators said, no.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's cool.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  It looked for people who had won math contests. We've seen this happen in America before with the IMO gold medalists all going to work for Ramp. The fund promised as much as $270,000 a year for AI engineers at a campus event in 2020 to support their AI ambitions. Liang and his team used the profits from the hedge fund, which charged the same type of hefty fees as US hedge funds do, so probably 220 or more. Liang's quant fund significantly outperformed the market between 2015 and 2020, sometimes scoring returns that were 20 to 50 percentage points more than stock market benchmarks. In 2021, HiFlyer-

• 1:07:09Jordi Hays?

  If that's your quant, you're doing pretty well.

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, had 14 billion. You want to keep reading?

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  I'll keep reading. Where do you end off?

• 1:07:18John Coogan?

  In 2021, HiFlyer's assets under-

• 1:07:20Jordi Hays?

  In 2021, HiFlyer Technologies' assets under management reached around 14 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. But the fund's performance soon faded. By late 2021, when dozens of HiFlyer's products were down by more than 10% from their recent peak, the company apologized to its investors for its performance. One of its flagship funds lost money in both 2022 and 2023, although it beat the benchmark index it was supposed to track. Two years ago, HiFlyer largely closed itself to new investors and started in mid 2024 to encourage some investors to redeem their investments. They're like, we have such a good short position that we're building. We would like you to just sort of take out your money and just let us just like reap the-

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  By the end of last year, like-

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  But, but I mean, to be fair, a lot of hedge funds have done this.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I know, I know.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  Jane Street doesn't have any outside capital, I believe, and a lot of other funds have kind of moved towards less and less LPs, if they can.

• 1:08:16Jordi Hays?

  By the end of last year, HiFlyer's assets under management had shrunk significantly. To me, this looks like, you know, one reason is that you just don't want sort of outsized, outside scrutiny into what you're doing.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's more leaks. Newcomer is going to get your returns as soon as you get an LP who has a subscription. And you can't have that happening. And and also just regulation, because there's just more people that can sue you for saying, hey, you know, what you did was was not meeting your fiduciary responsibilities.

• 1:08:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46John Coogan?

  And then, of course, once you have so many investors, of course, you might need to go public or something.

• 1:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:51John Coogan?

  There's a lot of different.

• 1:08:52Jordi Hays?

  So in mid 2023, the fund announced a strategic shift and created DeepSeek as an independent organization. Hi Flyer put almost all its revenue from the quant fund business into AI development, according to the company's posts on Chinese social media. Hi Flyer said it would devote itself fully to AI technology that serves the common good of all mankind. Sounds like it was written by CCP.

• 1:09:19Jordi Hays?

  DeepSeek's AI models are generally free, although it does offer. So.

• 1:09:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they just they just care about the good of humanity.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  Purely.

• 1:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Purely.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  Purely.

• 1:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Its problem is handling the traffic surge, so they're struggling to handle the traffic, but they don't want investment. They'll just take the ultra-low-interest-rate loan from the Bank of China.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  Not conflicted at all. They're just in it for humanity. Okay, like, it's just about humanity. They want to keep the models free.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:49Jordi Hays?

  Just free models for everyone.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  Just working with the government.

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  We're going to lever up.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:53Jordi Hays?

  From we're going to take low-interest rates from.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  From the Bank of China.

• 1:09:58Jordi Hays?

  The CCP.

• 1:09:59John Coogan?

  Yep. Just one board member, Xi Jinping, that's it.

• 1:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Jordi Hays?

  To lessen the overload on its servers, DeepSeek has been offering deep discounts to paying customers who use its services in the early morning, so you can get Timu DeepSeek credits if you're using it in the right hours. So some Chinese tech giants, such as Tencent, are testing DeepSeek to power features, including a search engine of Tencent's messaging and payment app. They don't have to pay DeepSeek to do so. Tencent users can opt for a chatbot that is powered by DeepSeek, but uses Tencent's own, more stable computer network.

• 1:10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Jordi Hays?

  So since late 2023, DeepSeek pitched itself to several venture capital firms, including some foreign firms. This is a great strategy, by the way. Say you're not raising, say you don't want money, but then go raise. It creates this dynamic that, you know, can really get people to fomo in. Apparently, the foreign firms declined to invest because they couldn't see a clear path to recouping their money. It's never stopped a Western capital allocator from investing before, to be clear. Opening eyes like, we're gonna, we're gonna, you, you, didn't they come out with some like prospectus that was like, at a certain point when you're raising, you know, tens of billions of dollars, you basically have to tell people like, we see no path to, we see no realistic path to like recouping this investment.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  Oh, just like safe harbor stuff?

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, safe harbor stuff.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe. I mean, I think the projections are pretty, pretty aggressive, but yeah.

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's, we're gonna lose money and then we will be the only, you know, profit center in the entire world.

• 1:11:32John Coogan?

  Basically, yeah.

• 1:11:33Jordi Hays?

  Good strategy. Yeah, so, anyways, he says for now, yeah, yeah, that's it. He says for now, Liang appears to be sticking to the vision he expressed in a rare interview in 2023. We don't do applications, we just do research and exploration, he said then.

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think the real way to like, kind of understand what's actually going on with DeepSeek is that you have to benchmark its App Store performance as you just did. They're at 47, 42, something like that.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  No, 21.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  21. You have to benchmark that against what happened with TikTok. I'm sure TikTok was number one in the App Store for a little bit and then dropped out and then, but the question is like, will it regain momentum and will it continue to become dominant and will there be some sort of economy or, or durable growth engine? Like, we saw with TikTok, there were, there were a series of strategy, growth strategies that really drove it into the significant penetration of the Western market. And that was first and foremost, you know, a unique feature. You could not make a lip sync video with, with like IP-protected music

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  very easily on Instagram or Snapchat. And so you would download, just like you downloaded Instagram to do photo filters, and then it happened, every photo that you filtered, it would happen to post, and then you would share that photo elsewhere, maybe. You'd save it to camera roll and share it elsewhere, maybe upload it on Facebook, but it was shared to the social network. Same thing happened with, with TikTok. Then it became. Okay, well, now they're advertising on Facebook and Snapchat very aggressively bringing in new users.

• 1:13:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14John Coogan?

  And then finally, they created the creator fund. And so all of a sudden, the power law creators on TikTok had jobs, had like businesses. And so you had people like Charlie DeMilleo and there were a whole ton of these creators that would get a slice based on how much traffic and how much, how many views they were getting. They were getting tons of views. They weren't getting paid a ton, but they were making enough to justify quitting their jobs and going all in on content and making sure that, and then also just creating the dream of this new American dream of like, if you have an idea or you're good at dancing or you're hot or you have anything going on, you can get on TikTok. If you go viral enough times, you will start getting checks.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Or you're a corporate athlete. You remember that guy?

• 1:13:52John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  This was one of the first probably creators that we sort of like.

• 1:13:57John Coogan?

  Really resonated.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  We thought it was more funny than I think anyone else. What's the guy's name?

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  I have no idea. I, I, I never remember the name of a short form creator ever.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's this weird thing.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Podcaster.

• 1:14:08Jordi Hays?

  The only thing you remember, you remember their bit.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:10Jordi Hays?

  It's this guy who would, he would wake up and he'd be like running and he'd be like,

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  yeah, lock in folks.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  It's another day today.

• 1:14:15John Coogan?

  I know exactly who you're talking about. I don't remember his name because it was just like so ethereal. It's, it's very much like, like TikTok and the short form stuff is very much like bathroom graffiti. It's like everyone sees it. No one remembers it.

• 1:14:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28John Coogan?

  It's just like high, high traffic, but it doesn't like make a statement as opposed to, you know, a two hour Christopher Nolan film, like leaves an impression on people. Even if less people see it, it has like a profound effect.

• 1:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Or a really good TED Talk.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  A really good TED Talk.

• 1:14:41Jordi Hays?

  We talked to the experts.

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  The Sam Hyde TED Talk is very memorable. Well, it's one of the greatest comedy bits of all time. Like it's, it's very, very funny. Anyway, should we do car technology driving people crazy? Should we move on to the timeline? What do you think, Jordy?

• 1:15:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm down to hit this and then let's get into the timeline.

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. So you know, we're car people here. We like talking cars. We like talking trends in cars. We're big advocates for the next Tesla Roadster having a naturally aspirated V8 with a gated manual shifter. We're, we're willing it. We're going to make it happen. We're going to have Elon on the show eventually and we're going to confront him about that, recommend it to him. And I think we have a winner on our hands if he can get that across the line.

• 1:15:23Jordi Hays?

  We do.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  There's been a lot of talk about, oh, Tesla's.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Tesla's down 36% the last month.

• 1:15:27John Coogan?

  How do you get back?

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  Gated manual.

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  V12. Exactly. Anyway, uh, door handles used to be simple. Now they are another piece of technology that can fail. Drivers are finding that they wish the smart technology in their cars was just a bit dumber. Automakers have added new features, uh, in 2020s that go beyond touchscreens, assisted driving systems and companion phone apps. Some vehicles come with infrared night vision and seasonal ambient light lighting and interior fan cams that show rear passengers. That's obviously for kids, but, um, many drivers say it's too much. The share that had positive feelings about intuitiveness of their car controls fell from 79% in 2015 to 56% in 2024.

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  The perfect car, the perfect car was the Porsche 911, the 997 generation manual. Sit inside, it's, you know, relatively high performance vehicle. It's not a track star or anything like that, but it's, it's, you know, it's sporty. It's fun. It's not, there's nothing over the top or anything like that. Every, you know, everything is just like ultra utilitarian. Everything's super solid. You can leave it in the sun forever. Nothing's going to happen to the seats. It's a perfect car. Um, and today you have a situation where, um, I, uh, I actually have a funny story about that. I, I bought the car on Bring a

• 1:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Trailer, uh, during, in 2021, sold it at a profit, like a couple of years later, but took ETH for it.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:16:55Jordi Hays?

  I had a buddy who was like, would you like, can I like buy it like with ETH? I was like, yeah, sure. Fine. ETH dropped like 20%, 20%. So I basically round, round trip back to the original purchase price. But, uh, to compare that to today, the, um, one of the most annoying, like the, the most annoying thing about my cars are, are the smart features. So the G63, um, there's this feature where, uh, when I turn it on, it automatically has a lane keeping assist, they call it, which you have to manually turn off every single time, which is like a small.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  That's so weird. Normally I've turned it on.

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's default on. And it's, and it is a truly. Terrible feature. You're driving and if, and I drive, I'm in Malibu. So to get out of Malibu, I have to take these sort of like

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, canyons.

• 1:17:42Jordi Hays?

  One or two lane, you know, canyon roads. And so if you go slightly off of the road,

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Jordi Hays?

  It breaks like one of the, like, it's this very weird experience where it just sort of like has this braking effect that just slams you back onto the road. And it's the most jarring experience. It's never when you actually would want it. And then the other thing is you have to turn on the, you have to turn off the thing that shuts the engine off when you're at a stoplight. And that's like, you know about this. This is like the EPA rules where new cars have to have this feature.

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  Also, if you put your car in sport mode, you, now the EPA requires that when you start the car, it starts in eco mode or like comfort mode. It can't start in the most aggressive mode.

• 1:18:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you used to be able to start a 911 in sport mode.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  In sport mode and just leave it at that dial.

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  We used to be a proper country.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  We used to be a proper country. Yeah. I think the real, the real, the real sad thing here is that, you know, a lot of the premium features have trickled down. You know, you get like heated and cooled seats and like a Hyundai these days, but some of the really important features have not trickled down. I'm talking about, you know,

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  Doors that go up.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Doors that go up. That should be standard.

• 1:18:48Jordi Hays?

  That should be standard in a Honda.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  Also, the champagne fridge in the back of the Rolls Royce with, with the champagne flute thing that grabs them so that, so that as you're going around a corner, your champagne flute doesn't fall over.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:59John Coogan?

  They should be available in a Honda Civic. And for some reason it hasn't made it. Uh, but yeah.

• 1:19:05Jordi Hays?

  Just totally ignoring customer demands.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 1:19:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  I agree. Uh, anyway, uh, people are having problems with battery electric vehicles. Uh, owners of EVs reported their door handles being difficult to open at a rate of 3.1 problems per 100 vehicles. Um, from point two.

• 1:19:23Jordi Hays?

  So bad.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  It's like your door should always open unless you have a G-Wagon. Well, then it's hard to close, right? It's not hard to open.

• 1:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  That's the real tell.

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  The real, the real tell is if anybody has spent time in LA is if they know how to close a G-Wagon door.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  For those who haven't done it, you have to really slam it. You have to really slam it.

• 1:19:42Jordi Hays?

  Guys out there, uh, you know, if she knows how to close a G-Wagon door, just focus on yourself.

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  Focus on yourself.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  We've changed door handles from being a problem free experience to now they pop out whenever the owner approaches and we're seeing all these problems. Yeah. All, all good.

• 1:19:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is super annoying. I walk out of my garage.

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  And my, like my nine 11 just like completely like turns on, like it throws the lights on and throws like the, the handle open. I'm like, I'm just grabbing the mail. Relax.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  It just knows you're there.

• 1:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  You know, this is the same thing with smart homes today where I have yesterday.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Jordi Hays?

  I hit the remote for my blinds in my kitchen and it didn't, didn't move. I'm like, oh, great. I'm pressing it again. I'm like playing around with the remote.

• 1:20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:36Jordi Hays?

  I finally like walked like close to it and it worked, but I was like, I was just not, my blinds were just going to be down until I could find somebody that like specializes in smart homes. So just come over and like figure out what's broken. And I'm like, that's so annoying versus just like going, like I, I think I'm very bullish on the sort of analog home experience of like, you know, you flip a switch.

• 1:20:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  You have a, you know, something that doesn't need batteries that you can like change the heater.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't need a remote for my fireplace. It's not like I'm, I'm not in my bedroom being like, I really want to like, you know, turn on my fireplace. Like there's something beautiful about analog products.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is somewhat of a boomer take, but I think that, I think that there is something real about like technology introducing more friction over time. And it's been captured in some sci-fi, like, I don't know if you've seen, or you probably haven't seen Fifth Element or Demolition Man, but they both paint a picture of the future where basically like all those smart features are like very inconvenient. And so.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  So Lester Stallone is like in Demolition Man, getting like fined every time he swears. And there's like, he can't get like.

• 1:21:42Jordi Hays?

  We should implement that.

• 1:21:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Actually, we'd be bullish on that.

• 1:21:46Jordi Hays?

  Except it would get boring quickly.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  And then in Fifth Element, he lives in this like pod and it like deploys like, like, you have been, you have three points left. It's like a super connected world and like, he's like trying to quit smoking and they gives him like one cigarette out of this like disposer and stuff. It's very funny. Anyway, great movies. You should see a film sometime, Jordy.

• 1:22:05Jordi Hays?

  I'll watch one.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  You should watch a movie for your first movie.

• 1:22:08Jordi Hays?

  I actually have been enjoying the new White Lotus.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I'm caught up.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Very cliche to watch, but.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  It's just enjoyable to watch.

• 1:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Everybody was like, okay, the first few episodes were boring.

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:20Jordi Hays?

  And then last night's really got deranged. It, you know, the dad is developing this sort of like drug addiction.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  The mom is also, you know, and it's just all like, you can tell it's just like starting to fully unwind.

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I find that like, somebody was asking me like, oh, like, was it a good episode? And I was kind of like.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  You mean just starting in the middle?

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Oh, no, no.

• 1:22:39Jordi Hays?

  Or you're saying like your favorite?

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, like, so like.

• 1:22:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the really deranged way to watch White Lotus.

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  Just watch random episodes. No, no, like, like, like, because I hadn't watched any. And then I was in Tahoe and had some free time away from kids, so I catch up. I watched the first three, then episode four premieres, I watch it and a friend asked me, how was episode four? And I say, like, oh, I thought it was great. Like, it's the same as all of them. Like, does it, but does anything happen? Because people are saying like, it's a little slow. And I was like, it kind of happens at the same rate in every episode. But more importantly, it's just such a lovely place to like, hang out. It's like beautiful, it's intriguing, it's chaotic. There's like all these little vignettes, like, I don't need there to be like some really major plot point.

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Like, that was why Succession was such a hit is because it was allowing people to be immersed.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Jordi Hays?

  In your everyday lifestyle.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I mean, White Lotus is like basically about the Aman, right?

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  Like, it's like the.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  The Aman hasn't actually, yeah, they haven't actually done it at an Aman.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, they've done it at Four Seasons, I think.

• 1:23:40Jordi Hays?

  It's that level of.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  But, but that's like the vibe. And so it's a very funny like way to poke fun. The, the guy who wrote White Lotus actually went to my high school, Mike White.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should have him on, talk about.

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  That'd be cool.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  Business of White Lotus.

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Did you guys overlap?

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  No, come on.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  He's like 50 now or something.

• 1:23:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Like, this guy's like a Hollywood legend. Like, he's not like, yeah, young.

• 1:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  And you think I'm, and you think I'm old, but I'm not that old.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  I mean,

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  He, he, he directed School of Rock, which, Phil, I'm sure you haven't seen, but came out in like mid 2000s, you know?

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  I've seen School of Rock.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  You've seen School of Rock?

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  That's a, that's a, that's a classic.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. The, the teacher in there, based on my Latin teacher.

• 1:24:20Jordi Hays?

  Actually, so, really?

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  McGus, you're welcome.

• 1:24:24Jordi Hays?

  I, I would go to rock band camp every summer.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  And it was basically that.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  What'd you play?

• 1:24:30Jordi Hays?

  I would, uh, guitar and, and I would sing.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:24:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  That's cool. Can you, can you blast like a lick on the guitar?

• 1:24:37Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  If you had like an electric guitar here?

• 1:24:38Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Cause we've been talking about soundboard. Maybe we just get you a guitar and like whenever you want to sound effect.

• 1:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, I could actually have it just strapped up always here and just be.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Just like when, when a founder comes on and they're, they were interviewing them and you just want to play the, you know, I have the size gong. I play the gong on the show. You play the guitar.

• 1:24:53Jordi Hays?

  I had one, one moment that I'll always remember. We do this rock band camp.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Jordi Hays?

  And there's all this prep. And then at the end of the summer, you play this like live performance for all of your extended, you know, all the other kids in camp and all this stuff with your band of five people. And our lead singer, I was a backup singer. Our lead singer didn't show up.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13Jordi Hays?

  For the perform, like got cold feet.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  So you just had to.

• 1:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Cause it was this big group and I, I had to like go founder mode for the band.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  I had to sing it, but it was like, it was like a foreign person singing like Western karaoke.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:25:25Jordi Hays?

  The right sounds, but like didn't quite, I just like didn't, I didn't, you know, it was like five minutes beforehand that I had to figure this out, but.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Oh, well. Yeah. I think we need guitar on set.

• 1:25:34Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, I've been playing a lot of, uh, I've been playing a lot of, uh, like dinosaur themed renditions.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Of like picture like John Mayer meets dinosaurs, playing it for my son.

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  They've been hits.

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  Do you, do you know enough like power chords just to like jam and it sounds like vaguely like Blink 182 or something like that?

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  You know how you know like the basic and then you can just like work it together? That's great. Like the Suzuki method more or less.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I play piano, but I only learned like how to play like the sheet music. So I need to see the exact notes.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Into the symphony. So for you, it was more euphoric to just be immersed in it.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:26:07Jordi Hays?

  Versus to even play the notes yourself.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:26:09Jordi Hays?

  You could have been a conductor.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  That'd be great. I mean, I named my dog after a conductor, Gustavo Dudamel.

• 1:26:16Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  That's great lore.

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  His Instagram handle is Real Gustavo Dudamel. It's great.

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  And people get confused.

• 1:26:24John Coogan?

  Often.

• 1:26:24Jordi Hays?

  John's dog had more followers than me.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  Of the, he used to be the conductor of the LFL Gustavo Dudamel is aware of the dog. Because people will see the dog, because the dog has like almost as many followers as the actual conductor, because I grinded up the account to like 20K. And, and, and the conductor has like, had like 100 at the time. And so like, people would like, let him know. And we were all in LA, so we'd run into people and be like, oh yeah, like that's the dog.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Would you ever say, I'd love to have your dog? Yeah, would you ever say, would you ever say, I'd love to have your, I'd love to have your dog Gustavo in attendance?

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Yes. We considered, we considered bringing him. We, we, we had season tickets for a while. We gotta go back. It's right down the street from the capital of capital, the forces of finance, Disney Hall.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think we both came to the conclusion that this.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  This next boys trip.

• 1:27:12Jordi Hays?

  This article is not that interesting.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  It's not that interesting. I agree. Anyway, let's move on to some posts, some timeline and some ads, of course. I know that's what you've really been waiting for. The advertisements, just because it's a Dom episode means, doesn't mean we're not gonna do some ads. Come on, people. Tyler says, this is a really deep understanding how VC works tweet. The headline is cursor raises hundreds of millions at 10 billion. Are these investors visionary or crazy? That is because we intuitively assume that those investors lose money if cursor is ultimately worth less than 10 billion. But that's not true. They just don't make money to get the point, to get to the point where investors actually lose money, the company, the company's valuation needs to fall below the amount raised.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  So if you're investing in this round, here are your outcomes. Cursor exits at greater than 10 billion, you make money. Cursor exits at greater than 300 million to 10 billion, you get your money back. Cursor exits at under 300 million, you lose your money. From a decision-making perspective, that changes the discussion from, is this worth 10 billion to what is the likelihood that this is worth 20 to 50 billion in a few years? And to be clear, that's good. I think it's a very good thing for us to have risk capital that is both clear-eyed and focused on the potential for growth. And then there's some, uh, there's some assumptions here. What'd you think, Jordy? Why'd you like this? It's a good breakdown of the cursor deal. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people know about PR.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Founders understand this. Because they've run the calculus where they're like, if I, I mean, Jeremy was on last week and was talking about this.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  They don't usually run the calculus until series A or B.

• 1:28:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51John Coogan?

  I find.

• 1:28:52Jordi Hays?

  No, but I mean, they intuitively understand, okay, you raised $10 million.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  You got to return that first.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  For $10 million, you're going to make $0.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:00Jordi Hays?

  And Jeremy talked about this last week, talking about founders that have 10 million of ARR, but they raised $200 million and they're growing at 30%, which means that they could grow for another five years, sell the company and still make $0, right?

• 1:29:14John Coogan?

  Unless you get really creative. Like, there are plenty of stories with Aqua hires where the investors get hosed and the founders get really egregious pay packages.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  At big companies. And a lot of funds are really upset by that, depending on their structure. Some funds don't care because they're like, yeah, like, oh, okay, yeah, we wrote down 10 million, whatever. Like, we're just happy for you to go on to the next thing. Call us when you leave and get your earn out and do the next thing.

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Make it all back, make it all back on one trip.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  But it's delicate. It is risky and.

• 1:29:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  And you can't stiffarm your.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  Usually I would say it's the employees that are most frustrated by that because they're like.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  The structure of the earn out.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, sure, but I'm just saying, I know a situation of a very high profile company that sold in 2021 and the price of the acquisition was like way too low for the traction of the company.

• 1:30:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  But the CEO got this ridiculously large incentive package at the new company and all the CEOs like didn't even get.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  All the employees.

• 1:30:18Jordi Hays?

  Most of the employees didn't get the opportunity to join the acquire. And so they were frustrated because they're like, we worked all this time for this equity and then you are the only one that got the.

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  Everyone just has to feel like it's fair.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  And there are a bunch of ways that it can feel fair.

• 1:30:32Jordi Hays?

  Worth highlighting of people like, everybody's trying to pick apart, oh, is Cursers revenue durable? It's so easy to switch off. You've got YC partners like promoting Windsurf.

• 1:30:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  All this stuff. And this is the right framework to be, you know, it sounds like Thrive and Kushner are doing this new round. It hasn't been formally announced yet, but it's not so crazy to price it that way. And it's possible that Cursor, I would imagine Cursor's in a position where they don't need money. So they're saying, if you want to own a piece of this company.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  You got to pay.

• 1:31:05Jordi Hays?

  This is the case. And if you're investing in this company and you think you could get a 2 or 3X on this, if you're putting in $300 million, it's a great. It's a great, it's not necessarily a slam dunk, grand slam venture return, but you're going to return potentially hundreds of millions of dollars off of a single investment. And it's, and your downside is relatively protected if you think that Cursor in a rare case scenario could sell for $300 million. And I would, and I would argue that, I would argue that there's a lot of companies on earth that even if Cursor's revenue dropped dramatically, they would say, we'll pay $300 million because you have great tech and we can integrate it.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  You want a new GitHub Copilot 2.0, basically.

• 1:31:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, very interesting. I mean, there's a bunch of scenarios where it could work out, you know, if they're just printing money and they just keep growing the business and they get to high EBITDA, like they could trade it, you know, I don't know, 10x EBITDA and get up to, you know, a couple hundred million in EBITDA and be good, right? It's not that crazy. And then, yeah, also, like every hyperscaler might need something that looks like this if they're doing a lot of development or, or running a, you know, you think like this could fit into AWS and the AWS tech stack. It could replace GitHub and be GitHub 2.0 or Copilot 2.0. I don't know. It's certainly a high valuation, but exciting for the team that built it and very cool.

• 1:32:27Jordi Hays?

  We won't know the truth.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  I mean, it feels like a size going moment.

• 1:32:32Jordi Hays?

  Size going moment. Let's give a cheers for the Cursor team.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  Cheers. Let's down this, Jordy. Come on.

• 1:32:37Jordi Hays?

  Down it? I don't know.

• 1:32:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna keep nursing it here.

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  The brother, the brother. Well, let's go to Flo.

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  Peer pressure.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 1:32:47Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  Flo Cribellio says, just bought 50,000 flower seeds on Amazon and going to throw them all over the place in San Francisco. Just a heads up, in case you're wondering why everything is suddenly so fragrant and beautiful, it'll be me, it'll, it'll be all me.

• 1:33:01Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. I put this in for you, John. This is very Coogan coded.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is what you live for.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  We want to elevate people that are making the world a more beautiful place, whether you are making, putting flowers everywhere or putting up swings everywhere.

• 1:33:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  You know, go repave the road.

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:17Jordi Hays?

  If you're upset with the road in front of your house, just hire private contractors to just pave it. Do it yourself.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Get some cement out there. Do it. No, I think smell is underrated in terms of the evaluation of a particular neighborhood. I've noticed that Beverly Hills smells very nice, but.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  Deafening noise pollution from all Lamborghinis and M5 competitions.

• 1:33:41Jordi Hays?

  You might have something to do with that.

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it's a lot of, it's a lot of kids clearly driving like exorbitant sports cars.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's their daily driver to school the GT3RS.

• 1:33:52John Coogan?

  And I do think, yeah, I mean, we were talking about the EPA earlier, maybe we do need, you know, some, some quiet modes.

• 1:33:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but if you can put up enough flowers on either side of the road and

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  Yep, deafen that down.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  GMO flowers to get them the size of trees.

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 1:34:06Jordi Hays?

  They could really dampen.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, or maybe just, you know, upgrade from the, the Aventador's and the Huracans to 19 spiders because it's a hybrid. You can drive it in electric only mode.

• 1:34:17Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 1:34:18John Coogan?

  A lot of the new hypercars, supercars, they have an electric drivetrain. So they're hybrids.

• 1:34:23Jordi Hays?

  They do.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  So you can drive them quietly until you get up into the canyons. Nobody cares.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Then you can rip.

• 1:34:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, thank you Flo for your, for your work.

• 1:34:31John Coogan?

  Thank you Flo. I'm excited to see how that pans out. Visit SF and see the flowers. Uh, let's go to Kyle Harrison with some news. Uh, Service Titan is at a 7.95 billion market cap. Uh, this is an $8 billion company that started as software for garage door repair people. TAM is almost always a terrible reason to pass.

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  So a little lore for you.

• 1:34:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in college, I wanted to move to LA.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  I was working on what became my first, you know, company. And I was barely making money at the time. I was making like a couple of grand a month. And it was like, like senior year, I was like, I don't know if I can actually sort of scale this to the point where I can like pay for rent and food and all this stuff. So I interviewed at Service Titan. First interview went well. Second interview, thought it went well. They rejected me.

• 1:35:21John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and I'm sure I would have done actually very well if I'd, I mean, obviously I wouldn't have stayed.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  In the wage cage?

• 1:35:26Jordi Hays?

  In the wage cage. Um, no, just financially, just financially if I just stayed there.

• 1:35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but I won in the end because that turned, you know, what I was working on turned into a business that's, you know, does millions of dollars in revenue to this day. So, um, your loss Service Titan.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:41Jordi Hays?

  But I'm glad, I'm glad they are building, you know, great software for garage door repair.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  And I believe they're in LA here.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  They are. They're in Glendale, so right around the corner from here.

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  And great name, like really aggressive name. I love it. Anyway, let's move on to an ad. We got an ad from AdQuick, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Let's go. Get yourself a billboard on AdQuick.

• 1:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so speaking of ads, Ted Turner, founder of CNN, started by running his father's out of home ad business. It was basically like AdQuick, but they owned, easy there, John. But instead of AdQuick, doesn't own the underlying inventory. There's sort of software layer on top of it. But Ted Turner's dad had started an out of home advertising network that Ted Turner took over. And the reason I know that is because I was listening to the Founder's Podcast episode this morning because Reggie posted about Ted Turner on Friday. And Reggie had said, and this, this post analysis is brought to you by AdQuick.

• 1:36:56Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, he said, I've been, he says, I've been researching the eighties a bit as a comparison for viewing the world today. I feel like Ted Turner is such an interesting character. Founder of CNN, which was the start of the 24/7 news cycle.

• 1:37:10Jordi Hays?

  We restarted it for tech.

• 1:37:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37:13Jordi Hays?

  Genuinely a futurist in many ways, my favorite quote from him. We won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on and we will cover the end of the world live. And that will be our very, will be our last event. But the thing is, he actually made a video made for the last broadcast ever, known as the Turner Doomsday Video. It was leaked by an intern and posted on YouTube.

• 1:37:32John Coogan?

  That's amazing. We gotta watch that on stream.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  We should make our own Doomsday Video.

• 1:37:35John Coogan?

  We should.

• 1:37:36Jordi Hays?

  And it's just us popping hundreds of bottles, not even drinking them, just saying, hey, we had the stockpile. We don't need it anymore.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, what an interesting thinker to do that. I wonder if there's anyone else who's filmed a doomsday video intact that hasn't leaked. Like, is there a Zuck doomsday video, or Elon doomsday video, or Sam Altman doomsday video that's out there?

• 1:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Hey, brothers?

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  If you're an intern, go find it and leak it. Put it on YouTube, please.

• 1:38:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  We'd love it.

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  We'll cover your cost of living until you can get rehired by, you know, the next beaner that you're gonna leak their doomsday video.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, let's move on to Antonio Garcia Martinez, the hardest to acquire and most exclusive watch in the collection, almost three years in the making. And it says, "Thank you for being a part of the base team. This custom Seiko watch designed by our creative team honors precision, reliability, and motion qualities that define base and drive us forward. Its automatic movement winds with every step, a symbol of the momentum we're building together. Here's to the work we've done, and to 2025, it's time to bring the world on chain."

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:38:40John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Inspired by, do we still have?

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  Oh, the XL watch?

• 1:38:44Jordi Hays?

  That said it's time to...

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  Oh, it's time to create shareholder value.

• 1:38:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's time to bring the world on chain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, a timepiece is great.

• 1:38:51Jordi Hays?

  No, I was wondering, I gotta, we gotta ask Quaid at Bezel, was this factory, or is this, they just bought it and then they just redid?

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you can swap out the dial, uh, and just kind of upgrade that. But of course, go to Bezel dot, uh, go to getbezel.com, get a luxury watch, get a Seiko, get a grand Seiko, get anything.

• 1:39:12Jordi Hays?

  Get anything.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  Get an FP joint.

• 1:39:14Jordi Hays?

  We've been looking at, we've been looking at, uh, Pottec chronograph stopwatches.

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:20Jordi Hays?

  Because we want something, we want to top, time the show and just looking at your computer clock.

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  Over 20,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated by Bezel's in-house team. Highly recommend installing the app, surfing, finding something great to add to your collection. Uh, in Tahoe this weekend, saw a lot of Apple Watches. It really, really harshed the mood, I would say.

• 1:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  It would be much better to see something, uh, more, more, more fitting of that, of that echelon of society.

• 1:39:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you're skiing too, wear, wear your nicest watch.

• 1:39:54John Coogan?

  What do you need an Apple watch for?

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  I, uh, when I was in Switzerland, uh, just before New Year's. I saw a guy that was just got back from skiing and he took off his gloves and he had this like, I think it was the orange, the orange Aquanaut.

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:40:12Jordi Hays?

  That Alex Park rocks. And I was like, that's, that's great. You know, go out skiing.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:40:16Jordi Hays?

  You know, with a six-figure watch on. Shows confidence in your abilities.

• 1:40:20John Coogan?

  It's great. Where is this second post?

• 1:40:29John Coogan?

  We got a lot of posts in here. We gotta go through.

• 1:40:34John Coogan?

  Let's just do this one. Mount Rushmore at sunset. Let's go. I just wanted to celebrate.

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Mount Rushmore at sunset.

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  Here we go. I got it.

• 1:40:42Jordi Hays?

  Is this, is this a real picture? It almost looks.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:45Jordi Hays?

  AI generated.

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:40:47Jordi Hays?

  Do you have this one, Ben?

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  But we gotta, we, we gotta make a new Mount Rushmore. We gotta need more monuments.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  A lot of gold. Where's your Rushmore?

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  We gotta do statue of liberty on the east coast. What was it? Statue of justice on the west coast. Replace Alcatraz with a massive statue. I love Mount Rushmore.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  You've been?

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  I haven't been.

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  We should go.

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  We should.

• 1:41:13Jordi Hays?

  We should set up. So I'd really like to get a, a mobile studio, but like set up more like one of those phone, phone booths. The truck like drops it off and then leaves. So we're just sitting there right in front of Mount Rushmore, recording with a nice view of it.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Be great.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  And if the police come, we'll just lock the doors and just keep podcasting as long as we have an internet connection.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, just so cool to go blow up some mountains and make some, make some faces. So much fun. Anyway, the story that I want to talk about was Orca. Orca is an energy water launched by this guy, Michael Moriarty, 13 months ago. He put up this idea.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  And it's now live and available 150mg of caffeine, zero calories, zero sugar. And he posted 13 months, four failed production runs and more stress than we ever imagined. All for the clear can. Worth it? Question mark. And gift of trees.

• 1:42:11Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, we covered this last week.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Oh, last week?

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  Remember this is the launch video of the guy from High School Musical that was just reading out the signs.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Very creative, very creative.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  It was very fun.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  But, but he's getting dunked on here by gift of trees of draught of barrel. Doesn't sound like that person has a LinkedIn, but we'll read it anyway. The clear plastic PET beverage can patent was granted in 2015 to a Polish packaging manufacturing company. This dude did nothing but pay a beverage contract packer to license the patent and fill it with liquid designed in the co packers lab. And yes, that is exactly true. That's how you launch a new consumer packaged goods product these days. You go to a co packer, have them make it. He made the interesting choice of using the clear plastic can, which I want to talk to you about because

• 1:43:01John Coogan?

  on the one hand, it really, this really does stand out on the shelf and you could imagine seeing this and, and it would just look different than Celsius Red Bull. You know, monster where they're all aluminum cans, but at the same time, plastic could not be less cool right now. So what's your take?

• 1:43:20Jordi Hays?

  So I've seen Michael working on this for a long time. I think he's got good instinct and taste. I think the marketing's been great. I think the packaging looks cool. I think the concept of just a clear-ish energy water, like energy water, like conceptually is just cool.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  As opposed to like this, like nuclear fuel looking Red Bull. It's a green and like, it's like, what am I drinking?

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  So, energy water is super cool. I do believe the actual formulation is difficult to get to the point where it's zero calorie and it tastes good and it's not filled with, filled with a bunch of insane additives. I looked at this entire thread, gift of trees of draught of barrel by intractable lion. And he's, he's a massive hater. Against people that are not. So, so I actually looked at the backstory. So he's a runs cideries.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:44:12Jordi Hays?

  restores. So he restores these sort of legacy.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Orchards.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Jordi Hays?

  That have been run down.

• 1:44:19John Coogan?

  It's like super trash.

• 1:44:20Jordi Hays?

  So it's like the most craft process, not even making the liquid, but.

• 1:44:24John Coogan?

  Making the barrels.

• 1:44:25Jordi Hays?

  Making the trees.

• 1:44:26John Coogan?

  Making the trees.

• 1:44:27Jordi Hays?

  And sustaining the orchard. So, so he's.

• 1:44:29John Coogan?

  The gift of trees and draught of barrel, of course.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  The gift of trees and draught of barrel.

• 1:44:35Jordi Hays?

  So I'd like to have this guy on the show to talk about the business of bespoke ciderie.

• 1:44:39John Coogan?

  That sounds interesting.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  But he's a huge hater on this guy, Michael, for no reason.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  Yes, I agree.

• 1:44:45Jordi Hays?

  It's, Michael didn't say, I invented the clear plastic.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  He said, yeah, if you're making a caffeinated caffeine has a super bitter taste.

• 1:44:55John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. You have to iterate on stuff.

• 1:44:56Jordi Hays?

  You've got to iterate on it. Yeah. It's a good thing that they didn't just use the first version.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:02Jordi Hays?

  That they produced. And so this, this is actually a much longer thread where, where gift of trees have draught of barrel. Is just hating on this guy's super hard. And I don't.

• 1:45:12John Coogan?

  It's like, just don't buy it.

• 1:45:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Just don't buy it.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  It's fine. You don't have to buy it. That's the beauty of capitalism.

• 1:45:17Jordi Hays?

  I think that Michael, Michael will be dramatically more commercially successful and gift of trees have draught of barrel is upset.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  I don't know about that. Is this really a long, short trade right now? Who knows? Maybe they both are successful.

• 1:45:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm going long, I'm going long.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  Orca.

• 1:45:33Jordi Hays?

  Orca. I would not invest in gift of trees have drawn them barrel.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  I don't know, man. I think there might be something to this. If he scales this up, maybe he starts putting the cider in plastic bottles.

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe. Honestly, here's what I'd like to see.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Collab.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Work it out. Both come on the show.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  We'll negotiate.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  A JV, a joint venture.

• 1:45:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you guys can collab.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  You guys can collab.

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you can find success.

• 1:45:56John Coogan?

  In plastic bottles. Exactly what the world needs. Bring, bring the science project with the trad based stuff together. It's a match made in heaven. Everyone can be happy. But Michael does respond and he says, I wish it had been that easy. We didn't invent the can. We spent 13 months figuring out how and who could actually fill them at scale. At every step, we were told, just as. To a normal can, every canning line in the country is built for aluminum. Nothing was plug and play. And so, yeah, like it is hard at work even to just put something in a can that exists or is patented because the manufacturing supply might not be there. And, and, and this is the, you know, the, the unfortunate like struggle and the schlep of getting a consumer product to, to, to market. I mean, you, I'm sure you went through with Rora where you're

• 1:46:39John Coogan?

  like, okay, there's like a million different manufacturing decisions to make.

• 1:46:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  And we want to maintain our brand values and what we're doing.

• 1:46:46Jordi Hays?

  No, there's, there's.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  And there's a bunch of trade offs and stuff.

• 1:46:49Jordi Hays?

  I distinctly remember when my co-founders, Brian and Charlie, we got the visual that looked almost identical to this. And then there were still like 10,000 decisions to be made. And both Brian and Charlie were just like, you know, incredibly in the weeds on every single one.

• 1:47:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:47:08Jordi Hays?

  They're all very high stakes and, you know, there's so many small setbacks and things like that. So that's the beauty of, the reason that beverage attracts so many sort of new entrepreneurs is that it's a super tangible idea of, I can see it in my head. I can put the right ingredients in the can and then I'm going to sell it.

• 1:47:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:27Jordi Hays?

  And it's just so much harder.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  It's a widgets business.

• 1:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  But at the same time, it, for a long time, software was super like high status because it was so complicated. You had to understand C++ or Java or Python and deployment and AWS and servers and all this stuff. And now it's been like, oh, well, you can vibe code a flight simulator in a day. But it takes 13 months to put caffeine in a can.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  It's like kind of, kind of weird, but we're kind of flipping. And this is like the bits and atoms thing. Bits just move faster.

• 1:47:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  So good luck, Michael. Send us, send us some product if you see this.

• 1:48:01Jordi Hays?

  No, but I actually, so there's, there's a, my wife invested in a company.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:08Jordi Hays?

  That. At like a, like a five cap.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:11Jordi Hays?

  That put olive oil in a plastic bottle.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:15Jordi Hays?

  And it's up 50x in like two something years.

• 1:48:19John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:48:20Jordi Hays?

  And so just something as simple as, you know, as sort of in this case. Novel product, energy water in a new form. In a new bottle. It's very possible. This is wildly successful.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  It's funny seeing him gripe about production because wait until you try and go into retail, buddy.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Cause you have to change.

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:48:43Jordi Hays?

  Retail generally.

• 1:48:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like actually getting retail distribution on this is going to be a thousand times more frustrating. Not, not that he can't do it and it won't be difficult, but it's going to be a lot more just unreasonable.

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  Basically you have to pay us to put this on a shelf.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  Oh, totally. Like every deal is bespoke and you're competing with Alani New and Celsius and Red Bull and they all have monopolies and they all want, hey, we want to keep our yerba mate on the, on the shelf and you're competing against every other company. And, and that's really where the game is won. Like Graza, the olive oil company has won because they're in every store now.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  I'm sure they're doing great on e-commerce, but that company is not a 50x return. They don't figure out retail and retail is hard and a schlep and it's something that is probably going to be, make these four failed production runs look like the easy mode. Anyway, good luck to you, Michael. And send us some. We'd love to, we'd love to try it. Should we go to Max Meyer?

• 1:49:37Jordi Hays?

  Before that, I'd like to do a promoted ad.

• 1:49:40John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 1:49:41Jordi Hays?

  So we have from Jose, high class and tasteful. And he doesn't even do any type of review. He just does the headline, which is high class and tasteful, five stars. And he jumps right into the ad, which is very aggressive.

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is this?

• 1:49:58Jordi Hays?

  But potentially a smart move because most people have been putting it. So he says, variable and early stage company HQ'd in Dallas helps manufacturers scale efficiently with a flexible on-demand labor model. This gives US manufacturers a competitive edge over China without relying on AI sweatshops or bloatware staffing platforms like Traba. Hey.

• 1:50:17John Coogan?

  Taking shots.

• 1:50:19Jordi Hays?

  Mike's a friend of the show, but.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  You know, sometimes attack ads are effective. Variable optimized your labor eliminates low or OT work, boost productivity and tracks key metrics. Visit variableops.com and tell them to give Jose a raise. So he's just taking the initiative. He's just not the founder, but he's getting out there. So I'm going to go there and just tell them to give Jose a raise, even though I don't think we're qualified. Unless we need to get Ben.

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're going to test drive that product.

• 1:50:53Jordi Hays?

  Ben, where are you? Oh, he's there. And one more review while we're at it. This is hard power, soft beliefs in my review of Technology Brothers. TBPN is the seminal technology podcast of our day. John and Jordy exemplify the human desire to create and contribute to a product that is bigger than the self, a devotion to the aesthetic. And for that, I'm grateful to the brotherhood. This five star review is brought to you by Techno Republic on X, a new project that shares the best quotes and ideas from Alexander Karp's book, The Technological Republic. Follow Techno Repub on X today to join your fellow brothers building the future of the West. Very cool. I'm going to go, I'm going to go follow this right now.

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  And thank you for the review.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  And while you're doing that, we'll move over to Max Meyer, also another publisher, similar to Alex Karp, actually works with another Palantir co-founder over at ABC. Max Meyer says, "Airports these days are the perfect picture of American affluenza. The US upper-ish class has too much money, but never enough. Lots of suspicious pre-boarders, teens in designer clothes, $500 headphones muttering what to flight staff. There are like 50 people in boarding group one now as well. You can see the confusion on people's faces who've clearly been boarding first for a while, who now wait 20 minutes standing

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  just to have their spot in line. The lounges are overrun. And again, you can see the exasperation on the faces of people waiting for them, thinking they'd paid for a service and realizing that now it's like Disneyland. Prices across the board have gone up and demand keeps up. This is one of the main effects of mass affluence, I guess. Airline taxes are as high as ever." As a result, actual budget flights, all a Ryanair are not allowed. At this point, a budget flight is anything under $300? People are amazingly unforgiving. They get violent looks in their eyes when staff announce that overhead bin space will run out. For many flyers, being asked to check a bag is like being asked for one of their kidneys.

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  So many people look at children like they're rodents that have infiltrated the house rather than our treasures and our futures. He's such a good writer. Parents are the scapegoat of every flight. Funny enough, the TSA feels like the one thing that has gotten better. Maybe I choose my airports and flying times well, but I don't remember the last time I waited more than 15 minutes to get through. Sometimes the clear line is comically longer than the regular line next to it. And for whatever reason, people will just not move over to the shorter line. It's pretty rare to see actual bawling, brawling, but you do hear about those things. As a writer and chronicler of America, this entropy interests me. Yeah, interesting. Basically, an ad for private jets. I completely agree with you, Max.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  Everyone should be flying into G650 ER ideally, maybe a

• 1:53:47Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have that. We're gonna have that.

• 1:53:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:50Jordi Hays?

  Superintelligence.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:51Jordi Hays?

  That's one of the things Sam Altman's gone on record. He says

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:53:55Jordi Hays?

  If Mas is able to do this round.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:57Jordi Hays?

  And we're able to do Stargate.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Everyone has a private jet, obviously.

• 1:54:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  So problem solved soon. Max, don't worry.

• 1:54:03Jordi Hays?

  Figure allegedly is training their robots to build PJs.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  Oh, that'd be great.

• 1:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Actually, you won't even need to.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:09Jordi Hays?

  And mine the ore needed to create the jet.

• 1:54:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:54:13Jordi Hays?

  You buy your figure for 20 grand.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  It'll actually build you a Gulfstream.

• 1:54:17John Coogan?

  And that's coming in 12 to 18 months, right?

• 1:54:19Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  Perfect. Perfect. Okay, great.

• 1:54:21Jordi Hays?

  Just after the IPO.

• 1:54:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, just after the next fundraiser.

• 1:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:25John Coogan?

  It'll be here. Great.

• 1:54:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Well, that's fantastic. Let's move on. Avi Schiffman, back on the show. We gotta have him on live soon. He says, "Companies should shut down when the founder leaves."

• 1:54:38John Coogan?

  Pretty good take.

• 1:54:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah. I mean, Ben Thompson has an interesting take on this.

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  And they, and they should, uh, if the founder passes away, they should just like, it should shut down in solidarity.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  In solidarity.

• 1:54:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  Dead man's switch. If I die, my company goes with me.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  No, I mean, uh, Ben Thompson has a take on this, which is basically like, like companies do not need to go on forever. So it's actually okay for a company to be in kind of its late stage and just dividend all, all the profits until it's like done. This is kind of what's happening with like the cigarette companies, like, like literally no one is, no one, like new smokers are not emerging. The market is shrinking. They just increase the price on the, on the reducing customer base. And over time, they, they make the same amount of revenue, but their cash flows are steady. And so they're just gonna like whittle down basically. And they all have plans of like, oh, we'll get into the new markets, but none of them are doing that well in the new alternative market. And so a lot of people are just like, well, they dividend a lot, they, they, they pay out. And so, you know, if you have, uh, you know, ultra is a hundred billion dollar company.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  If you invest right now and you get a hundred and $50 billion in cash returned to you over the next five years or something like that. Could be a good, that could, that could be a good deal, even if, even if the value of the stock is zero at the end. Like it's fine.

• 1:55:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:53John Coogan?

  So.

• 1:55:54Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I think, I think, I think Avi dropping these, uh, they're thought provoking.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:56:01Jordi Hays?

  And I think there's some value to that.

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fun. Good poster. Tim Suzman says, we invested in a YC startup a week ago. Their revenue growth was so high, it would have been crazy to ignore it. Just saw them at alumni demo day. They doubled their revenue in the past week. Let's go. That's exciting. We're, we're very.

• 1:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. And a cheers.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Let's size gong that. Let's cheers the Dom Perignon.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

  And we have some YC news that we'll be sharing.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  We will be at demo day in just a few days.

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna say, we're gonna share it tomorrow.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  We'll be there. Well, we're gonna announce what we're gonna be doing there and tomorrow, I guess. But let's move on to, uh, Windsurf sharing a, uh, a video from YC, uh, from their Light Cone Podcast. Jason, uh, so Windsurf says, not every day you wake up to a shout out from Y Combinator. Jared Freeman explains why founders are switching to Windsurf. Is Windsurf a YC company? Or are they just like loved by YC? I don't know. Uh, what's the figure it out?

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  Fact that the partner was coming out and taking such a strong stand.

• 1:57:06John Coogan?

  Makes you think. Anyway, Jason Lemkin says brutal competition always comes to software. Partners become competitors, collaborators compete. Usually it takes a few years, though, to get real. AI is accelerating at the pace, an order of magnitude in coding and contact center already. Huh, I can't really understand that. Will it do the same to your category? Interesting. So we have, I mean, I don't even understand.

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people, a lot of people were pushing back on this, saying, if you don't think that cursor indexes your code base, you haven't used it, but.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Indexes your code base? Oh, like pulls it in as like training data? I mean, there's just like layers and layers to this fight right now. There's like the cursor versus wind surf debate, but then there's also the cursor versus Claude code debate that's happening.

• 1:57:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  Will it all commoditize? Who knows?

• 1:58:01Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  Anyway, a lot of gills in the gundo, wondering if he should get some curls and zen in. He also really wants a mustache. This place may have changed me forever. I like, I love when a new size lord capital allocator takes the gundo tour. You know, Augustus took them around, I'm sure.

• 1:58:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  Introduced him to everyone else. Little bit of a controversial post because he spells zen wrong. It's Z Y N. He said C I N. And also in the gundo, man, I mean, this is like, you know, highest penetration place in the world for Lucy. So Zen's kind of out there. Got to get on the next generation of products when it comes to nicotine. But you should do some curls and some bench press and you should, you know, basically just wind down your podcast, become a size lord, become a mass monster and go for your IFBB pro card.

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  That's what we want to see.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  And I think you have it.

• 1:58:54Jordi Hays?

  It's got what it takes.

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  You get diced. Get big.

• 1:58:56Jordi Hays?

  And do the, the, the Mount Rushmore of the West.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:59Jordi Hays?

  Next topic, my dear friend, my oldest friend, called me last night.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Like, long after I went to bed, I go to bed very early. So I saw it this morning and he just joined the chat on YouTube and said, hey, Jordy, he just called me and I told him I'm, I'm live right now. I can't talk. And he said, in the chat, I wanted to let you know I got engaged. So congratulations. Cheers to Cody and his lovely fiance, Emily. And.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations, Cody. I love you. And if we ever need a financial model, he is the guy to go to. Right now, we're just sort of vibe coding our finance, but absolute finance chat.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Let's get him to do something.

• 1:59:46Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of your early bedtime, we are sponsored by Eight Sleep, nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to eightsleep.com/tbpn and upgrade your sleeping experience. I was miserable the last two nights, honestly, at the Ritz Carlton, which not a bad hotel. They don't have eight sleeps and it was miserable. It was not a fun experience. It really, it really does ruin every other bed. So get one, never travel ever again, and just stay in your eight sleep forever.

• 2:00:21Jordi Hays?

  It truly is unbelievably good.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  It's so good. We highly recommend it. Check it out.

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  This morning, I was, so I woke up.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:31Jordi Hays?

  4:45.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:32Jordi Hays?

  It's effectively 3:45, according to my brain.

• 2:00:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Completely, it's the dead, it's the dead of night.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  And you know what I thought to myself? I thought, thank God for eightsleep.com/tbpn.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Where anybody can get $400 off eight sleep.

• 2:00:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:50Jordi Hays?

  And get to experience the sort of

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  The warm feeling.

• 2:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Warming effect in the morning.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  It really makes waking up so easy. It's crazy.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  And the vibration alarm clock?

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  I don't do that one.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  You gotta try it. You gotta try it.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:04Jordi Hays?

  It's subtle.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  I've tried it. I just, the warm works for me.

• 2:01:08Jordi Hays?

  It's subtle. And it is

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  It's a good option.

• 2:01:12Jordi Hays?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  It's great. Well, anyway, go check it out. Let's move on to the Optify Kids. This is the YC company that was canceled briefly, but they're back. They created Sweatshop Software, essentially. That was the critique of them, but they leaned in, they went direct, and they printed t-shirts that say, "Justice for Workers 17." And Spore says the Optify Kids are going to be all right. They're having fun with it. They clearly realized that their first Message didn't resonate. They turned it around and I cannot wait to talk to these guys because I think they're having fun and I love it.

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna talk to them Wednesday.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Yep, it was great. So, uh, love, love Justice for Worker 17, uh, creating a lot of fun on the timeline, a lot of, uh, a great meme. And, uh, still just so funny that that happened, all the back and forth.

• 2:02:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:03John Coogan?

  But they had a good time and I think they, I think this is the right way to handle it. They, they, they didn't put out some groveling post saying like, "We're sorry, oh," they just like, they, they kind of took a breather.

• 2:02:14Jordi Hays?

  I think if anything, it will be helpful because every investor at the very least will want to talk to them.

• 2:02:20John Coogan?

  I'm listening at this point.

• 2:02:21Jordi Hays?

  For the novelty of talking to the,

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:24Jordi Hays?

  The legends that made that video.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  The legends. And I mean, we, we talked about this before, like, there's so many things that you could tweak in that presentation and that software that would be beneficial. And I mean, they created such a meme that someone built an OptiFi clone for PMF or Die.

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Which is fully functional.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Fully functional. You can go to pmfordie.xyz and see the productivity of the two guys that are in the cage right now, Blake and Patty. Uh, and so you can check it out and it's, it's, it's hilarious that somebody built that so fast. Uh, but I mean, it helps when they're live streaming.

• 2:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to another YC founder, an alum, one of the legends, Emmett Shear. He says, "When I was CEO-ing at Twitch, one of the things I do every batch of interns was a very short presentation on the origins of the company and then a Q and A. One of the questions is always, where should I work and what job should I get or should I start a company?" And he goes on to say, "It's an interesting question to try and answer for an intern I didn't really know because of course, the actual answer is dependent on that person and their life. So I decided, so I had to figure out how to articulate the framework I used. First, there's money. Obviously you want money, but money is well-known for diminishing returns. Debatable. Um, after you have enough for rent and food and so on, then, uh, so you don't want to optimize for cash. It's more of a constraint.

• 2:03:43John Coogan?

  Then there's prestige. How much will getting this job impress people? Prestige is mostly a trap for the same reason designer clothing brands are bad deals. Also debatable. Um, brand might make something less discerning. People think better of you, but it won't actually make you better or better off. Uh, power is also on offer, usually called impact and the chance to make a difference. Or mission, we like power because it feels good to wield the pure joy of throwing a stone in the lake and watching it splash.

• 2:04:12Jordi Hays?

  We need Emmett to write a book.

• 2:04:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, he's a great writer and really great prints. What, what is your framework when someone asks you, where should I work or should I start a company?

• 2:04:21Jordi Hays?

  So general advice, generalized advice is probably one of the most dangerous things in the entire world.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:28Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing. Yes, you can get advice and try to kind of general advice from somebody that you don't know.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  The exception is everyone should have an A to everyone should buy a watch on bezel. Everyone should be on public. Yeah, everyone should be on ramp, but I hear your point. Yes.

• 2:04:43Jordi Hays?

  And obviously advertise on adequate.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  But obviously.

• 2:04:46Jordi Hays?

  No, this, this is the thing to, to me, the, the, the most important thing you can do in your twenties is develop a meaningful enough relationship with smart enough people.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Whose lives you admire and only get advice from them.

• 2:05:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Like David Senra and Sean Frank are like two of the only people on earth that aren't immediate family or you that, or Ben, our lovely producer Ben. But, but in general, like I only take sort of professional advice from a couple of people in the world.

• 2:05:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:17Jordi Hays?

  Because they understand my values, they know the things that I care about, they know what I want to optimize for. They know all these things and they are, have a unique and earned perspective.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:27Jordi Hays?

  And so it's much better to have, you know, one or two people and, and only get sort of professional advice from them. And that is the thing that has served me the best in life. The best career decisions that I've made were in response to people like Sean Frank's advice, people like, you know, David Center's advice, and I can kind of pinpoint even the conversation. So.

• 2:05:48John Coogan?

  Get a rich wallet, start a podcast.

• 2:05:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, like, um, I think if you had a strong personal relationship with Naval.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure he could give you really, really, really good advice.

• 2:06:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:00Jordi Hays?

  But just blanket, you know, taking his advice, like you should work like a lion. And then somebody like works hard for two days and takes like two days off, like, don't do that. You know, like, like you need to sort of like take it.

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  And process it and then ideally get the same advice from somebody that actually knows.

• 2:06:16John Coogan?

  Well, I threw this post in here randomly, but it seems like an answer to Emmett Shear's post from Guillermo Rao over at Versal. He says, in a world of infinite possibility, the alpha is in focus, quality and depth. And that feels like the right level of like meta advice that that is almost safe to apply to everyone. It's not, it's not go work at this specific company.

• 2:06:39Jordi Hays?

  Except if you're an investor and you're like, oh, I'm really into games. And then somebody pitches you a CRM and then it becomes Salesforce. It's like you like, you, you took the advice of like, I'm just going to fall like, so, so again, you can always apply these things.

• 2:06:52John Coogan?

  Focus, quality and depth, does that keep you from investing in, in Salesforce?

• 2:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because you're saying, I'm going to be the best, I'm going to be the investor. You're too focused. I'm going to deliver the best returns and I'm just going to focus on.

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  Well, it depends on what you're focusing on. You could be focusing on founders, right? Quality of businesses, like it doesn't necessarily need to be something as narrow as, I mean, focusing on a specific company or specific niche. You could be focusing on a, on, on an axiom of investing. But yes, I, I, I hear your point. Interesting. Well, let's go to another post about being young and doing great things. Gabriel says, the only thing stopping me from doing great things when I was young was that I thought I was a moron and there were too many people smarter than me. I still do. The only difference is that I realized everyone else is a moron as well. It's kind of a mid-wit meme.

• 2:07:38Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  It was actually a huge untrick.

• 2:07:40Jordi Hays?

  Gold retriever maxing.

• 2:07:41John Coogan?

  Yes. When I, when I realized the bell curve of people is not that wide and being economically productive seems to come from what thoughts and insight about the world rather than genes. Interesting. Good one. Did we talk about ServiceNow at all? I don't think we have. ServiceNow was buying MoveWorks, the AI platform for almost $3 billion. They were backed by Bain, Lightspeed, Kleiner.

• 2:08:03Jordi Hays?

  For the shareholders and Bain and Lightspeed and Kleiner and their LPs.

• 2:08:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Great moment.

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Great moment. Great exit.

• 2:08:12Jordi Hays?

  ServiceNow is a company that I just don't know anything about.

• 2:08:16John Coogan?

  I mean, honestly, when we put this in the stack, I was like, I kind of got them confused with ServiceTitan.

• 2:08:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:22John Coogan?

  ServiceNow, ServiceTitan, like we're doing two stories on the same thing.

• 2:08:25Jordi Hays?

  And this is a $160 billion company.

• 2:08:27John Coogan?

  But this one's much bigger than ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan's what, 8 billion?

• 2:08:30Jordi Hays?

  It's a cloud computing platform for the creation and management of automated business workflows.

• 2:08:35John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Buying a.

• 2:08:38Jordi Hays?

  Platform called Move Works.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Gundo bros hate this. Hate this one weird trick.

• 2:08:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  Make a hundred billion dollars building B2B SaaS. Augustus, somebody needs to do a wellness check on Augustus Tirico right now.

• 2:08:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  Because.

• 2:08:53Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, somebody should go and do like a content warning, like tell Augustus.

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hey, don't listen to this episode.

• 2:08:58Jordi Hays?

  Minute, you know.

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  They're talking about, yeah, trigger warning, August.

• 2:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Trigger warning. Yeah.

• 2:09:02John Coogan?

  They're talking about ServiceNow. Be careful. You're going to be super depressed when you hear how much money people are making automating business processes.

• 2:09:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, that's the thing. Some people wake up and from a young age, they know they want to live a life that allows them to deliver value through automating business processes using AI.

• 2:09:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:22Jordi Hays?

  That's beautiful.

• 2:09:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24Jordi Hays?

  That's beautiful.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  Their icky guy.

• 2:09:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  It's their life's work. They're live players.

• 2:09:27Jordi Hays?

  My icky guy is automating business processes.

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  You're laughing, but it's true. It's real. Some people love this. They build for it. It's great. Anyway, um, if you want to get on, on ServiceNow and the action, head over to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Of course, this is not financial advice, but it is the preferred platform of.

• 2:09:58Jordi Hays?

  The technology brothers.

• 2:10:00John Coogan?

  So go check it out. Uh, anyway, let's move on to former brother of the week, Justin Mayer's profiled in none other than Forbes, our favorite publication that we never say anything negative about. We love Forbes here.

• 2:10:16Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:10:16John Coogan?

  Eight years of hard work and Justin and Kettle and Fire have been featured in Forbes. Congratulations.

• 2:10:21Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, this, this was not a contributor piece that, you know, you can basically get for 20 bucks. This was a. Cover story.

• 2:10:30John Coogan?

  Cover story.

• 2:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Daily cover story.

• 2:10:32John Coogan?

  Let's go. Beautiful picture of Justin.

• 2:10:34Jordi Hays?

  It shows him, uh, yeah.

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  Looking great.

• 2:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Looking fantastic. And there are a bunch of the brothers in the community quoted this and, you know, said, uh, said nice things about, about him, but, uh, I, I just liked the boy who sold soup.

• 2:10:48John Coogan?

  The boy who sold soup.

• 2:10:52John Coogan?

  That is so good. From John Fio.

• 2:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:10:55John Coogan?

  The boy who sold soup. Incredible read. So good.

• 2:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing, uh, Justin is, is incredibly, uh, hardworking and kind.

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:05Jordi Hays?

  And, uh,

• 2:11:06John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:11:06Jordi Hays?

  There's a reason he's a former brother of the week.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:11:08Jordi Hays?

  And I, you know, some people have said to me, they don't know when I'm being sarcastic or when I'm being serious, not being sarcastic right now, credible human.

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  He's a great guy.

• 2:11:17Jordi Hays?

  And I'm lucky to call him a friend.

• 2:11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, can't wait for our episode on, uh, Thursday when Justin joins, we're going to be talking about the hot topics in consumer health. We'll talk about who's making money on Maha.

• 2:11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Which I'm excited about.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what the vibes are like at Mar-a-Lago, where he's been spending time.

• 2:11:36John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, of course, the, of course, the bone broth empire.

• 2:11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:41Jordi Hays?

  He's built.

• 2:11:41John Coogan?

  He made, he made his money in bone broth.

• 2:11:43Jordi Hays?

  He's basically built a, um, almost, like, I don't even say this ironically, he almost has a monopoly on the bone broth market.

• 2:11:50John Coogan?

  He really does.

• 2:11:51Jordi Hays?

  Because it's actually really.

• 2:11:52John Coogan?

  How much money is he making, Jordy?

• 2:11:54Jordi Hays?

  A hundred a year.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Let's go. A hundred million dollars a year.

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  That's their run rate. I think they're probably well, uh, that, that was when, whenever, you know, I think they're probably well beyond that now.

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  It's a fantastic business. He's a fantastic entrepreneur.

• 2:12:07Jordi Hays?

  We got a fantastic post from Bucko Capital Bloke, and I'm going to read this.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Read it.

• 2:12:13Jordi Hays?

  Dude, it's Jevon's paradox. It's literally Bhamal's cost disease. A classic example of Gellman's amnesia effect. Oh, that's the Monty Hall problem. It's orthogonal to Dutch disease. It's prisoner's dilemma. You're a prisoner. You're in prison. You're in prison.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  You're in prison. It's great. Mental models.

• 2:12:32Jordi Hays?

  Trapped in a mental, trapped in a mental model, trapped in a framework. Can't get out.

• 2:12:38Jordi Hays?

  Absolute banger. He's had some great posts today. While we're at it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull.

• 2:12:42John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:12:43Jordi Hays?

  He was talking about the Redfin acquisition, right?

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I think that's the bottom of the stack.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  The bloke was.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Says Redfin got acquired today. Shout out to their CEO for one of the wildest things I've ever heard on an earnings call. The analyst on this earnings call for Redfin says, what if mortgage rates don't come down? Of course, this would be harmful to Redfin's business because they buy and sell homes. And when mortgage rates go down, people buy a lot of homes. And Glenn, the CEO says.

• 2:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Which is a public, this is a public company.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  Any of this? I don't think so. Glenn says, will drink our own urine or our competitors' blood stay in the foxhole?

• 2:13:23Jordi Hays?

  No, he says, great question. Plan B, plan B is drink our own urine or our competitors' blood stay in the foxhole.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  I don't know if you remember, but our last earnings call ended with a single line from a Who song, Won't Get Fooled Again, where I said, we're not banking on low rates when other people had thought they might come down. I don't know. Weird. Go Glenn. He got out. He sold the company. Congrats to Glenn.

• 2:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  Gong for Glenn. And yeah, I love a, I love a, I love a CEO dropping a hot take on an earnings call. Real, you know, don't have a lot of time to post when you're running a public company. You gotta get those bangers out in the earnings call that the analyst asks.

• 2:14:03Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. They were, they were trading.

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was Redfin worth? It was a Zillow competitor, right?

• 2:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow. They were trading at like a quarter of their revenue.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Oof, rough.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:16Jordi Hays?

  Tough, tough go.

• 2:14:18John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:14:18Jordi Hays?

  But they got out.

• 2:14:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, they got out. Let's move on to Blake Anderson. He's locked in the cage right now. But he says 10x will be a hundred million dollar company within one year. He's manifesting. What's their ARR right now? They haven't launched yet, so they're still at zero. But they haven't spent much money. They're only a couple of weeks into the cage. And their goal, of course, is to hit $1 million in ARR in 90 days. And he's very confident about that. And he's confident that he will take it further, take it all the way to $100 million.

• 2:14:45Jordi Hays?

  All the way.

• 2:14:46John Coogan?

  So good luck to Blake. If you want to go check out what he's doing, go to pmfradie.com.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to, oh, Josh Wolfe. He says, incredible leadership in the United Arab Emirates as a husband to a super successful feminist in a male dominated world and father to two bold daughters raised by my sacrifice at all. Single mom and grandma, women have more rights in the UAE than some US states. He's clearly fundraising, but I just want to take a second to say the UAE is one of the greatest innovations in human rights in the world. And I think that everyone needs to acknowledge that at this point, everything in the Middle East is fantastic and, and I can't say enough good things. And, um, you know, I really hope that everyone in the Middle East can, can, can come together

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  and support American financial markets more aggressively than ever before. What do you think, Jordy?

• 2:15:41Jordi Hays?

  I agree, John.

• 2:15:42John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  Let's move on to Gary Tan.

• 2:15:44Jordi Hays?

  You're not, uh, you're not beating the fundraising allegations. Will, Will started a rumor mill last week when he said he was leading around in TPN. It's, you know, you know, there'd been rumors that we had been in the Middle East. And so you're not really helping the rumor mill, John. But anyways, back to the show.

• 2:16:02John Coogan?

  We do what we have to do. Did you hear about the Simpsons producer who was forced to demolish his 24 year old Simpsons inspired treehouse after the city of LA demanded he permit it like a single family dwelling? Gary Tan says deregulate housing. Yes, in my backyard. And, uh, yeah, I, I couldn't agree. It is post fires. It's more important than ever to reconsider how permitting is, is, is done. It's a treehouse and they wanted it to be ADA compliant. So they wanted a wheelchair ramp into the treehouse, which I think was probably impossible. So they made him tear it down. Very sad.

• 2:16:41John Coogan?

  And, and, and, and my, my problem with this is like, I am okay with, I'm okay with, with housing regulations and, and, and rules around how you build things. Cause you know, you don't want someone building some massive structure that just falls over and destroys your house next to you. But you need high throughput approvals. And when I was, when I was. Kind of pitching was like, there should be a CAD plugin where you design your structure. And at every moment, it's running the algorithm to say, is this approved or is this denied? And then you can just see, okay, everything's green, click, print the plans, go build it, you're good.

• 2:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  Instead of, instead of, oh, we designed the blueprints and then we send them in and then a month later it comes back and they have one tweak and then another month and just goes back and forth and back and forth. And, and it's very annoying. And now is the time to, to fix housing and Gary Tan has been a very vocal voice for that. So we love it. We actually have a whole bunch of, of Gary Tan posts here. Let's go to the next one.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  He's quote tweeting someone who says, I, so I just simply asked Manus to give me the files. We already talked about this. And, and Gary.

• 2:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he, he. He came to a similar conclusion, which is all the alpha is prompting, custom prompting, tool use and clever workflow and evals.

• 2:17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:57Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait for demo day. I'm sure we're going to see a lot of people adopting similar approaches to Manus. As some, some people call it Manus, some people call it Manus.

• 2:18:06John Coogan?

  My news. The neomotive determinism is that you will be hung by it.

• 2:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  It's not great. Anyway.

• 2:18:13Jordi Hays?

  Dark.

• 2:18:15John Coogan?

  Things got a little spicy with the acquired podcast. They flew out to Taiwan. They interviewed TSMC founder, Morris Chang, legend. I've been calling for Morris Chang to go on Joe Rogan for years now. And it hasn't happened. We saw Zuck go on. We saw Peter Thiel go on. We saw Naval Rabin go on. Mark Andreessen's been on. I wanted Morris Chang to go on Rogan. Didn't happen, but fortunately, the good folks over at acquired podcast got it done. They flew out there. They interviewed him. But funny exchange. Gilbert says, TSMC is essentially the only trillion dollar company in the world, not on the west coast of the United States. It is incredibly, it is this incredibly important thing in the world. It is, it's this unlikely success of grand scale.

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  And Morris Chang cuts him off and says, unlikely in your opinion? And Gilbert says, I mean, you started it when you were 56. There are many things. And Chang chimes in again and says, I'm not going to argue with you. I merely asked it, I merely asked as a point of curiosity. I didn't think that it was unlikely. I love it.

• 2:19:16Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  You go over to meet with a, what, 80 year old founder? And he just tells you, I never had a doubt in my mind. Not for a second.

• 2:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Not for a second.

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  But, I mean, the, the, the acquired guys are doing fantastic interviews and they are, I mean, I hope this soundbite goes viral or like, there's more soundbites from the Morris Chang interview that go viral because there's that famous Jensen Wong interview that they did where there's that clip that goes viral where they're like, if you had to go back and you had to do it all again, would you do it? And he's just like, no, I wouldn't do it. It's been too hard. It's been too miserable. I don't like it. It's bad.

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  But I'm here to check out my leather jacket.

• 2:19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a very, very, very funny interaction. And they're, and they, they obviously do a ton of research on these companies. So they show up extremely prepared and get great soundbites. And so go check it out. You can listen to the TSMC founder, Morris Chang, on the acquired podcast. You can go to their YouTube. It's probably in their RSS feed as well.

• 2:20:10Jordi Hays?

  Okay. One more post.

• 2:20:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:20:13Jordi Hays?

  And then, and before we do that last post, I wanted to give-

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  That's what you gotta do before that next post.

• 2:20:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna stop myself at two because I-

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  We haven't finished the bottle.

• 2:20:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's no rule about a Dom. There's no rule about a Dom episode.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Let us know in the chat, what do you think? Should Jordy finish the bottle?

• 2:20:36Jordi Hays?

  No, but I wanted to give a quick shout out to Wander.

• 2:20:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:40Jordi Hays?

  Number one place to book vacation rentals in the world. They are more than vacation homes. They are simply-

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Start over.

• 2:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 2:20:56John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views.

• 2:20:58Jordi Hays?

  We need the guitar for that.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do. We do need the guitar. Hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service is a vacation home, but better. Jordy, do you have a link or a code?

• 2:21:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you just have to go to wander.com/tbpn.

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  If you just create an account, they're gonna give away a, I think it's like a four-ish night trip to someone in our audience.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  That's a long trip. That's nice.

• 2:21:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  Longer than I was in Tahoe.

• 2:21:21Jordi Hays?

  So go do it. Takes a second. You can use Google or any other login and you'd be silly not to and invite us. Maybe we'll come. We rarely leave the house except to do the show.

• 2:21:34John Coogan?

  But if you book one that has a podcasting room, we'll be there.

• 2:21:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:37John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's go to Gabe. Tech guys take up a creative hobby because they want to prove they are insulted, unlike all other tech guys. And then they end up taking, and then they end up with the exact same hobbies as all other tech guys, which are making electronic music and photography.

• 2:21:56Jordi Hays?

  Bodied. I do know some tech guys that have taken up electronic music and photography.

• 2:22:01John Coogan?

  Yep. But that's why we advocate for Nürburgring, bodybuilding.

• 2:22:07Jordi Hays?

  MMA.

• 2:22:08John Coogan?

  MMA, long distance rifle shooting.

• 2:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Watchmaking.

• 2:22:13John Coogan?

  Most dangerous game.

• 2:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Car collecting even, even if you don't want to drive the cars fast, just collect.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Sailing alone across the Pacific Ocean.

• 2:22:21Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:22:22John Coogan?

  These are hobbies that will differentiate you if you're looking for something. You're not going to become glorious and remembered in the trenches of EDM and photography.

• 2:22:30Jordi Hays?

  Carve your own Mount Rushmore.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:22:32Jordi Hays?

  In the Marin Highlands.

• 2:22:35John Coogan?

  Yes, I agree.

• 2:22:37Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  Someone says, want to go bouldering? And Gabe says, I will not do this. Very popular hobby. But yeah, get, yeah, get out there, get deep in some rabbit holes on YouTube, find an obscure hobby.

• 2:22:49Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  Really, really deep. Watch collecting. Go to Bezel. Start, start collecting watches. It's much better than photography. Anyway, Lancer Anga says, you think cursors growth is, is crazy. There's a company in this YC batch that hit $50 million in annualized profit in two months. What do you think, Jordy?

• 2:23:11Jordi Hays?

  Annualized profit. Like.

• 2:23:13John Coogan?

  Weird, weird stat, right?

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:14John Coogan?

  Like, what if you have a bunch of CapEx?

• 2:23:16Jordi Hays?

  Cause if you're making that much money, you should probably hire and scale the team and sort of spend even, you know, like, I don't know.

• 2:23:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Annualized profit. It's like, did you make, is that like one good day?

• 2:23:28Jordi Hays?

  It'd also be hilarious if it was, yeah, it was one good day.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  One hour.

• 2:23:32Jordi Hays?

  No payroll expenses hit. It was just pure play.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  Pure profit that day.

• 2:23:36Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's still impressive.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  It's still impressive. I'm sure, I'm sure it's a great company, but it is, it is funny that we're now talking about annualized profit, which is not like really a thing.

• 2:23:46John Coogan?

  Cash balance over time is what matters.

• 2:23:48Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:23:49John Coogan?

  If you're making so much profit and you need to manage your expenses, you gotta go to ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. I really hope that YC company signs up for ramp. And if we meet them, we will definitely be pitching them ramp. Anyway.

• 2:24:05Jordi Hays?

  We should have an iPad where anybody that comes that we run into, we just sign them up for ramp.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, that'd be great.

• 2:24:13Jordi Hays?

  It's more of a public service than a sales activity, a sales motion.

• 2:24:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Let's go to Richard Crabbe. Very fascinating poster. Does the poster very often.

• 2:24:23Jordi Hays?

  John, John has insane podcasters high right now because we were like, we're, this is the last post.

• 2:24:30John Coogan?

  Oh, what were you talking about? I never agreed to that. You still have the champagne you haven't finished. Let's keep going. What do you have to do the rest of the day? Nothing. You're posting, you're podcasting. Let's keep going.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheers to that.

• 2:24:42John Coogan?

  We literally only have six posts left. We can get through this. We're good. We're good. I'll skip some of these. Some of these are repeats too.

• 2:24:49Jordi Hays?

  Stick with us, folks.

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  We'll skip.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Save, John saved the best for last.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  Okay. We'll skip this one. We'll skip this. This is a duplicate. Yeah, let's just, let's just, let's just close out of Richard Crabbe. Very interesting poster. He only pops up when something big is happening in the market. He runs a hedge fund, Numerai. And he said he woke up today wondering how Leopold Ochenbrenner situational awareness hedge fund is doing. And so, do you know the story of Leopold Ochenbrenner?

• 2:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Is that the OpenAI?

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  He was at OpenAI. He left. He did a great podcast with Dwarsh Patel, talked about scaling laws and basically predicted that, you know, if you fall, if you scale out the AGI systems, like it's going to get really, really crazy. Made a bunch of kind of pivots away from the traditional AI safety arguments towards kind of geopolitical relevance.

• 2:25:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  The fact, the idea that these will be, you know, akin to nuclear weapons, very controlled. But I think what Richard here is saying that, you know, Leopold's bet was that situational awareness hedge fund, like, like go turbo long Nvidia, basically, like, like AI is the future. And then, of course, like, things are selling off right now. And if you're levered long Nvidia, even if it's a good bet over the very long term, it could be in a rough spot.

• 2:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Timing and sizing.

• 2:26:10John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And so, Richard Crabbe's. Throw in some, throw in some questions up on the timeline. I thought, I thought were interesting, but good luck to Leopold. I'm a big fan of his podcast. I thought it was very interesting. Anyway, anything else you want to cover?

• 2:26:26Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if this is somebody messing around. Okay, it's not. This is breaking news. We got some personnel news.

• 2:26:33John Coogan?

  What is this?

• 2:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Somebody on the chat.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Oh, you were talking a big game about me going to, now we got breaking news, Jordy's, oh, we gotta do one more.

• 2:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. Yeah. Did you finish? You didn't quite finish the bottle, but that's all, that's all you, John.

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  The bottle's done.

• 2:26:47Jordi Hays?

  So, under the number, not, less than 10 minutes ago, he says, when's the next, some personnel news should be a regular segment. And the answer is right now. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, is the new leader of Relativity Space. He's joining as CEO. This is 50 minutes ago.

• 2:27:07John Coogan?

  That's incredible.

• 2:27:08Jordi Hays?

  And it says, I got an article here from Ars Technica, another Silicon Valley investor is getting into the rocket business. Everybody's getting into the rocket business. We've, we've, you know, sketched out some designs. We're exploring it, but just to get some of our own low earth orbit satellites, just to stream the showdown.

• 2:27:28Jordi Hays?

  But apparently he's been quite involved over the past few months and that he's been largely been bankrolling the company since the end of October. Dangerous position to get in when you are the lifeline of the company and the burn becomes your own personal expenses. But if anybody can afford it, it's Schmidt.

• 2:27:48Jordi Hays?

  And it's not immediately clear why Schmidt is taking a hands-on approach at Relativity. And, but, but this article says, it's one of the few US-based companies with a credible path toward developing a medium lift rocket that could potentially challenge the dominance of SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket. So, pretty wild.

• 2:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Anybody that wanted the Google founders to go back to Google.

• 2:28:15John Coogan?

  He's not founder.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  He's a.

• 2:28:18John Coogan?

  Oh. CEO.

• 2:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 2:28:20John Coogan?

  CEO for a long time, but he was never founder of Google.

• 2:28:23Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 2:28:25Jordi Hays?

  Exposed.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  But granted, I was, but I was a, but I was a small, I was a small child in that era.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  I mean, clearly like, you know, he grew the company. He's like a fantastic executive, but technically not a founder. But maybe that's a bull case because Relativity has already been founded. He comes in and if he can do what he did for Google to Relativity is very bullish.

• 2:28:47Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 2:28:47John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:28:49Jordi Hays?

  And Google is down 5% on the news after hours. Obviously not. No, it is. It is. It is. But it's because of the market.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  This guy who hasn't been.

• 2:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Involved in the company.

• 2:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Former CEO.

• 2:29:05John Coogan?

  Some personnel news. Anything can happen in the market.

• 2:29:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, there's an argument. It's like, okay, Eric, such, so insane for Eric to join Relativity space.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:15Jordi Hays?

  And Eric's thinking is still embedded in this company. Maybe the company's worth less.

• 2:29:19John Coogan?

  The fact that he's, that he's choosing to go back into the CEO role and he's not going back to Google, bear case.

• 2:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Maybe. That's what you come here for. The worst financial advice you've ever heard.

• 2:29:30Jordi Hays?

  No, it's our job to give the worst advice.

• 2:29:33John Coogan?

  Break things loose.

• 2:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Nobody could ever say, as a joke, so nobody could ever say, you guys are giving financial advice, which we never do. We never have. Anyways, fun show today.

• 2:29:44John Coogan?

  Fun show.

• 2:29:45Jordi Hays?

  I will make sure John finishes the dom.

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  I will make sure Jordy finishes his dom.

• 2:29:51John Coogan?

  I refilled it to the top.

• 2:29:53Jordi Hays?

  For cheers to you, John.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  Cheers to the great show.

• 2:29:58Jordi Hays?

  Our life's work.

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  It is. Icky guy.

• 2:30:00Jordi Hays?

  Icky guy.

• 2:30:04Jordi Hays?

  And thank you everyone for watching. We will see you tomorrow. We have some, we have a big.

• 2:30:08John Coogan?

  We have a big week.

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Big, big announcement tomorrow morning.

• 2:30:11John Coogan?

  Big announcement tomorrow morning. If you, if you follow us on X, get ready to repost, engage, please. You'll know it when you see it.

• 2:30:18Jordi Hays?

  That is for sure. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Bye.