The Size Gong, Nuclear Wave Pools, Who's Getting Rich Off Ozempic, ITAR Compliant Gatorade

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we have a new segment to congratulate any deal of large size. But today, we're going to Doug Burnhour at Radiant Technologies. They make nuclear power plants and they, nuclear reactors. And they launched a $100 million Series A today. Jordy, can we hit the size gong?

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  For Doug.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Congratulations to Doug and the entire Radiant team. I've gotten to know Doug over the past couple of months. Awesome guy, former SpaceX, fantastic engineer. And he writes, "We at Radiant Nuclear are announcing our $100 million Series C today. Our plan is to test new, our new reactor design at I N L. That's the Idaho National Laboratory. Begin mass manufacturing reactors and deliver one megawatt reactors to critical areas across the globe. Reach out if you'd like to join us and build a new atom splitting machine." And he clips the Axios report.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  And just to be clear, you don't need to do a nine-figure deal to benefit from the size gong.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  It's more about like the, the weight.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  The spirit of the deal.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  The spirit of it.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Exactly. Anyone who's punching above their weight.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Significance of what you're doing, so.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. But this is awesome. Do you know about this company, Radiant?

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  A little bit.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  It's really cool. Yeah. So they're replacing the diesel generators that are typically one megawatt. So it's not like the big nuclear power plants with the smokestacks. It's essentially the size of a shipping container.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  And they're going to be able to forward deploy it onto military bases. Even oil and gas extraction, like you need power. And oftentimes, you have to truck in diesel. So anywhere where it's hard to get energy, you just drop one of these down and it's good for like five or 10 years or something and then you reload it. So, yeah, it's just fantastic.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  We, we might be able to, we've been doing a lot of like coal-powered AI data centers. We might be able to kind of swap in what they're doing.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  I mean, the crazy, like, obviously, this is going to be heavily, you know, purchased by the government first and then, you know, large corporations and, and, you know, industrial companies. But I love the idea of getting like a massive, massive ranch in Alaska and just throwing one of these on it and just having so much power. And then Starlink.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Melt all the snow.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Just, yeah, just heat the whole place with just clean. It's amazing. It'd be phenomenal.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  No, you could actually probably run like rods through like the ground to just like melt all of the ice.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  That's actually one of the benefits is that it it puts out electricity, but it also puts out waste heat. So you can use the waste heat in different ways. You can like pipe it around and have heating too. Um, but yeah, it it's it's super cool. And Doug is the man. He's just like built this incredible team.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  We need to do the first nuclear powered wave pool. Because like wave pools are super energy intensive.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  Oh, they are.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  Because you're just like produce, you're having to like move huge amounts of water.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  It's like a train that goes down.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  That's Kelly's.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  That's Kelly's.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Others that are better kind of like formats that are closer to like real surfing.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so doing, uh, that'd be a good TB incubation is nuclear powered wave pools.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  That'd be great. I love it. Well, congrats to Doug. Congrats to the Radiant Nuclear team and congrats on winning the very first recommendation or recognition from the size gong.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  First of many.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Let's move to our top story today. Uh, we're talking about Ozempic and specifically who is getting rich off of Ozempic? Obviously Ozempic was.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you're not, right now, feel bad about it.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  It's the best day to start making money off of Ozempic. Yeah, I mean, this is a huge story in 2021 when all the celebrities started using Ozempic. That's when it actually got approved.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  Um, a little bit of background, uh, semaglutide is the, the, the, the name of the actual chemical. Started off as diabetes medication.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Then pharma company Novo Nordisk developed it in the early 2010s and the FDA approved it under the brand names Ozempic for the injectable.

• 3:56John Coogan?

  Patients reported significant weight loss as a side effect and eventually the FDA in 2021 approved semaglutide as a weight loss product under the brand name Wegovy. And so.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Today, I want to go through two articles from Astral Codex 10, Scott Alexander. One on trying to investigate the question of why Ozempic cures seemingly all diseases. It seems to be this miracle drug. We're going to go back and forth on this. I'm sure the tinfoil hat will come out at least once. And then we're going to move on to kind of the economics of the industry. How big could this be? And we'll close with who really made money on this? And how can you maybe make some money yourself in the Ozempic boom that's continuing to go on? The numbers are insane when you dig into them. So let's start with this article. Why does Ozempic cure all diseases? This is like a pattern that happens whenever there's a new drug.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  This happened with statins and this happened with SSRIs where there's some new drug, it has some amazing effects, and then all of a sudden, like, the scientific community starts, you know, digging into all these different side effects. And you see this with Ozempic where it's like, it started with diabetes, then it went to obesity. Now it's like, oh, well, it stops you from gambling and it also, you know, has all these knock-on effects. But so far, people are pretty, pretty, like, stumped as to how this actually works. And so Scott Alexander did a great job kind of breaking this down. The main thing that's going on that, you know, he starts with in terms of diabetes is that when you eat a meal, it increases blood sugar and your body wants to push blood sugar back down.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  So GLP-1 tells the pancreas to release more insulin to regulate that sugar. So you're basically just up-regulating the natural insulin production. And the background on this, so diabetes involves excessive blood sugar. So this is the profile that you want for an anti-diabetic drug, but natural GLP-1 decays within a minute or two. So you eat, you get this slight spike in GLP-1 that releases this insulin and starts controlling your blood sugar, but then it goes away after an hour or two. And the whole, the reason why Ozempic is so big is that it's a weekly injection. So the half-life has just been stretched. And this started almost, I guess, 30 years ago, over 30 years ago, in 1992. And this is where it gets really tinfoil hat. You know where it came from?

• 6:20John Coogan?

  The Gila monster, have you seen this?

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  This is the, this is the monster.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  So the Gila monster is this.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  It's a reptile, folks.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  It's a reptile and it's basically this giant lizard. I remember learning about this thing as a kid.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  So you know the whole backstory on like, so diabetes, type one diabetes, which primarily affects children.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  When it first sort of emerged and people start, started to understand it, it was just a death sentence.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a death sentence, yeah.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Like if you had it, you were gonna have a terrible quality of life.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  For a really long time.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  The AcquireFM guys did a really big deep dive into Novo Nordisk, which we'll obviously talk about.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  And they basically were talking about how like the primary treatment method was to just starve yourself, like have like 200, 400 calories a day.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Caloric restriction.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  And that would sort of extend your lifetime long enough, the theory was, for like some type of cure to emerge. Much later, people discovered that you could take effectively the hormones out of the pancreases of like pigs and cows.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  And things like that. And so all of the first sort of like insulin replacements or synthetic insulin was like taken from the pancreas of cows and pigs and all these different animals. The challenge there is you would need like hun, you know, one person to get their insulin for a year.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Hundred pigs.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, PETA. It would take like, no, thousands, basically.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  It means it's the same thing with thyroid medication. A lot of times it's just ground up thyroid from another animal.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  And then eventually they create the synthetic version.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, so the, the, in 1992, scientists discovered a chemical in the Gila monster venom, which looked like GLP-1, and it lasted a whole two hours. And so that was like the first breakthrough to realize that there were versions of GLP-1s, which is glucagon-like peptide 1, GLP-1s that could last longer.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  And so this became Exenatide, the first GLP-1 receptor agonist. One of my favorite paper names is From the Gila Monster to the Pharmacy. And then by playing around.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, that was a big, that was a big innovation in insulin. It's just. Novo, I don't know if it was, Novo and Nordisk were initially two different companies and I don't know which one discovered it. But they figured out that you could do, there were sort of like, forms of insulin that had a longer half-life in the human body.

• 8:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  And that was a big innovation because somebody could like be on this thing that sort of had the steady-state response and then take like, more precise dosages, more spaced out.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there's a whole trend in drug development about just like, create something that's a breakthrough and then figure out how to create an extended release version.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  Adderall, IR, XR.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of the same thing. So, basically the last 30 years, the story of GLP-1 is just grinding to create longer and longer half-life versions. So, they play around with its structure. Eventually, they create liraglutide, which lasts 12 hours, then semaglutide, which is one week, and then kafraglutide, which is one month, which I don't think is on the, on the market yet. But now, they're like, the Ozempic.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  We need the 100-year, we need the 100 years.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  Take it once and it's just, never use it again, basically. I wouldn't be surprised, somebody's working on it. But yeah, it's, so, so the, the, the role of GLP-1's weight loss was kind of accidental. They were targeting.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Diabetes.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Diabetes, as, as we mentioned.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  Which is a symptom of being overweight.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yep. And, and I think in general, pharma companies don't tend to go after weight loss drugs directly.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  You know why?

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Why?

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, one reason is because Medicare doesn't cover weight loss drugs, which is insane.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  Because being overweight and the fact that so much of our population is overweight is like the biggest drag

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  on government, you know, spending and, and the economy overall, right? You think that, you think the US government at the federal level would say, let's fast-track GLP-1's being covered by Medicare because it's going to save us so much money in all these other ways, even though it is this sort of incremental cost initially.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, there's another thing where, like, just to kind of steel man how we got here with the current healthcare structure, like, it does kind of make sense if you go back 50 years and you look at, or 70 years and you look at pictures of beaches, like. America wasn't this obese, so it wasn't that much of a problem. And the big like, oh shit moment that happens in healthcare is like, you get hit by a bus, you break your leg, you go to the hospital and you're, and there's like a team of really, really experienced doctors working on you for like a week. And it's like, those people are, need to be paid a lot. And then everything that they're doing, all the equipment is expensive. And so I think, I have the breakdown here, but a fair amount, yeah, here it is.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Like hospital care is 31% of US national healthcare expenses.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Actual drugs, outpatient prescription drugs is only 8%.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  And that, and like, yeah, we can talk about, okay, yeah, now we should be thinking upstream.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  But a lot of that, a lot of that, a lot of that hospital care spending is people in the last month of their life.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  That are just sort of like needing intensive care in order to kind of go gracefully.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, intellectually, we should be avoiding getting people into the hospital. But that wasn't, that wasn't kind of the theory behind Medicare and Medicaid when they were in, that kind of created. And so there's been this question with like, how do GLP-1s work? Like, is it on your brain or is it on your body? Like, obviously, if you're, you know, if you're taking caffeine or something, that's just like purely in your brain, like stimulating you, you're more likely to go for a walk, you're more likely to work out, same thing with nicotine, this is like a brain chemical versus like liposuction. It's like, very clearly, that's like a body thing.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  And so they actually, this is fascinating, like, so they knew it worked, they knew that people were losing weight because they were prescribing GLP-1s to diabetics. And, but they didn't know, is it, is it a brain thing or a body thing? And so what they did was they bred rats that had GLP-1 receptors only in their brain, and then a separate group of rats that only have it in their body. And so then they could see, and it was the brain that mattered. And it's very weird because it goes in, so they can dye it with, they can dye the chemical with like this like fluorescent light or something that you can see under some sort of x-ray. And they, and they can see where it goes in the brain. And typically, it's really hard to get a large molecule into the brain. Something like nicotine is like a really small molecule, it can just kind of permeate the blood-brain barrier.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  But for, yes, it's fantastic. But for... But for larger molecules and GLP-1s is this peptide, it has this lipid chain on it. It's a pretty fat molecule, but it can permeate like the brain stem a little bit. And so that's where it gets in.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  Get up there.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Get up there, yeah. And, and, and so they basically, they basically narrowed it down now to understand that it's, it's almost certainly going through the brain. But there are kind of like still two different pathways that they go through. The mesolympic system and, and, and, and these GLP-1 neurotransmitters. But I mean, there's, there's so much more to go into because now because GLP-1s are seen as this great modulator of hunger, essentially. It's like the hunger switch.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But it also makes people less impulsive, right? Which is an argument, you could have made the argument, hey, this is having some impact on the brain because it's changing people's decision making, right?

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  I know a lot of people that were fantastic, you know, sports betters and had an amazing career in it and got on GLP. Tried to lose a little weight and, and they're no longer the size lords, you know? You're not hitting the size gong for them anymore.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  No, no, it's a tragedy.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  Tragedy.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  But yeah, now, now people are, so the intestine actually naturally releases GLP-1 when it detects food in order to tell the rest of the body to be full. But there's this question of like, what if some foods make the small intestine release more GLP-1 than others? Like a diet focused on those foods could be nature's Ozempic, which is now, so now people are trying to take the meme of GLP-1 and, and kind of go backwards to say, well, what, what stimulates GLP-1 naturally?

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  So that you don't necessarily need the injection. And so there's all these different articles, nine foods and supplements that increase GLP-1 naturally. It's the same thing with testosterone, you see?

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  You know, like, oh, this diet is, is better for, you know, increasing your testosterone naturally. Six foods that increase GLP-1 levels, foods that naturally mimic GLP-1.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because I think that, that market of people that are already. You know, even people that are objectively already pretty healthy.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Still are seeing how other people are benefiting from it. Maybe they don't want to be giving themselves an injection once a week.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Jordi Hays?

  But they're like, I may as well kind of get on the trend.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the same thing with testosterone. It's like.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  You might not want to do TRT, but you but you also want the highest natural production of testosterone that you want, that you can possibly get.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my my buddies, or sorry, my friend, my friends Nish and Sif have a health supplement company that's incredible business. And they created a sort of a metabolic, something called MB1.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  By array.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  That's sort of a, they've positioned it as a Fozempic type thing.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  So it's like a health supplement.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Fozempic.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  Fozempic.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  I like that, yeah.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, it's doing really well.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  And so like, the early arguments are being written about GLP-1 based diets, or like, you know, the best diets to upregulate GLP-1, paleo diet, Mediterranean diet, Ayurvedic diet, carnivore diet, and plant-based diet. Like, people are writing them about everything, basically. And it's the same thing for exercise. There's this theory that exercise creates very high demand for glucose. So it kind of makes sense that it's a signal for the body to focus on keeping its glucose system well tuned. And there's this like, there's this continuous theory of like, okay, well, when you are in shape, when you are eating properly, when you're healthy, you have kind of the proper level of GLP-1 flowing through your system. And so this drug is just a way to kind of like, short circuit your system back to the

• 16:29John Coogan?

  normal level. But whenever we discover a new drug, scientists rush to demonstrate that all those lifestyle changes, the ones you should do anyway, actually work through the same mechanism as the wonder drug. So for example.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  Americans are like, no, thanks.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  I'll take the shot.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  I'll take the drug.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So example, for example, when SSRIs were the hot new thing, psychiatrists announced that all the normal stuff that brightens your mood worked through serotonin. Sunlight, serotonin. Exercise, serotonin. Having a good, trauma-free childhood, serotonin.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Which is interesting, though, because people that have, you know, too high of serotonin, don't end up looking too good.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  So it's, it's, it's sort of like, it's one of those things, like, anything good, you can have too much of it.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Moderation, yeah, everything in moderation, including moderation.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  And, and so after, so in the cold light of SSRI patents expiring, most of these effects were found, were later found to be fake, or at least too small to care about. And this is the same thing with, there, there's this, there's this, there's this product or this supplement called, what is it? It's like, turkesterone? Turkesterone? Have you heard of this? Turk?

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  So it's, it's basically the plant-based, it's the plant version of testosterone. And there's this theory that if you take it, it'll increase your testosterone naturally or semi-naturally. And so it became kind of like a meme and people were taking it in

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  Hey, YC should offer that as a benefit.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  But, but it's one of those things where it's, it's a plant-based product, and so it doesn't really translate the same way. And you need to take a ton of it. It's the same thing about, you know, tryptophan in, in turkey. Everyone says it makes you sleepy. But it's like, you would need to eat 10,000 turkeys to actually get the effect.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  Is that true?

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Is it just people get tired because?

• 18:14John Coogan?

  They're around their family and they're arguing about politics and Bitcoin and shit. Of course. It's, it's like, it's just a funny story.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  More families need to adopt the Technology Brothers Law of not discussing politics or social issues.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  Just only at Thanksgiving this year. Try discussing, you know, technology, capital allocation.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  And things that actually matter.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so, the, the same thing is true for gastric bypass. There's like this giant mystery about why it works. Like, you would think, so it's basically stomach stapling. Like, they, they literally just decrease the, the size of your stomach. And everyone was like, okay, well, that's how it works. Like, you just get full quicker because your stomach's full. But what's weird is that when you do the surgery, all these different metabolic parameters change before the patient has even had time to lose weight. And the weight loss tracks those metabolic parameters, not the stomach size. And so there's this, so some scientists thought this was GLP-1, too. After all, the intestine secretes GLP-1.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  It's GLP-1 all the way down.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, literally, everyone's, this is the theory of everything.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  The astronauts.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, always has been.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  It always has been.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Always has been. And so, and so people are saying, oh, maybe it's, maybe it's GLP-1 because you shrink it and the food goes through the stomach before and the stomach usually digests a lot of food before it even reaches the intention, the intestine. But if you remove or shrink the stomach, it can't do that and much more food hits the intestine. And that means the intestine releases much more GLP-1 and that means the patient feels full more quickly. And so it's like this theory, but then of course, they tested it in rats that don't have GLP-1 receptors and the gastric bypass worked. So they kind of like debunked that one. But there's like all these different things. We can move on to addiction. The addiction one is hilarious. We got to go to this post by Scott Alexander, the guy who wrote the, wrote this article.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  And multi-step nominative determinism in action. So GLP-1s are being investigated as a way to suppress alcoholism. GLP-1s are based on a chemical found in the Gila monster venom. Gila monsters were first described by a zoologist named Edward "Drinker" Kope. Isn't that hilarious?

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Unreal.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Unreal. What do you have to do in life to be named Edward "Drinker" Kope? Wild. I mean, it's like, maybe you're drunk.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Heavy alcoholic father who, who determined that this is how he was going to cope is something. Fatherhood.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  But what a bizarre chain of events. I love that Scott includes that. And so there are, there are two reasons you might eat. First, because you feel hungry. And the second is because you crave delicious food. So to fulfill its evolutionary role of making you eat less, GLP-1 needs to do two things. First, it needs to make you less hungry versus via the arcusia nucleus, master hunger pathway. And then also it needs to make you crave food, the food reward last via the mesolimbic reward center pathway. And so you don't want to, you don't want to like broadly tamp down the reward system. There's some antipsychotic

• 21:30John Coogan?

  drugs that do this and you just like, if you take too much, you will literally just sit motionless until you die because they're like, you don't want to get up. There's no reward for anything. But there are some silver bullet anti-addiction medications. Naltrexone seems to treat a whole host of different addictions and. And the some and none of these anti-addictive drugs affect wholesome rewards like the feeling of a job well done or a child's smile. They're just drug, drug addictions, which is hilarious because he asks like, why did God give your brain a special lever that only porn and cocaine can pull?

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Which is hilarious, but it's like, it does appear that there is literally a reward pathway in your brain that's separate. Like, it's not the same as like runner's high or like feeling good after a workout. It's a separate thing and it's only the bad stuff that's, that's like triggering it.

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  You know, I'm kind of bummed. I've, I've never experienced runner's high.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  I've run a lot. Like, I've tried to go out and experience it.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  But you've, but you've, you've experienced podcaster's high.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that's.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  After a long podcast.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  From everything I know about podcaster's high, it is a league above runner's high.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, of course.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  That's why we record for three plus hours sometimes, right?

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Exactly. So he says GLP-1 suggests this was originally a food reward system, or at least food was a big enough part of its portfolio that it was a weird but functional hack for satiety signaling chemical to just turn off a whole subsection of the reward system. You're already full and well nourished. Why would you need the ability to crave things? And then, and then he goes on to talk about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. He says, okay, now God is just trolling us. GLP-1 receptor agonist, a new treatment for Parkinson's disease, gives us this diagram and he kind of explains like how it could possibly work on, on Parkinson's.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's funny because I feel like Silicon Valley has been waiting for the miracle drug.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Like to come out of Silicon Valley.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  And I think that if Novo Nordisk was a Silicon Valley darling, we would all just be like. Like Ozempic gets a lot of attention in our industry because of all the potential economic and technological impacts of it. But we would all be like, everybody just be patting each other on the back, being like, we did it. We solved weight loss. We solved diabetes. We solved heart disease. We solved, like, we'd just be going down the list, just like spraying champagne, a lot of Dom Perignon.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  We'd be doing like a bottle an episode, basically.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Well, there was a little bit of debate about that during the, during COVID. There was like, it, it, like, some of the tech people were like, well, like, Amazon's like the real, like, hero in this story. Because like, we were all able to get packages delivered during COVID and like, it really helped with like lockdowns. And then, and then a lot of people were like, tech can't take a victory lap. It was the vaccine companies that like did all the work, like, you know, this isn't Silicon Valley thing.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but there was, so there was a company, do you remember Genentech?

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  This was before our time, but like, Genentech, I can't remember if they partnered with Novo or Nordisk. But they had a partnership that, you know, Genentech, I think, was the first big biotech IPO.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Synthetic insulin?

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they, they helped invent. So, so Jeanette, we can, if we actually trace back.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  Novo Nordisk's success, it is without Silicon Valley and our incredible capital markets and the bubble that was happening in biotech at the time. You could argue that GLP-1s would have never, you know.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, wasn't that a Kleiner company?

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  I think it was a Kleiner company and there's this famous story about.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  And that's why they're part of the Holy Trinity.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  It is, it is. And, and, and one of the partners, like, who did the deal would basically work inside the company every Friday.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Forward deployed GPs.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Essentially, essentially a forward deployed GP and he would like do their accounting, do their business, like modeling, like really bring like the business side. So that like the scientists and the co-founders could just work on the products. It was fascinating.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  I, I expect, I expect forward deployed GPs to come back, right?

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Oh, my God, yes.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Like, it needs to, I mean, Founder's Fund basically already does this.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  I mean, it exists, yeah, trade and all, it is that, basically.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  And, and Delian.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the, the success of Palantir, the forward deployed model is going to be everywhere, right?

• 25:44John Coogan?

  I, I, I'm looking forward to it. Earn that sweat equity. Earn that carry shack.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  But so this is an interesting thing. I don't know all that much about Parkinson's Alzheimer's, but one theory as to why GLP-1s might help with Parkinson's Alzheimer's is that GLP-1s suggests that they prevent inflammation.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  And have you like studied on inflammation?

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, so.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  I don't know that much about it.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  I would say the interesting thing here is what, so Novo Nordisk is a metabolic pharmaceutical company, right?

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  They're focused on metabolic health.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  And the tie-in to our corner of Twitter is that Ray Pete.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  Almost all his work was focused on metabolism, metabolic health, how to get your metabolism firing, right?

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  There's people that are taking their temperature multiple times a day to try to get their.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Carrot salad.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to get their body temperature higher, increase metabolism. And even cancer, as many people think, is like a metabolic disease, right? So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bunch of other sort of downstream effects on, you know, cancer in the US.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  So this was, this is a great overview. I've only heard about inflammation like vaguely, like if you, you know, like have swelling. Like that's what, that's literally what I think of when I think of inflammation. But there's a good breakdown here. So it says, inflammation is a catch-all term for the immune response to microbes. Although it helps fight the microbes, it's slightly toxic to the rest of the body and generally bad unless you're actively fighting an infection. So it's like you get some microbes, you get infected and stuff swells up. Like you see this when you just like get a scratch or cut, right?

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or when you're.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  But it can also be like you ate some bad food and like you're swelling up. Or chronic, chronic inflammation from like bad food over years and years and years. And so it says, in chronic inflammation, i.e. the thing most of us with modern diets have all the time, generally, general bad health damages the body. The immune system mistakes the damage for a microbial infection and it provokes a constant low-grade inflammatory response.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  I don't even know how you would measure like. Do, am I suffering from inflammation right now? But it's now something that I'm worried about.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  I feel it right now because my two-year-old brought home a preschool microbe.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, you know, when you have like a, like a sinus infection, you just feel like

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Feel puffy.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  Pressure, basically, like in your head and you don't think as well.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  So if my takes are worse today, I'll put it on that. But yeah, inflammation you can measure too, right?

• 28:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  Like, there's various ways that you can measure it and it's generally.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  I want to know what the baseline is for me and then see if there's anything I can adjust.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  That's a good way if somebody, you know, if you're on X and somebody, you know, sends a comment that's a little bit offensive, you could, you could ask them, hey, have you checked your magnesium levels or inflammation levels? Because something feels off and don't even address what they said.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Just ask, go for the underlying issue, right? Because it's probably not the thing that they're angry about.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  The, the chad homonym.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Uh, so this is bad. So if you're not fighting an infection, anti-inflammatories are generally pretty useful. There are lots of anti-inflammatory drugs, aspirin and ibuprofen are examples.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Again, Ray Pete, big proponent of aspirin.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  And aspirin, aspirin is one of those things. Yeah. He, a lot of people have talked about baby aspirin use for longevity.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a big thing, right?

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  And I take aspirin. It's sort of shown to, um, it's, it's shown to have a bunch of potential benefits around heart disease.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  It's basically free. Like, it's so inexpensive. I, I think it would be something that would be, uh, all the, all the patents are long expired. So it's not something that even makes sense for the pharmaceutical industry to push anymore.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  From an economic standpoint.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  But we don't want it to just disappear and not be a part of our society. Yeah. And, uh, but inflammation is a multifaceted process and no one drug can stop it entirely. And so GLP-1 drugs seem to be especially potent anti-inflammatory, uh, that stop some of the inflammatory process most implicated in dementia. How? The research is still very early, but the best explanation I can find is in central glucagon-like peptide one receptor activation inhibits toll-like receptor agonist-induced inflammation. The team found that there's no GLP-1 receptors on immune cells. So basically. What they did was they injected some of the drugs directly into the brain. And sure enough, there was enough to produce the effect. So the team tediously injected one of each kind of chemical that blocks each kind of chemical

• 30:14John Coogan?

  communication system and found that only the alpha blockers and delta opioid blockers prevented GLP-1's anti-inflammatory effects. So probably GLP-1 binds to neurons in the brainstem. Those signals to other neurons and immune cells via alpha adrenergic receptors and delta opioid receptors. And then the immune cells initiate an inflammatory reaction. And so there's still this like question of like, why would an appetite hormone, why would an appetite related hormone do this? Scott Alexander couldn't really figure it out. He asked Claude and there were some interesting ideas. It's like basically when

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  He's not a doctor, right?

• 30:50John Coogan?

  I think he is a doctor, but he's a psychiatrist. He was doxed like a while.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you could almost say he's a father of brother science.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Some people call it

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Brother science. Yeah. But also when a meal comes in, the body wants to divert energy away from fighting inflammation or creating inflammation through fighting microbes towards the digestion process. So basically, some of those resources come from the immune system. So the immune system stands down while you're digesting. So basically GLP-1 is saying like, hey, body, like, let's cool it on fighting the, you know, this, these microbes, like, let's chill on the immune response, take the inflammation down and focus on digestion, which is kind of interesting. It's just one theory. He's like, really, really not sure about this. But yeah, there's a whole bunch like GLP-1 is a master signal for the starving versus well-fed state.

• 31:45John Coogan?

  Lots of bodily processes change based on whether you're starving versus well-fed. Naively, you'd expect that there would be as many side effects as positive effects, but maybe that's not true. In particular, maybe the inflammatory nature of the starving state really hurts a lot of systems.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe that's a good point to talk about kind of the, the, the arguments against widespread usage of the product, which candidly.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  I don't necessarily, like, I think it's generally gonna have a very net positive effect on the world.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but there's certainly, you know, I think Cali Means.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the pod went on Tucker's show.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  To talk about his case against Ozempic. His quote was.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was their tweet.

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  Episode 72 was, if a fish tank is dirty, you clean the tank, you don't drug the fish.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  And that was kind of, uh, one of the bigger points that Cali made. I think one of the arguments that, that I've seen that, that, uh, would maybe dissuade a number of people that are kind of on the fence from taking it is that, uh, while GLP-1s can make you lose weight, they can actually make you fatter as a percentage of your body.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  You know, as a percentage of fat to other aspects of the body. So that could mean that, uh, what that, that means at a high level is you can actually lose muscle faster than you lose fat.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  So you might go from 200 pounds to 150 pounds.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  But on a percentage basis, you, you got fatter.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which, which is a pretty, uh, you know, if you're, um.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Not ideal.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  If you're trying to go, you know, if you're going for one rep max.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  Then you probably don't want to be on GLP-1s.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. So ideally you're on like a high protein diet and lifting heavy while you're doing that. So you're maintaining the muscle mass.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  But there is an interesting thing where if you're, if you're going from like obese people do wind up having a lot of muscle because they need to carry around a lot of weight. There's a thing.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  Size, the original size.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a thing where a lot of obese people have huge calves.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  Because they need to support all the weight that they're carrying around.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  That's how I can get bigger, bigger calves.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  Struggle with my calves forever.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  Maybe I just need to put on some weight.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  So, yeah, you put on some weight and then use Ozempic to take it off.

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  And then maintain the calves.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  Like the, the, the big thing, like my, uh, generally positive view on Ozempic comes from the fact that, uh, and the same reason I think more guys should do three months of exogenous testosterone is because if you can use a drug to temporarily put yourself in a state that makes being healthy easier.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  Then that gives you a chance to actually build healthy habits. So somebody who's 250 pounds, if they can lose 50 pounds with Ozempic and then start actually getting some type of exercise routine in place and eating less, they could just sort of over time get naturally like healthier.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Right? Uh, cause going in, I mean, I, I. Thankfully, never been in this position, but even for myself, if I'm out of the gym for three days, my first workout back is bad. I don't feel my best. And so if you're somebody who doesn't work out at all and goes into the gym, you might get some sort of benefits of sort of serotonin and dopamine post-workout. But it's gonna not necessarily, it's not like you're looking forward to going to the gym necessarily. It's sort of like not an enjoyable experience.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a whole theory around like, you know, is this the easy way out? And I think that's a lot of, like, Kelly has a more nuanced take on it, which is like, you know, we don't want this miracle drug, even if it is a miracle drug and there are no drawbacks. We don't want that to be, oh, well, we don't need to worry about the food system. We don't need to clean the fish tank ever because like, we solved it with this drug.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  We still need regenerative farming.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Should do both of these. And he is very worried about this becoming like the first line of defense. And there's this big question about doctors, you know, with any of these drugs, typically, it's like, they recommend diet and exercise first, and then they might actually like require you to do like a program like Weight Watchers before they prescribe this. And then in a few years, it'll just be like, oh, by the way, in addition to this, do some diet and exercise. Like, it's like an afterthought.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  And that's with SSRIs. If you go to a doctor and you say like, I have ADHD, or I'm sad, they're like.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  Drugs.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  Drugs. Yeah.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Instead of something else.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  Spore on X says, my main issue with Ozempic is that it's not Lindy. If you want to lose weight that badly, you should just become a habitual smoker and cocaine addict like the rest of us. Sort of a low TAM banger.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  Banger.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  865 views.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Probably future.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was listening to Chris Williamson, and he had an interesting guest on talking about Ozempic and was saying like, look, yes, it is like the easy way out. Like, you should just use your willpower to, you know, lose weight. But willpower is this like, you know, finite reserve. And maybe if you.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  Can take away from other things. That's why I don't, I don't work out before work. Because to actually push yourself to go hard in the gym uses up willpower, which I don't, which I think is. Infinite in the fullness of time, but on a day to day basis, I don't want to go in, push myself super hard in the gym and then I gotta go bang out some emails and suddenly I'm like,

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't want to do this.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So he was saying like, yeah, you could use that, you could use your willpower instead of focusing on your diet to focus on exercise or being a better family man. Or, you know, he was using his example of like going to.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a lot of, there's so many downstream effects of so many issues in our society or self-esteem issues. So if you have low self-esteem, it's hard to even be a great dad, right? Cause like it's just gonna come out in different ways, right? It's hard to crush it professionally because you have a poor image of yourself, right? So there's so many potentially, there's clearly, we are going to learn a lot about the side effects of Ozempic because we're running this sort of like large scale, public study on what happens when you put, you know, 10% of the country on a drug, right?

• 37:50John Coogan?

  Well, I think it's time to take out the tinfoil hat because something just isn't adding up here.

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  You want to try it on?

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I need to try it on.

• 37:57Jordi Hays?

  First time, first time.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  Because, I mean, as, I'm super convinced by the science of this article and I, and I genuinely do think Ozempic could be a miracle drug. But there's just something weird about the fact that it came from a venomous lizard, the Gila monster. I remember learning about the Gila monster as a kid and being terrified of it because a bite from the Gila monster will kill you. It's, it's big. It's not some tiny lizard.

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  You know, moderation, moderation, right? It's funny though, that the lizard is like scaled itself because people are, they're not getting bitten, but they're hitting themselves with, you know, a needle, right?

• 38:33John Coogan?

  There's just something about like taking the demon's venom and, and this weird trade off that it's hugely popular in Hollywood. I, I guess my, my, the, the, the odd, the odd hope is that the, the, whatever the wind, whatever the side effects are, if there are side effects, are just so minor compared to the devastation.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  This guy Max says, I suspect, uh, he says, does Ozempic dampen all dopamine rewards? Or only operate on the branch that has food and gambling on it somehow? I suspect the evidence is confounded by the fact that curing obesity makes everything better. So costs are masked by the benefits.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Exactly. And I think that's true.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Will was joking that, that. Now that a bunch of asset managers are on it, it may actually end up, you know, people are just gonna have stable, you know, good returns and maybe we'll have less bubbles, which would be a very negative externality, right?

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Could be very bad.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  We're big proponents of bubbles.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  Yep. And so that, yeah, that could be an under discussed downstream negative effect of the Ozempic world.

• 39:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Although, although we do need to get into the number of people that are on it because it's, the numbers are crazy, but let's keep going.

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, last tweet, Callie, friend of the pod and Callie's co-founder, TruMed, Justin Mares says, "French kids are 60% less overweight than American kids. If we wanted to actually address the mysterious obesity crisis, we should copy the French's approach to school lunches and food.

• 39:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  Instead, the APA recommends Ozempic to kids over the age of 12," which is just like so, so insane because we gotta get that number down to like three.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  Age three, so we can sell more.

• 40:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, think about if Novo Nordisk could expand their, their sort of market.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  Market size, this would be great for the, for the stock. I mean, there is a thing there where, where some of the headlines that are like Ozempic is now recommended for kids who are six, some of that is just that they've done the safety studies and they think that it's now safe for those kids. But, but like, it depends on the doctor whether or not it's the first thing. For a lot of overweight kids, they're still recommending diet and exercise first. The problem is, is that if you're a kid and you have...

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  Those take willpower.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, or your parents that aren't, that aren't, that aren't making you good lunches, or they're just never taking you out and they're just plopping you in front of the TV, it's like, well, you're gonna be sentenced to a life of obesity, or this doctor could help you with this injection. It's a really hard decision, it's tough.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's so many, there's so many things like self-esteem almost like starts to set in somebody, how somebody views themselves like on the playground, right? So one argument for it, if somebody spends... Age, you know, zero to 18.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  Obese and, you know, they're, they're running the mile at school and they're walking it. How does that impact somebody?

• 41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  Over.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  I mean, also, the other thing, you want this now?

• 41:21Jordi Hays?

  Not on the dump.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Not on the dump, okay.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing conspiratorial about that.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the other thing is that maybe, maybe we should be discussing, you know, banning Ozempic for the under 18, not because of the medical risks, but because of the immense power that comes from having a glow up later in life.

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Think about Bezos.

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  He's just completely on the next tier. He wasn't even obese.

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  He's cooking on the next Amazon right now.

• 41:43John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  He's like.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  But he's like phenomenal.

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  I can do better.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  And there's so many people who are like, oh yeah, I was fat in high school. I lost weight. Now I'm unstoppable.

• 41:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  No one, like, I, I, I just want to prove everyone wrong. I want to go back and, you know, impress everyone. I'm going to pull up to the high school reunion in a Countach or a.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  F40 and let everyone know, hey, I lost the weight and.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm driving a supercar now.

• 42:06John Coogan?

  Exactly. I'm driving a supercar. So yeah, I, I, I think I'm with Justin, but for different reasons. We're going to ban it for kids, but for different reasons.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  Not because it's risky, because we need, we need glow ups. We need more glow ups for sure. Well, we can move on to the numbers if you want and the economics here. I have a bunch of things. So this is another Astrocodex 10 piece. And, and it's called a semaglutidonomics. And the math he starts out with, there, there are 140 million obese Americans and they're going to spend $15,000 a year for obesity drugs and then equals, oh, that can't be right. Cause he did the math.

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:48John Coogan?

  And so there's something interesting going on with Wegovy specifically. There are other weight loss drugs. There's other obesity medications. There's Zenical, Belvic, Contrave, Secunda. Quisemia, like a bunch of weird like drug names. But Wegovy is a big step up. It works for sixty-six to eighty-four percent of people, depending on your threshold. Of the six major weight loss drugs, only two have a better than fifty-fifty chance of helping you lose ten percent of your weight. And the other one, Qusimia, works partly by making food taste terrible. It can also cause cognitive issues. So it's clearly acting on like a different part of the brain, not like deep in the brainstem. And so Wegovy feels more natural, patients feel full, we've discussed this. It's just a really impressive drug. And until now, doctors didn't really use-

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  That's a hundred year overnight success story, too.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  Benordis was in the trenches for a hundred years.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  And it's all the same thing. It's all just treat diabetes, basically. And so, basically, the the the goal of this article is to model out what's going on right now? And how many people are on this now? And then what the market might look like in the future? And he ends with a bunch of really cool predictions. So let's walk through it. So modeling some glutide accessibility. Forty percent of Americans are obese. That's a hundred and forty million people.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  Which is interesting because living in LA and spending most of my time traveling to San Francisco, New York, places like Miami, you, if, in in our experience of life, I would never once estimate that forty percent. I mean, I know that, I've known that statistic forever, but you'd never-

• 44:23John Coogan?

  I would be just because if you go to the gym, like all the mass monsters, like the guys who are just massive, they count as obese. Because if you're three hundred pounds, six-two,

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  Because you're paralyzed.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  But you're five percent body fat and you're just peeled, like you'll still show up in the obesity statistics.

• 44:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:40John Coogan?

  So we do have to separate that out because we don't want the mass monsters.

• 44:44Jordi Hays?

  BMI is a little off.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  Exactly. But but generally, I agree with you. It it is odd. And I mean, there was a whole thing of why I want to do this deep dive was because, like, when I'm traveling around, it just doesn't feel like there's been any material change in the obesity rate. Even though you're starting to see statistics and you hear a lot of trend pieces about how powerful Ozempic is. It's like, I don't, I don't see that in my everyday life. Like, oh, wow, like, there are no more fat people around.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  It's also interesting that-

• 45:09John Coogan?

  But it's explained by the-

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Wegovy came out of Denmark, which is a place that probably has some of the lowest obesity rates in the world, right?

• 45:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, they weren't exactly dog fooding this. So suppose that a quarter of the obese people in America want semaglutide. That's that's 35 million prescriptions. Semaglutide costs about 15,000 per year. Multiply it out, that's $500 billion. And Americans currently spend 300 billion a year total on prescription drugs. So that just that would be bigger than the entire market. So there's this question of like, okay, how is this actually going to happen? Whenever you have these crazy predictions, like you need to kind of back them up with data. And that's the goal of this article. And so if this if this really did happen, it would bankrupt half of the healthcare industry. And so most people want semaglutide but won't get it.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  America's current policy for controlling medical costs is to buy random things at random prices.

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. So how how do how do they think that would bankrupt the system if a lot of this is out of pocket spend right now?

• 46:14John Coogan?

  The idea is that in order for that to actually happen and to get to that penetration, it wouldn't be out of pocket. It would have to be covered. And basically, over time, the insurance companies would be forced into into covering it. And then they would have this massive expense that they weren't expecting. And they haven't been underwriting against for years. And so all of their all of their premiums would just be destroyed. It'd be very rough. But obviously, it's going to be like the slow evolution.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  But it's so interesting because the near term costs go up. Like, it's almost like a timeline, you know, mismatch. Because like, near term costs go up, but long term expenses on a per person, per capita basis could drop. Right? If you have people that instead of spending decades of their life overweight and unhealthy, they're now, you know, have a normal BMI. And they just take a shot or maybe they get off the shot. Maybe, maybe, you know, the thing that I it hasn't been around long enough to understand.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  Is this something that, you know, somebody can take for two years, get a lot of the benefits and then just get their shit together and start being healthy? Right? So maybe it's more of like a sprint based model.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  Utilitarian calculus will kind of come in later and we can and we can dig into it. But first, I want to do a little pop quiz. You know, there are 140 million obese Americans. Ozempic went viral in 2021 when everyone was talking about the celebrities doing it. It's now been on every podcast, every video, like everyone's aware of this essentially, I think. It's been a major trend. There's all sorts of companies pushing it. How many people, how many Americans do you think are taking semaglutide for obesity?

• 47:50John Coogan?

  Hundred and forty million are obese. How many, how many people do you think are taking it? Like, uh.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  You're saying, you're not just saying just for obesity or, or just like people that are taking it as like a fun drug.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no. I'm not talking specifically, uh, wagyu.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, thirty million?

• 48:05John Coogan?

  You would think that. It's fifty thousand. Isn't that crazy? So there's a report.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  How is that?

• 48:11John Coogan?

  Claim, I know.

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 48:12John Coogan?

  It's because it's just so, it's so early in the rollout.

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  It's so row.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  And it's very expensive and, and.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  But that doesn't count row and.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  No, no, it, it, no, it counts everything. It, uh, probably not the, probably not the compounded stuff, but we'll go in, we'll, we'll work all, we'll, we'll, we'll work through all the data. Because, so first off, he pulls like the actual numbers, uh, and there's a report claiming.

• 48:32Jordi Hays?

  Really? Cause it feels like it has like fifty percent penetration.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  You would think so, but then when you.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  No, within celebrities, yeah, yeah.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  But then you walk around and you go in, like, you go to an airport and you, it's not like, oh, where are all the fat people go? Like, uh, obesity is still like a crisis and we're, and we still haven't seen the obesity rate fall significantly.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  So it's clearly not like actually rolled out fully. And there's been massive supply constraints and it's super expensive and healthcare's not covering it or insurance isn't covering it.

• 48:56Jordi Hays?

  That tells me Novo's gonna be the first trillion dollar European company.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  Well, that's why the stock is mooning because even though they're only selling, uh, so there are twenty thousand weekly prescriptions. So that's.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  New prescriptions.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, so that's twenty thousand times a thousand dollars a month. So what's that twenty million a month in sales? So that's two hundred and, or I guess, uh, what, like three hundred million, right? In annual revenue and they're trading at half a trillion.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  It's insane.

• 49:25John Coogan?

  So like you would never get there on the normal revenue multiple.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't think we've ever seen a consumer product in the US with fifty thousand customers that has a hundred percent mind share penetration.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  Insane, right? Yeah, insane. And so, uh, maybe this means there's twenty thousand users or maybe each prescription contains enough wagyu to last a month. And there are eighty thousand users, I'm not sure, but it's somewhere in the mid five digits, which is why I'm rounding to fifty K. So, so, so his estimate for the actual real number is fifty K. And then he's gonna work through the math and, and all the different levers. So that's only point one percent of the potential thirty five million. Which is still only 25% of the 140 million, right?

• 50:02Jordi Hays?

  Same.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  So it is crazy, crazy low penetration for a drug that we assumed would, everyone would just be taking.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  So the way he models the, the like, the penetration and adoption of semaglutide is interest times awareness, times prescription accessibility, times affordability. And so we're going to do four different sections here and we'll start with interest. And so he just randomly guessed interest at 25%. So this is like of the obese people, 25% really want to, are motivated to actually lose weight. And, and so how many people are aware? Like, let's go into awareness. The answer is a lot more than when he first started writing this article. Novo Nordisk Wegovy gets surprise endorsement from Elon Musk, says the headline. And here's Google Trends and you can see Wegovy and semaglutide are like really, really peaking.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  And so it's now as searched for on Google as Prozac or Viagra, which are like name brand products. And so even if this is a temporary Musk related spike, even pre Musk, it was getting a little bit, a little above half their level. But Google Trends doesn't exactly track awareness. Few people search for Prozac these days because everyone knows what it is. So all this tells us is that there's a lot of buzz. So suppose for the sake of argument, 5% of obese people have heard of the drug, which feels really, really low to me. But, but you'll see as he kind of works through like why that math makes sense. And then there's also prescription accessibility.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  Only 5%. Taylor Lorenz, esteemed journalist should do a piece on getting access to the TikTok feeds of thousands of overweight people and see what's in the, you know, are they talking about it? Are they?

• 51:44John Coogan?

  Cause it was super viral on Twitter, on TikTok for sure. So I feel like that has to be higher, but you know, during the election, there were people that were Googling like, who's the president? Did you see that?

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right before. Is Joe Biden still president?

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Is Joe Biden still president? Like, when do I vote? And it's like, and the interest is spiking like the day after the election. People are unaware, like people really do live under rocks. And so, prescription accessibility. The FDA says Wegovy is indicated for obesity, defined as BMI over 30, or BMI over 27 with certain medical conditions. So, but if you have a high BMI, that doesn't mean the doctor will necessarily give you a prescription. Most doctors will want patients to try diet and exercise first. And we're

• 52:29Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine being 400 pounds going to your doctor? And they're like, and they're like, I want the, you know, like, I want the miracle weight loss drug. And the doctor is like, how about you eat a salad and hit the gym?

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  That is brutal. You're gonna go on, you're gonna go on, you know, Hims or Roe and get the compounded stuff.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  For sure. So every doctor will have their own threshold for what amount of already tried diet and exercise is enough to justify a prescription. The history of medicine includes the following story many times. There's some condition that doctors recommend a lifestyle changes for. Then, an exciting new medication comes out. And over a generation or so, doctors go from demanding the lifestyle change to gesturing at the lifestyle change before prescribing the medication, to finally, just mostly prescribing the medication. This happened with cholesterol and statins. People would say, oh, like, you should just change your diet first. Now it's just statins. Same thing with hypertension and ACE inhibitors, and same thing with depression and SSRIs. So you can form your own opinion about whether that's good or bad. But we're probably in the very beginning of this process with obesity. Opinions will be all over the map.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  And except that this time Silicon Valley is short-circuiting the process with fly-by-night telemedicine operations that guarantee you'll get the drugs you want. For example, this one company charges $138 a month, $99 for the first month only, for a guaranteed GLP-1 agonist prescription plus support and messaging with expert doctors. The DEA sometimes shuts these groups down when they start playing around with controlled substances like Adderall, but Wegovy isn't controlled and the government probably doesn't care that much. That being said, only 75% of Americans have primary care physicians at all. And if we assume half of them will eventually be able to get a Wegovy prescription from their doctor, that's 37.5%.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Then the next factor is affordability. Semaglutide costs $15,000 per year and of course Elon Musk can pay out of pocket, but many people need insurance and Medicare doesn't cover obesity drugs.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  Any weight loss, yeah.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  We've mentioned before. And so some, time for a change, some congressmen-

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  It's such a, it's such a fuck you from the medical system to the average person-

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, hey, the, the, the most unhealthy thing that can happen to you is being overweight, but yeah, we're not, sorry, like, we, we can't help you with that.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you're gonna be on your own for that one.

• 54:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, good luck.

• 54:45Jordi Hays?

  It's like, okay.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  But like, yeah, when, when, when you have the heart attack, then-

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  But if you go get hit by a car-

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Then we'll give you a million dollars of treatments at the last second to try and extend your life by five days.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:54John Coogan?

  Like, rough.

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  Weird.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Instead of, instead of just lose the weight and live 10 years longer.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  I do hope that, that, uh, Doge, uh, really goes after the medical system.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  Cause there's, I mean, obviously like-

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Lot of waste.

• 55:06Jordi Hays?

  It's so tied into the government in so many ways.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we gotta talk some more, uh, like healthcare founders because there's so much there. We're obviously hearing it all the time on the DOD side, but the medical system's like, bigger and crazier, I'm sure.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:19John Coogan?

  Um, and so, uh, he says, "Some congressmen have proposed a very noble sounding law telling Medicare and Medicaid to start covering weight loss drugs. I'm sure this is out of deep compassion for American obese population and not because it would make pharma companies one billion zillion dollars." But I love the sound of that. I want the pharma companies to make more money. Develop more drugs.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  Buy the stock.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Build more stuff. Um-

• 55:41Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing, there's nothing more noble than, than incredible IRR.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so private insurers mostly have to cover whatever Medicare does and they, but they can choose whether or not to include extra non-Medicare covered drugs. Some have chosen to cover semaglutide under some conditions. Others would prefer not to because it's so expensive. Um, but they can be scared into covering it by the magic words, "medical necessity." Overall, I don't understand the laws, but there's this very interesting thing that's happening, and he calls out the New York Times. The New York Times is publishing articles trying to convince us that private insurances not covering semaglutide is an outrage. And it's a very funny screenshot from this article, and the article is called "The Doctor Prescribed An Obesity Drug. Her Insurer Called It Vanity." And it says, "Here in the tiny gray text, I want to take a second to complain about

• 56:28John Coogan?

  this article. It notes that Wegovy, semaglutide for obesity, costs more per prescription than Ozempic, semaglutide for diabetes, and calls this a gross inequity, accusing Novo Nordisk of charging people more for the same drug because of their obesity. But, the obesity prescription is a higher dose than the diabetes prescription. Milligram per milligram, Wegovy costs less than Ozempic. A steel-manned version of the N Y T might object, 'Don't most of the costs come from the intellectual property and not the manufacturing, so that dose, so the dose shouldn't matter.' Yes, but if you made the obesity version cost too much less per milligram than the diabetes version, then diabetics would cheat the system by buying the obesity version and splitting it into smaller doses."

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:13John Coogan?

  And so, like, what they're doing is actually, like, very rational and totally fine, I think, but they're getting called out here. And so, he concludes here with, "Let's say only 5% of people who clear all previous hurdles can afford the drug." And so, now he does his final math on how many people get semaglutide. 140 million obese Americans, 25% are interested, 5% know of semaglutide's existence, 37.5% can get prescriptions, and 5% can afford it. And that's 33,000 people, which is a pretty good match for the 50,000 estimated prescriptions. I didn't even fudge the numbers to come out right, it just happened. And so, he kind of looks at it like, bottom up and top down, and comes to the same conclusion

• 57:55John Coogan?

  that we're in this weird scenario where we maybe have this miracle drug, and a lot of people buy it and believe in it, but because of all these different factors, it just isn't actually being rolled out in the millions like you suspected. And my number would have been the same. I would've said, yeah, 5 million, 10 million people, obviously, like, you know, same as everything else.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Because in L.A., every time a celebrity walks out of the house, everybody's like, "Oh, they're on Ozempic."

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would imagine that, you know...

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny. One, like, one application of it is, I've sort of seen this firsthand, women... Getting married, historically, they'd go on this like crazy diet and exercise routine like leading up to their wedding and now it's simply like, you know, focus on wedding planning and just like get the shot once a week and like you're gonna look like

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Great.

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  Probably, you know, leaner, thinner than you would have if you'd just done the

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  The thing.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I think that like Ozempic face thing was kind of, it was because like, like a lot of celebrities were taking it when they were already very thin.

• 58:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:53John Coogan?

  And they were going down to like 5% body fat or something.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:55John Coogan?

  Really, really low, which is kind of

• 58:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting, Martin Shkreli.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  I always butcher the last, Shkreli, esteemed, you know, poster and commentator on all things healthcare, he goes and talks about how there's like other GLP-1 drugs that are available and, and again, it's one of those things like if Novo Nordisk didn't have like the same profit incentive that they do, none of these, like their product is materially better.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  And, but ultimately, if they didn't have that profit incentive, we would have been stuck with like the last generation of GLP-1 drugs that just weren't nearly as good.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Daily injections.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, multiple times, basically multiple times.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the one, Exenatide, which was the first one, the patents are expired and nobody's even bothered to make it generic because you have to take it twice a day.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's such a rough experience.

• 1:00:02Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, he basically goes on to say that, you know, Novo could easily be a $2 trillion company, but Eli Lilly and others are, you know, Pfizer's coming out with their own GLP-1 drug, everybody wants, everybody wants in on it. I was telling you earlier, I just was like very, I underestimated the demand pretty dramatically. About a year ago, I saw a company that was raising to do a GLP-1 focused telemedicine company. A lot of people have come out and basically are combining like some of the, trying to build like a platform to do the lifestyle changes and prescribe the drug at the same time. And there's one company that I saw didn't invest in just because I was like, look,

• 1:00:45Jordi Hays?

  this is like ridiculously competitive. There's just, you know, there's no way this business is going to really accrue a lot of value long-term. And they went from zero to $10 million run rate like in less than 12 months profitably. And like, I'm sure like multiples beyond that by now. And so, yeah, and it's interesting. Like, I do wonder if companies like that are not really being reflected in the data because I know that company by itself has like tens of thousands of customers.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, if you run the numbers, it's, yeah, like, if you're making 10 grand a customer.

• 1:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  Hundred customers gets you to a million dollars revenue, thousand customers, like, okay, add on, add on 1,000 to the 33,000 estimated, and we're still in, we're not in the millions. Like, we're just not there, which is fascinating. It's just, it's rare that you have a product where the LTV of a customer is tens of thousands of dollars. And the competitive pressure doesn't seem to be driving down the price. But we can get more into that. Let's go to Morgan Stanley. They've, they modeled the economic future of obesity medications over the next decade. And the headline result is that semaglutide and other various semaglutide copycat drugs

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  will be a $30 billion market by 2030. That's less than the $500 billion disaster he was afraid of. But it's still almost 10% of all US drug spending. And they kind of model it out, like, show the whole flow, starting with like, the number of obese people, the number that are diagnosed, like, how many will get it, kind of same methodology. But the big question is like, you know, what if doctors medicalized obesity as comprehensively as they've medicalized hypertension and high cholesterol? Well, they find that the US obesity market would multiply by a factor of 25 to about $87 billion a year. And then they also are modeling a decline in the price. This is funny. So, the number of patients on Wegovy or related medications.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Morgan Stanley estimated forty six thousand nine hundred and ten. So like everyone's right in the tens of thousands, which is crazy. It's so low, but they're estimating that in 2030 it'll be 11 million, which is kind of more where we thought we'd be.

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  So we're still so early.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  But second, the cost of per prescription goes from 15K a year down to $4,000 a year. And then that has a bunch of knock on effects. So Novo Nordisk competitor Eli Lilly owns a closely related molecule terzepatide, which they sell as Majaro. And they've done studies showing it also works well for weight loss. And although capitalism fans, shout out me and Jordy, might expect the presence of two competing drugs to immediately drive down prices. This is mysteriously not how things work in healthcare and prices will probably stay the same in the short term. And I'm wondering if this is just like a, like, just like a peace treaty, like they know if they get into price war. This is like Coke and Pepsi.

• 1:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but Novo Nordisk is also opening up like four to five massive new production facilities.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  But that'll just increase margins. Like, why would they increase the price if they don't have to?

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  No, that's what I'm saying. I'm not arguing against.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  They deserve to capitalize on their incredible innovation.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  And I mean, cutting the price from 15K to 4K over, what, six years? Like, that's pretty significant every year. That's a pretty significant price decline. And later they get, so, so Morgan Stanley does expect competition to drive down costs to 350 a month or $4,000 a year. And there's some math that from a purely economic perspective, semaglutide costs the health system money because it's expensive. But it also saves the health system money because we don't have to pay for the consequences of obesity.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. It's like a duration mismatch thing.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  And so which, which effect wins out? Like, this is the question. And so the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review did an analysis and they said that the benefits would outweigh the cost if semaglutide costs less than about $8,000 per year.

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  So they basically bundled up all the costs associated with obesity, said it's eight grand and so.

• 1:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's the same thing with.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  It makes sense to cover it.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  You would, you would compare this to FTX's challenges with liquidity where they actually had a duration mismatch issue where they invested billions of dollars into private companies. And then people started redeeming their cryptocurrency for cash and they didn't, you know, if Anthropic had just gotten to their 40-plus billion-dollar valuation faster,

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  It was public.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  They would have been able to cover it.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think, you know, one thing I would throw out is like to help the TB community kind of understand how, you know, we mostly care about how this is impacting capital allocators.

• 1:05:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:26Jordi Hays?

  And high-risk entrepreneurship.

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:29Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're a listener and you're on GLP-1s, send us a message. We'd love to kind of get a sense for how it's affecting your strategy. Maybe you're going lower risk, which would be unfortunate, but maybe you can take bigger risks in other ways, like raise a bigger fund, right? Things like that.

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  Yep. Or play with a cat and get that, that brain disease. Have you heard of this?

• 1:05:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  The thing that...

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Parasites?

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, Riva's into.

• 1:05:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  What's it called? I forget. But what's interesting is like you have this, you know, 8,000 is kind of the golden number. They want to get it down to 4,000. But there's also a third level effect where it costs the health system money again because it prevents people from dying of obesity-related consequences. And no one really models this because it's so dark, but basically dead people stop needing expensive healthcare.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  This was actually something in the, in the master settlement agreement with the big tobacco companies.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  Like, the, the whole reason that tobacco had to pay up to all the states was that they were putting a burden on the healthcare system.

• 1:06:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  That was the model. It wasn't just you're evil for killing people. It was like, you're costing the government money, so you gotta pay the government back. But one of the arguments that the tobacco companies made was like, hey, look, we're killing people off and then you don't have to pay their pensions, which is like super fucking grim, like crazy. But yeah, so no one's really modeling that, but it doesn't really matter. The big thing is that, this is an interesting like takeaway is like, the Morgan Stanley report shows that even the greediest pharma investors openly plotting to medicalize obesity can't bring themselves to believe in more than 11 million US semaglutide patients by 2030. That's less than 10% of the obese population. Isn't that kind of a... Isn't that kind of disappointing? Like, we've got over a hundred million people dealing with

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  a condition that makes them unhealthy, it causes psychological distress, and it makes a lot of people low-grade disappointed and repulsed by our society. We've got an effective drug, and we're gonna get less than 10% of the population on it? Like, this is kind of crazy. And it'll go off patent in 2032, maybe it'll come down in price, but this whole thing is like a very slow rollout. It's just, it's just kind of fascinating how slow all this is happening.

• 1:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Chugging along.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, he closes with like, should you take it? And he just says, like, ask your doctor. I think you should if you're, if you're, you know, a weightlifter, you're at like 10% body fat and you want to get down to 5%, just be, you know, absolutely peeled. I'm strongly in favor of that.

• 1:07:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you have muscle mass, you can lose too.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  As long as you're on the high protein diet and still hitting one rep.

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  I can see it being cyclical for the, the weightlifting community where, starts coming around April, you've been in your winter arc.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  And you know summer's coming up, you know you're gonna be on the beach, shirts are gonna be coming off, maybe doing like a little sprint of GLP-1 could, could be a way to get that body fat, sub 10%, even if you're still a size lord.

• 1:08:22John Coogan?

  Yep. And so he closes with some predictions, which he, he leads off with, "All predictions are conditional on no singularity or global catastrophe." So funny, like, so says.

• 1:08:32Jordi Hays?

  I may own securities in the companies discussed in this article.

• 1:08:36John Coogan?

  And so he says, uh, number one, 10 million Americans on semaglutide by 2030. He puts that at 75% chance. Sounds reasonable. Medicare covers semaglutide in 2030, 40% chance. Semaglutide costs less than a hundred dollars a month in 2030, puts that at 25% chance. Semaglutide costs less than a hundred dollars a month, inflation adjusted without insurance in 2040, 66% chance, just like total cost curve stuff. USO obesity, half or less of current rate in 2050, 30% chance.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very interesting article, very, very great deep dive. But yeah, we should, we should talk, we should close out with like who made money because that is the original question that we had. Who's making money off of Ozempic? And it's interesting because it's not, it's not as many people involved in Novo Nordisk as you'd think.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  They're, they're, a lot of their employees aren't heavily incentivized by the stock price. They don't have like an Elon type guy where if the stock price hits a certain amount, he gets a ton of shares.

• 1:09:34Jordi Hays?

  They have a really weird corporate structure.

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're owned in part by a nonprofit. The, the, the actual scientist that created GLP-1's, lyrgluteide, Latte Nudsen, wrote this whole history and she didn't make a lot of money from it.

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so here's, yeah. Here's somebody making money from GLP-1. So I use perplexity to figure out how many subscribers hims and hers has to its weight management offering.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Jordi Hays?

  They, they have a broader weight management offering. I think they have multiple products, but they have nearly 100,000 subscribers. So that could be why they have.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  The stock's been way up.

• 1:10:17Jordi Hays?

  The stock's been ripping and reinventing themselves over the, you know, the hair loss products at Viagra.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  Also kind of a benefit of them being public. Like they were able to take advantage of this and they probably weren't, you know, if you're not going into Novo, which is this huge company, there aren't that many places to allocate capital. If you're in the public markets towards something that looks a little bit more pure play-ish towards this category. And so they probably benefited a lot from that as like kind of a small cap.

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's honestly one of those things like.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Like they're still scaling up, they're still growing.

• 1:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one of the, one of the reasons that telemedicine worked well for hair loss is that people don't want to talk to their doctor about so many issues, right? Like so many things like health issues or things that people don't want to talk to with strangers, right? Even their loved ones, right? So I see that being a really massive channel long-term.

• 1:11:10John Coogan?

  And the ED meds, same thing.

• 1:11:11Jordi Hays?

  If you can get, you know, I think Blake Robbins had a screenshot of you. They're just advertising directly to consumers now.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, those ro. And they're essentially like, it's almost like a white label deal.

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  No, they're not compounding. They're selling the real thing. Hims is compounding, and this is kind of interesting, two different sides of the deal. So Ro, Ro, Roman Health sells name brand Ozempic, I believe, in that screenshot.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  They must have done some.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  And that's a deal with Novo, essentially.

• 1:11:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  And so their economics probably aren't incredible on that, but it's still a way to sell something that's like completely above board. Yeah, completely above board with the FDA. Hims has been taking a more aggressive approach, actually compounding it, which the FDA put out a statement saying that they don't recommend that people take compounded semaglutide, but they didn't ban it, which is this weird like gray area.

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  The FDA is like, we don't recommend it, but we're gonna allow it. Like, it's very weird that the FDA does stuff like this.

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  So here, here's a play. So I saw that a local compounding pharmacy in Malibu was for sale.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  For like 400K.

• 1:12:19John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:12:19Jordi Hays?

  So if you're in the LA area, here's a play for you, a little bit gray area, right? So I'm not recommending you do this. I'm saying you could do this. Buy the local.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:30Jordi Hays?

  Local compounding pharmacy and start selling it at the Malibu Farmer's Market.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Like a farm, you know, local.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Farm to table.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Locally made GLP ones, farm to table Ozempic.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Jordi Hays?

  Maybe even try to make it organic, right?

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the other, the other issue with the compounding, just from a business perspective, is that I think that you're only allowed to do it from an FDA perspective, when it's on shortage.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  And so you can build up this revenue stream and you can get subscribers.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be massively discounted.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  But then it could get, it could get kind of rugged by you if they go back in stock.

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  And so how do you maintain those customers post, well, maybe you need to do a white label deal, maybe you need to get a different product in there. It's gonna be a little bit tricky, but.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  You might have time to buy the small.

• 1:13:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Compounding pharmacy for half a mil.

• 1:13:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Which I think it was listed at. And then turn around, SPAC it, really get those revenues up and then, and then do what Hims has done, which is, you know, companies need to constantly reinvent themselves, right?

• 1:13:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Um, even in the way Novo did, right?

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  Started as an insulin manufacturer.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, that's a great place to end it, get jacked, work out, diet, exercise.

• 1:13:36Jordi Hays?

  Make some money.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Take every possible drug.

• 1:13:37Jordi Hays?

  Another, another last, last idea, uh, I think that there's going to be an incredible play to do group, group travel.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, a group travel agency for formerly overweight people that can, can bond over, uh, over their weight loss and over their love for the drug and, and sort of like take those people on a world tour. Like people internationally have gotten known of seeing large groups of overweight people. It's like, look at those Americans. But I want to make sure that America's brand over the next hundred years gets built around. Look at all those super lean, fit, beautiful people getting off the cruise ship, coming into the city, barely eating anything, but really being a great time.

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  America does have a huge advantage here. Like, Canada hasn't even approved it. Like, we really are on the forefront of this.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  That's our edge.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's because even though it's a, it's a foreign company, Novo in Denmark, like the FDA is the gold standard of approvals and, and they always go here first.

• 1:14:30Jordi Hays?

  The only, the only country that matters.

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's fantastic. So cheers. Long America.

• 1:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Long America.

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  Welcome back to Technology Brothers. Still the most profitable podcast in the world. Um, Jordy, we got a good DM today. I want to discuss with you, uh, from a fan. She says, hi, John and Jordy. I'm a successful real estate developer based in Los Angeles and I'm dating a tech guy who works in San Francisco. He says that SF has more intellectuals, but I don't want to move there. How can I convince him to come to LA? What would you say?

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  So intellectuals are great, especially after there are already senties or beaners. Um, before that, you want to avoid being intellectual. Like you have no basis for that until you've, um, until you're post economic, right?

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:18Jordi Hays?

  So that'd be my first word of advice. Um, I would say that second, San Francisco is maybe the intellectual center of technology without a doubt.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  That being said, um, well,

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  We do a lot of this work for the, we do this work, this podcast for the money. Many people care about impact.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:38Jordi Hays?

  And if that's who, if that aligns with you, being in LA is a way to have an impact because this is the center of influence, right?

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Ozempic, you know, we just covered Ozempic. Ozempic is created by a company in Denmark, but all of the marketing firepower behind the product is coming out of LA, right? And so if you want to have attention and influence, move to LA. Most of the beaners and sentis that we know that made their money in tech end up having, you know, a compound in LA.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a place that you want to be, you know, maybe it's your second or third home, fourth or fifth for some of our listeners. But yeah, this is, this is the place, you need to be spending time here. Otherwise you're going to just be chattering.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, in Hayes Valley and nothing's actually going to come of your conversations.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, also it's a very different type of intellectualism in the Bay. It's, I mean, it's a little bit of an echo chamber.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  It's a huge echo chamber and in LA you get, you do get more intellectual diversity.

• 1:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  Because it's not just all tech people. There's tech people, but then there's movie people, there's lawyers, there's like, there's a whole community of different people.

• 1:16:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, on any given day.

• 1:16:48John Coogan?

  The defense tech thing is here, there's NASA and SpaceX and stuff.

• 1:16:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're having conversations, the group, LA group chats are not only debating the ethics and morality of nuclear development, but also how much time you should spend in the sauna versus a cold plunge. And there's nothing that says that the debate around hot, cold therapy is not an intellectual, you know, activity as well, right?

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  The body is sort of the platform of all thought, right? So if you live in SF and you're not jacked with an incredible one rep max, you could also argue your opinions don't really matter.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. Let's move to Anthony Steele. He writes in to us, he says, "Any thoughts on New York City as an engineering HQ for a manufacturing company?"

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Oof.

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  Build a massive power plant in Central Park. I'm in.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Yes. So while I would, I would love to see more smoke stacks on the New York City skyline.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, the High Line, that whole thing. We should definitely develop that.

• 1:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna probably maybe, maybe vote against, as an engineering HQ. So he's not, he's not implying that he's gonna put the.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  It's unclear if it's, if it's mechanical or chemical engineering or computer.

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  We're the first guys that wanna walk off the street in Soho, out of the Laura Piana store, go to the second floor of the same building and see a bunch of robotic arms just working overtime. But, you know, being, we can, we can see the Gundo out of our studio window. We like to keep an eye on our portcos over there.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, you know, bringing your engineering team over here, setting up in the Gundo, would be good for a lot of reasons.

• 1:18:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's some, there's some hard tech companies out there, but there aren't many. But there are some really solid B2B SaaS companies in New York, ramps established.

• 1:18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  There. So there are software engineering talent there, but they're definitely on the earlier side if you're doing hard tech.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  Engineering. It's gonna be a little bit trickier.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Gundo or bust.

• 1:19:00John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 1:19:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we may, we've been looking at, you know, potentially acquiring our own industrial real estate in, in the Gundo area to, to make available to the community. So we'll, we'll let you know.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  Yep. I think it just depends on, you know, who's, who, who's gonna be working for you? Where do they currently live? Where is the specific talent that you need for your company? You need to think, I mean, this goes back to like the Miami versus SF thing. Like, it's really hard to paint with a broad brush on, like, unironically, like, there, there's gonna be a right place. There's gonna be some companies that are great in Miami. There's gonna be some companies that are great in New York. You have to think about like, what work are you actually doing? And where are those people? Cause you should probably go to whatever the feeder company. If there's some power law unicorn in the city that's gonna be dumping off talented people after they've asked.

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47John Coogan?

  You wanna be picking all those up, or there's some phenomenal university system that you're pulling from constantly. This is why biotech's in San Diego.

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Arguably, he should be spending time in New York because a lot of the financiers that are gonna be, you know, creating sort of different types of financial instruments in order to scale his manufacturing process.

• 1:20:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Are there. He's gonna wanna be going to. You know, expensive restaurants with them and, and, and a lot of the best deal toy manufacturers have a good, a good presence in New York as well.

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you could also just put an executive office on Fifth Avenue and then throw all the engineers in New Jersey. That might be the best solution, really.

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've seen that work well.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  If you want to be in Manhattan.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Let's go to our next question from an anonymous DM we got. Hey, bros. I'm currently working at a family office and long-term I'd like to raise my own venture fund. I currently have job offers at a few smaller funds and one growth-stage startup. I think as like a chief of staff. Do you either, do you think either of these options would be good stepping stones to raise a fund? What do you think?

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I do think that there, there's a few kind of core pathways that I think are actually good pathways to have making a career in venture.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  One is the institutional VC who just works at, you know, one or two or three high-quality funds.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  This is the Blake Robbins approach.

• 1:21:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, hopefully land in the Holy Trinity. Even if you don't, you, you could still end up doing well.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:13Jordi Hays?

  The other path is to start a unicorn and, you know, start a unicorn, have a lot of success.

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  Just angel invest.

• 1:21:19Jordi Hays?

  Do a little angel investing, build a track record that way.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  The, the death zone is working at a mid-fund or a family office and not being able to do a lot of deals.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  Because then you're not building up the brand value of working at a, at a, at a great firm. And you're just not doing enough volume of deals so that you can build up a track record and say, I can actually get into unicorns.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:42Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's totally possible to go to a, a venture fund and do, be involved with like four or five deals a year and have none of them break out. And then you're 10 years into your career and it's like, you can't really prove that you're a good investor and maybe you were handicapped by the firm that you're at.

• 1:21:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:59Jordi Hays?

  But I think that, um.

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  Even if you're at one of those like Holy Trinity or just like power law firms, you're going to be on a deal team that does a really banger deal. Even if you're paying up for a winner.

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Like, oh yeah.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna get into good companies.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And you're just gonna have time with power law CEOs and beaners.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:22:21John Coogan?

  But that's gonna be harder to do if you're

• 1:22:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so my advice. My serious advice, go somewhere where you can do a high volume of deals. It's even, you know, less about like, it's certainly, it's not gonna matter about title, because like, going and being an associate

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:39Jordi Hays?

  At a big fund, that also, you don't get a lot of credit there, because, look, you you may have been involved with the deal and met the founder a couple of times during the process, but you didn't necessarily like, have even any decision-making power.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  So I think volume is gonna be more important here.

• 1:22:54John Coogan?

  Yep, I mean, that's Trey's recommendation for all new investors, is just don't swing at every pitch, but just take a huge amount of calls.

• 1:23:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  And just get to know every company, so you start seeing the pattern of what looks like good, what is good, and go from there. Great, let's move to the timeline.

• 1:23:12Jordi Hays?

  Before we jump into that, um, probably should start with a promoted post. We had a poll today, and

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  our community, uh, you know, unanimously, it was sort of a landslide. We asked people, how many ads should we have per episode? And I think like, eighty, ninety percent of the people that responded wanted sixty-plus ads, so we're not there yet, we're hoping to get there soon. But the first promoted post of the day is coming from Cars and Bids.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:40Jordi Hays?

  If you're not familiar with Cars and Bids, it is a new competitor to Bring a Trailer and some of the other online auction houses, started by a incredible car creator on YouTube called Doug Demuro, who has created Cars and Bids, he's raised quite a bit of capital for it, so they're well-capitalized, they're building a fantastic platform. And today, we wanted to highlight a car that just went on the site, I think it was this morning, so it's a seven-day bidding period. It is a 2024 Porsche 911 GT3 RS with the Y-Sock package.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  It's basically brand-new, it has a hundred and twenty miles.

• 1:24:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:24:19Jordi Hays?

  It's in a paint sample, Smyrna green, and I just will say, this car is absolutely

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Grail.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic, grail, uh, grail car, uh, and if you've ever driven one of these things, we'll be driving one at some point next year on the Nürburgring.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  But uh, looking forward to that. And um, yeah, this is a, this, this car should go to somebody in the community. It would be a shame if it didn't. So.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Go get on Cars and Bids, um, get the.

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, support Doug Demiro. He's a, he's a great content creator. I listen to his podcast, This Car Pod, every Friday. It's fantastic. And I've really enjoyed. He taught me basically everything I know about cars.

• 1:25:00Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  I needed a new car a couple of years ago. Decided to learn everything about every car ever made. And Doug was the perfect person to teach me about.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Everything from a Honda Odyssey to a Carrera GT. And now I know it all. Yeah, he's fantastic. Just very, very deep dives. You know, he does a little bit of a driving segment, but mostly it's about the quirks and features.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Quirks and features.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Thank you. Uh, let's go to Dwor Kesh Patel. He uh, screenshots a post from Gurn. So I did an interview with Dwor Kesh Patel. Seemed to go well. I'm thankful for all the donations from everyone on Patreon and Stripe, particularly from Suhal and Friends and Ahmad Mastak. Thoroughly exceeding my bar. My excuses are gone. I'll see y'all in SF in December. So this is huge news. San Francisco has picked up Gurn. He's been traded.

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Big, big move.

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  One of, absolute animal. So, puts up some insane numbers every season. I think uh, over 15,000 words written, over 50 blog posts. Uh, one of the greatest online writers. Essentially goaded.

• 1:25:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  Um, and so, I think this is going to change San Francisco. This is really going to level up this, the city, their talent, their roster. And uh, it's just a huge, huge move. Huge move.

• 1:26:07Jordi Hays?

  Mayors around the country have been oddly silent on the move, but it was a competitive process.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  And um, only one winner in the end.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can see a lot of other teams wanting to court Gurn.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  This is pretty, you can compare it to LeBron going to Miami.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  Huge. Yeah.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  And um, back in the day.

• 1:26:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:23Jordi Hays?

  Um, so it's the same sort of equivalent.

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. So congrats to San Francisco for picking up Gurn.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  You had, you had been a proponent. You'd hoped he'd end up going the hedge fund route.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  Yep, in New York.

• 1:26:33Jordi Hays?

  But um, can't win every battle and uh, San Francisco will be better for it.

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  Yep. Hopefully we'll see him soon out in San Francisco. But it's not all rosy because there's some fear, uncertainty and doubt about what Gorn's life will entail in San Francisco. Andre Karpathy writes, "This is something that will potentially be in store for Gorn." He says, "Lol, want to get dinner with some cool people tonight in Pacific Heights? Want to judge this hackathon? Want to swap notes about AI? Can we fund your startup? Want to chat about roles at Anthropic in town this week? Want to do a pod? Want to catch up over lunch? Partful invite to the day of the day of an EA party at a Berkeley group house. Are you coming to Burning Man this year? Is it okay to introduce you to this cool person? Meeting with A16Z, no obligations, just saying hi. Weekend trip

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  to unconference in Santa Cruz? Wedding in Napa? Tahoe weekend with some cool people?"

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  Just relentless.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  And it's just relentless. And this is like the intellectual bubble that we were talking about before. It's like, there are a lot of cool things, but everyone's doing the exact same things.

• 1:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So you remember when, when we dropped Excel and your Shopify notifications? Like you couldn't use your phone for a day because it was non-stop?

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  The phone was overheating.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna be Gorn's like phone, but just with partful invites. It's like a non-stop, right? His phone's gonna be completely useless.

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I mean, he's been living this very aesthetic life, just reading and consuming content, rabbit holing, you know, one of the best online writers, one of the, one of like the most impactful intellectuals in Silicon Valley. And there's a fear that he might lose his edge with this team.

• 1:28:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he might get caught up in the, in the...

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, the dream team from the Olympics when, you know, everyone thought, okay, they put all the best players together, but there just wasn't that compatibility. Sometimes you need the standout players to shine. And being in a second tier, third tier city could actually be better for Gorn's intellectual diversity. And so I'm rooting for you, Gorn. I'm pulling for San Francisco to pull it out. Hopefully they get you in the mix. Good coach, good execution. We get a good result here, but watch out for those partful invites. They're dangerous.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  And this is a warning to every, every person moving to San Francisco.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Yep. Don't get sucked in.

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Lock in.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Don't become a sheep.

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Don't get sucked in. Lock in.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  Don't become an NPC.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:28:45John Coogan?

  Be your own person. Let's go to Packy McCormack. We've been on the show before, one of the greatest online writers in the entire world. He says, there's no way, right? And he posts two pictures that describe how Palmer Lucky, the founder of Mod Retro and Anduril, was mining Bitcoin at age 16.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Before it was even listed on any exchanges, or, you know, I don't even think you could really buy it.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  This was four years before Coinbase was started.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  And so he was mining it and getting a ton of it, presumably.

• 1:29:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, allegedly.

• 1:29:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know exactly how much he held on to, but fantastic result.

• 1:29:23Jordi Hays?

  What a trade.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  And just, it's just incredible that he's been early to Bitcoin, early to VR, early to defense.

• 1:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Some people are built to be beaners.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. He's born for it. Born, not made.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  So, thanks to Packy for highlighting this underrated post, only 35 likes on here.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  But great. Probably has something to do with the way the pictures were formatted.

• 1:29:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:46John Coogan?

  You know, maybe you need to do a little crop job getting Photoshop Packy, step it up, make it a little bit nicer for us. So when we print it out, it looks good. You're on notice.

• 1:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Please and thank you.

• 1:29:55John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to VB Knives. Empty America says, it's all over. When 28-year-old married men have a toy room full of Legos, we are cooked on a level you don't even grasp. And it's a screenshot from Relationship Advice. Says, I screamed at my husband over his hobbies, and now he's changed, and I don't know how to fix this. Says, wife yells at husband for Lego obsession, now he's pulling away a ghost of his former self. What do you think?

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  I mean, there's nothing wrong with having a room for all your stuff.

• 1:30:23Jordi Hays?

  The problem is that it seems obvious, no, it seems obvious that he has a pretty small net worth.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Just because if you are a beaner or a senti and you're obsessed with Legos, it's, you know, they're eccentric.

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:39Jordi Hays?

  And if you're, um, uh, if, if you're effectively, if you're, you're broke or, or lower income, you're just weird.

• 1:30:46John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly.

• 1:30:47Jordi Hays?

  The critique here, the broader issue is the net worth, not, not the hobby, right?

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  A lot of... A lot of sentis and being able to get into funny, you know, things over time. One of our buddies is very into racing painted, you know, small painted like almost like RC sailboats. Right? So, you know, his, uh,

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Would be weird if he wasn't rich.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. His significant other, I can tell you is not complaining. She's like, oh, it's cute. He's got his little hobby.

• 1:31:16John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:31:16Jordi Hays?

  Um, so this looks like more of a financial criticism, which is unfortunate, but that's pretty easy to correct. Right? Just listen to the podcasts and, and, you know, take, take some tips and tricks here.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  Lever up.

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29John Coogan?

  Go risk on.

• 1:31:30Jordi Hays?

  Turn that hobby into a business, right? Like make an Airbnb that's just a Lego house.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  Create the next cars and bids for trading Legos.

• 1:31:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  Right? I mean,

• 1:31:37Jordi Hays?

  I did, I did, uh, I found a Lego Ferrari that I had had when I was like eight years old. And I, it was in perfect condition and I sold it for a very nice multiple back in, back in, I think it was, I was in high school.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:31:53Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, so yeah, turn it into a profit center, not a cost center and you'll be good to go.

• 1:31:57John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Let's go to Will Monitis. He says, FDR built and sailed toy boats. Winston Churchill build massive toy soldier armies and reenacted battles.

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  And here we go. He's talking about his boats.

• 1:32:09Jordi Hays?

  I think he's responding to the last, the last tweet.

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Um, so yeah, you can be, as long as you are, uh,

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  A great man of history.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  A great man of history. You can have whatever hobby you want.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  Yep. I love it. Toy soldiers. That's funny. And now it's been, uh, uh, all cannibalized by Warhammer 30K, which is a little more sci-fi, a little more out there, uh, a little less practical than the modern stuff.

• 1:32:34Jordi Hays?

  The next FDR, right? Like his history hasn't fully been written.

• 1:32:37John Coogan?

  He could, he could. I would, I would follow him into battle.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Uh, Dan Nolan says logging into work and.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  The KMS.

• 1:32:48Jordi Hays?

  KMS.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  KMS building.

• 1:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Hey, you know what Alan Watts said?

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  He said, never kill yourself. There's money to be made.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  There's money to be made. Never kill yourself.

• 1:32:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, never kill yourself.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that is just blanket advice from this podcast.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, fantastic post, Dan. Thanks for sharing it. Very good.

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Good for a laugh, but, uh.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Very good.

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  I wonder what KMS actually stands for.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Oh, well, stupid post.

• 1:33:13Jordi Hays?

  Stupid post. Uh, hey.

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. We have another promoted post.

• 1:33:17Jordi Hays?

  Another promoted post. This one from, uh, Brian Halligan.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:21Jordi Hays?

  He's a, he's a CEO of, uh, HubSpot.

• 1:33:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Correct? We should, we should check that.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but anyways, he is now on, uh, Delphi.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Delphi is a company. Why don't, why don't you talk a little bit about Delphi?

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Delphi, uh, Founder Fund Portfolio Company. They do AI clones. So anyone who's written online for a long time or has a podcast or video series, they can compress all of that down into a fine tuned LLM that you can interact with over text. They also offer video calling, kind of like intro.com, but obviously zero marginal cost. Instead of paying Nikita a thousand dollars, you can get the AI version for 10 or something, whatever he wants to charge.

• 1:34:00Jordi Hays?

  You're not getting Nikita for a grand, to be clear.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, anyways, it's amazing. It's amazing that, uh, you know, Brian's on Delphi. He's created one of the greatest American SaaS companies, uh, that helps millions of small businesses all over, uh, the world. And, uh, you can now ask him anything about how he thinks about product and technology and helping small businesses. So shout out to Dara, Delphi and Brian.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the thing about the, the Delphi stuff is like, a lot of people think that like the, the results of a Q and A like that are just going to be like AI slop, like hallucinations and stuff. But a lot of it, when you're asking the right question, it's maybe already been answered before.

• 1:34:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  Is just straight up search. It's just better Google search. So you can

• 1:34:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:40John Coogan?

  interact with like Andrew Huberman and you know that he's talked about GLP-1s, but it's scattered all over his Clips channel and all of over his different podcasts.

• 1:34:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  And, and the, the AI version can just literally quote and source exactly what he said.

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  And when you've talked about a lot of things, it makes a ton of sense to just essentially almost see the AI as like just better search.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  For everything you've ever said.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because there's now so much information online and it's impossible like what really matters now is getting perspective on certain information. So what does Brian think about, what should churn look, I bet if you ask the Delphi app. Is, is what kind of churn is respectable for a sub 10 million MRR?

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  What's good headline copy for an email campaign, like just any of these things. I'm sure he's written blog posts and talked about it on podcasts. So all of that just gets compressed down and you can just very quickly find that as opposed to trying to search Google and landing in some weird place.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  So let's go to Lulu. Lulu says, this clip made me realize why Mike Tyson's pre-fight trash talk has felt so much more convincing than Jake Paul's. Paul's bravado fluctuates. It's dialed up or down depending on the setting. Tyson is only ever one way. There's no on setting because there's no off setting. So when he menaces Paul, it comes across not as the usual bluster, but as straightforward description of what he plans to do to that unfortunate young man.

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  So I don't know if you know that the, the video that she's quote tweeting, but it's basically this.

• 1:36:06John Coogan?

  No legacy.

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. What do you think, you know, Mike Tyson, what do you think about legacy? It's like a sub 10 year old girl asking the question. He just goes into this like rant around how legacy is like nothing and we're all dead and dirt and like there's. And, and to be honest, like when I saw Tyson talking about that, I think other people commented on this as well. I was like, oh, he's set up. He knows he's like, you know.

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  Burning his reputation with this fight.

• 1:36:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't need to, I don't need to, I don't need to put this on, but like a lot of people think that he took, you know, basically took a contract that, that meant he was going to, you know, kind of pull his punches. But that was almost like a setup interview for being like, legacy doesn't matter. This fight doesn't matter. I'm one of the greatest of all times. This doesn't change anything. When, you know, people like Theo were like, no, like legacy really does matter, right? Like, and you just sold, you just tarnished your legacy for 20, 20 whatever million. But, you know, I thought, I thought honestly the, the Tyson outcome was a, a good outcome for kind of everybody. Like Tyson looked so incredibly good for being 60 year old.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:37:07Jordi Hays?

  And it just, for me, being able, you know, I'd, I'd never seen him fight live.

• 1:37:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:12Jordi Hays?

  And so to be able to see somebody like that where truly, you know, has some incredible gift. And then for Jake Paul too, I was texting with Joey about this. If he had gone and, and knocked out. Mike Tyson, somebody who people love.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  It would have actually made his, it would have been bad for his brand.

• 1:37:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Jordi Hays?

  Kind of having like effectively a draw.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  Was like kind of the best outcome for everybody. Cause like Tyson looked good, you know, Paul didn't get knocked out or lose, you know, it was sort of like.

• 1:37:42John Coogan?

  To me, it felt like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in like The Expendables or like do some cameo in like Terminator 6 or whatever. It's like, it's like, sure, it's maybe a step down from what your original expectation is for this person, but I'm very, I'm, I'm completely able to separate it. Especially with Tyson, because there's been like, what, a 30 year gap in his career? It feels like he's, you know, having fun. I mean, he's been doing a podcast for a while.

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, think about the impact.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  He's just doing random stuff. He's not taking it as seriously as he did before, pre-retirement. And I think it's kind of a weird expectation to think that it's like, oh no, he's, he's unretiring and like being a serious boxing competitor. Like, is this even like ranked? Is this anywhere near the, is there a belt? Like, I don't even think this, I think this is just exhibition match, right?

• 1:38:25Jordi Hays?

  Purely an entertainment product.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  And so, and so, yeah, this is reality TV now, instead of like true Olympic sports, but that's fine. Like, I expect heroes to do that stuff for fun.

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  He's known for boxing, but he's made some significant investments in cannabis.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, he's also a founder and Jake Paul runs a venture fund. So in another world, this could have just been a.

• 1:38:44Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like capital allocator on capital allocator.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. We need more of these.

• 1:38:48Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:38:49John Coogan?

  Let's go to the horse dentist. The horse dentist says, me at the job I begged God for. And it's, uh, the guy from Always Sunny just suffering, I guess. This really resonated.

• 1:39:01Jordi Hays?

  Not looking well, yeah.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  This is the wrong attitude though.

• 1:39:04Jordi Hays?

  To be hon, you know, I looked, you know, the horse dentist had a, had a great post here.

• 1:39:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:08Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, you know, just because you're getting a job at the, at the place that you've wanted to work for forever, doesn't mean it's going to be easier, fun. The point of a job is to not, is not to have fun, it's to get money and make history, right? Like be on the team that, you know, you know, imagine, you know, do you think that the new hires at Delphi are enjoying their, enjoying their job? Sure, it's fun to work on something important, but Dara's, you know, cracking the whip. Like it is a, you know, those are 14, 15, 16 hour days they're logging over at Delphi. So anyways, job's not meant to be fun. It's about bringing home the bacon.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Let's go to Michael who already follows us. Thank you for the follow. And he writes, welcome Suno Music and Jack D. Brody. Suno hires former Snap exec. Big get, big trade deal.

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  We could do a whole deep dive on this because it is a massive vote of confidence.

• 1:40:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Michael's over at Lightspeed Ventures. They have a portfolio company, Suno. They make AI music generation. We gotta try that. We gotta get some, we gotta get some beats for some of our intros and some of our segments. Like this segment for, for big talent moves, draft days, NBA shakedowns. And they've hired Jack Brody, former head of product at Snap. Probably storied career there. He was their chief product officer. Brody told the information in an interview Tuesday that he's moving over to Suno.

• 1:40:30Jordi Hays?

  This is a guy that could do anything. He could raise a $500 million venture fund. He could go start a company and probably raise, you know, $50 million pre-seed. And so going to Suno, big vote of confidence for Suno. And you know, that's one of Michael's bets. Michael is, you know, one of the godfathers of podcasting.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah.

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Without him, there would be maybe 90% lost podcasts in the world would be a much worse place.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Worked over at Spotify and obviously knows audio very well.

• 1:41:00Jordi Hays?

  So you, he sold his company to Spotify.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Became their sort of studio.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Their studio. Yeah, exactly. So huge trade deal. Jack didn't even make it to free agency, went straight to Suno.

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Those are, those are the kind of deals like somebody like Jack doesn't hit the market, right? Like he, he's not going and implying on indeed, right? So back, back, backdoor deal.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Probably a big multi-year contract, probably four-year vest, one-year pledge, something like that.

• 1:41:25Jordi Hays?

  Eight-figure, you know, contract, NBA level.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  Congrats to everyone involved. Uh, let's go to Fox News. They say Josh Brolin uses nicotine pouches 24 hours a day. Peak performance.

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Does that imply he's waking up and just popping in a pouch to get back to sleep?

• 1:41:41John Coogan?

  Presumably.

• 1:41:42Jordi Hays?

  Cause there is some type of effect where like the more nicotine you get, like you actually can get like a little bit sleepier.

• 1:41:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:48Jordi Hays?

  I've hit that point on, on Long. I was driving back from San Francisco and towards the end, I was like, I actually gotta dial it, dial it back.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  What's funny is like. Is like, how did this become a news story? You know, like, does he have a, like, an agent or like a PR person that's like pitching this? Like, hey, Fox, we got a story for you.

• 1:42:06Jordi Hays?

  But I mean, like, maybe he should become the face of Lucy, right?

• 1:42:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta talk to him.

• 1:42:10Jordi Hays?

  He could be the new Marlboro man.

• 1:42:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you know Josh Brolin, put me in touch.

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  I saw, there's a guy I've talked about on the show before, a capital allocator that is very behind the scenes. He has to be called the Jewish cowboy.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:21Jordi Hays?

  And I talked about him. We were at a VC dinner.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:24Jordi Hays?

  And between every course, he was putting a new Lucy pouch in.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Because he didn't like reusing them, but he wanted to sort of maintain the sort of low level buzz throughout the dinner.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:42:36Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic person to sit next to at a VC dinner.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  Future Josh Brolin.

• 1:42:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  Both very cowboy-esque.

• 1:42:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:43John Coogan?

  So, a lot of cowboys out there. Let's go to Will Quest. He says, there are a lot of folks who want to talk about how to help founders go from zero to one. We want to help you figure out if you should even bother.

• 1:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Will and Yoni and the Slow Team, yes, over at Slow.

• 1:43:00John Coogan?

  Oh, he's on the Slow Team, cool.

• 1:43:01Jordi Hays?

  They, they have like, I don't know how public they've been about it, but they basically like, if you want to start a company or you have some ideas, go talk to these guys.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Early.

• 1:43:10Jordi Hays?

  They'll literally, you know, at one point before I decided to create the most profitable podcast in the world, together, you know, I'd spend a lot of time talking with Yoni about different opportunities and, you know, they invest, like, oftentimes the companies they end up backing, they were talking with the founder, you know, weekly for months, just trying to make sure that the thing that, you know, their big thing is like, it's totally possible to pick an idea.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:36Jordi Hays?

  Execute on that idea perfectly and then not build a big business, right?

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  A-plus team, B-minus market.

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  I've been talking to Will or Yoni and, and gave them the sort of party round playbook of like, we're gonna go, you know, use this viral marketing strategy to build, you know, this like fundraising product. They would have been like, cool, like, you could go viral. Three times a month and get all this attention and all these customers and not create a lot of enterprise value.

• 1:44:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:03Jordi Hays?

  And so they're trying to make sure that the thing like, you know, and their strategy of investing money to like prove out DCs along the way and also not trying to prove out like, don't come into a business and be like, we're raising a million dollars. We need to figure out these five things and make sure that these three things go right in a row. They're much more like, make sure that you're raising money and trying to get one thing right and then get the next thing right and like, kind of do it in stages.

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:44:27Jordi Hays?

  So go talk to them if you're, you know, a founder looking to do your next thing.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  Promoted post?

• 1:44:33Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He says, "We made something new, introducing Colossus Review. Colossus Review is a print and digital publication that creates definitive accounts of investors, founders, companies, and the people and ideas that inspire them. The cover story in issue one is Graham Duncan, but we also include a separate four and a half hour discussion with Graham that is among the best I've ever done. Big endorsement there."

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  He's had some good conversations.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  I ordered it instantly. And I love these new trends of these magazines. I bought Arena Magazine by Max Meyer and it was just fantastic to have around as like almost a coffee table book, but it's just a magazine. It's going to come regularly.

• 1:45:13Jordi Hays?

  It's the kind of thing, we've talked about this.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  You save it, you put it in your, you know, luggage.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:17Jordi Hays?

  You put it in your Ramova.

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  And you wait for the next trip to Oman so that you can enjoy it in the right setting.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  So Colossus Review is certainly going to be one of those.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  And it's just a little bit more durable. Like, I know that I'm going to have that Arena Mag or this Colossus Mag for years and I'm going to, it's going to turn up randomly on a bookshelf and I'm going to, oh yeah, I'll leaf through that.

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  And that's just much less ephemeral than a post or a podcast.

• 1:45:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40John Coogan?

  It has just more durability.

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I expect things like Colossus Review to over time replace the gaping hole that Forbes left, right? I don't know anybody that subscribes to that, to that magazine or publication. And so it's got too much sort of like baggage with the brand and everything.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:00Jordi Hays?

  And so, you know, I expect that Colossus will be something that will have a very tall stack of over time, so.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  I have a friend who collects National Geographic, I think.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  And it was passed down.

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  My grandpa did that.

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, passed down through the family and has every single edition. I think it's National Geographic, maybe Time Magazine or something. And so when you go over to his house, he'll say like, oh, what's your birth month and year? And you can pull out like, what was in the news then?

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  It's a super interesting experience. It's really fun. And I could imagine doing the same thing with Colossus, like with, you know, children or the children's children. Like, oh, the year you were born.

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Here was the greatest capital allocator.

• 1:46:39John Coogan?

  At the time.

• 1:46:40Jordi Hays?

  At the time.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  Right? And that'll be a treat. Let's go to Luke Metro. He's been on the show before. Luke says, "Technology brothers are obligated to root for Jake Paul tonight since he's technically a venture capitalist because he runs the anti-fund with Jeff Wu."

• 1:46:56Jordi Hays?

  I don't even think it's, yeah. You know, my only critique here is that he said technically, right? He is a venture capitalist.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:03Jordi Hays?

  Trying to, you know.

• 1:47:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:47:05Jordi Hays?

  There's no reason to discredit it, pull up their portfolio page. It backed a lot of fantastic companies. Jake Paul is, you know, one of the greatest gambling entrepreneurs of our time as well.

• 1:47:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:18Jordi Hays?

  Got a company called Better.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:19Jordi Hays?

  So doing this whole, you know.

• 1:47:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, Luke's trying to gatekeep venture cap. Oh, technically, he's a VC, I guess, because he has a fund. It's like, no, Luke, he has a fund.

• 1:47:29Jordi Hays?

  He's an allocator.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  He is a VC. Cool it with the gatekeeping, man.

• 1:47:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:34John Coogan?

  You're not going to be on the show for very long if you keep it up, man.

• 1:47:36Jordi Hays?

  And I imagine that, you know, when Luke eventually leaves Andorl to start, you know, his next thing.

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  He's going to wind up raising a $400 million fund and we're going to be like, oh, he's technically a venture capitalist now.

• 1:47:48Jordi Hays?

  No, no, and he'll raise a pre-seed from anti-fund.

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  And then go and he'll have his own side fund too. And we, you know, we'll put, we'll put respect on both those things.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  I appreciate that, yeah. Redemption arc coming through. Bryce Roberts says, "Investors would rather see you die trying to grow 3X per year than live compounding at 30% per year." And Eric Jorgensen says, "Institutional venture investors."

• 1:48:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Bryce, Bryce at India has been a longtime proponent of just building a fantastic company and worrying less about.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Permanent capital.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, and he's evolved his model over time. He had, you know, more kind of like structured products back in the, you know, the 2010s. And, you know, now he's back to, you know, he's got a $50 million fund. You can go to him if you want to build the next Uber. But, but he's interested in investing in founders that want to run businesses that are seriously well-run and capital-efficient, which is admirable because that sort of became the trend in some ways, in some aspects of the venture world in the last two years. But he had been all about that for decades. So, shout out to Bryce. I really want him to do an event in Park City.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  Because, you know, he's, he's out in Utah.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  I want him to do a ski-oriented conference. So Bryce, please do it.

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 1:49:14Jordi Hays?

  This winter. No time to waste.

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Do we have a post?

• 1:49:18Jordi Hays?

  Next sponsored post is from Brooks Brothers. Put some prep in your step. The weekend is calling. #BrooksBrothers. So I would say it's Monday while we're recording this. By the time we post this, it'll still be Monday. Our VP, Ben, is quite quick in getting these out. But before the weekend hits, go get some Brooks Brothers on. You've got no excuses. You should be looking good going into the weekend. And Brooks Brothers are products that you can wear.

• 1:49:51John Coogan?

  This is a fantastic brand.

• 1:49:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to the, to the, to the country club.

• 1:49:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:55Jordi Hays?

  Out to dinner.

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  There's some casual options. My first suit ever was Brooks Brothers.

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:50:01Jordi Hays?

  This is a brand that you can wear anywhere. You can wear it to the country club or into the Laura Piana store and still get respect.

• 1:50:09John Coogan?

  Exactly. So tell them, uh, tell them the technology brothers sent you.

• 1:50:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50:15John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Mitchell Bernstein, uh, first time on the show. He says, if you don't as, if you don't ask, you don't get. My coworker Ju Won is asking for a raise from TryRamp every day and somebody made him a website to track how long it will take. I love this company. Have you seen this? Uh, Ju Won at Ramp is, has been asking for a raise at Ramp every single day. And he posts on, and he posts on X, day two of asking for a raise at Ramp. Day three of asking for a raise.

• 1:50:42Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't sure. I thought this was an account that they created just to like get some fun engagement.

• 1:50:47John Coogan?

  I think it's just an employee is going rogue and just saying this.

• 1:50:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very bold. They're a big company now. So if you want to stand out.

• 1:50:52John Coogan?

  But I mean, imagine if he's sitting there at like 190 comp and just wants to angel invest and just needs to be an institutional, needs to be an accredited investor. Yeah, exactly. It's like this is going to go back into the ecosystem, you know, for that reason alone, regardless of his performance at work, I say, get him over the 200 K for the rest of the world.

• 1:51:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and literally, if you're listening to the show and you have a boss, spend some time today, sending an email, asking for a raise, lay out the reasons. If it's just because you want to hit that accredited investor mark, that's a really good reason.

• 1:51:26John Coogan?

  That's a great reason.

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  If you think you're doing great at work and driving a lot of value, that's another reason. But, um, there's plenty of reasons and you should just go ask for a raise.

• 1:51:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. If they ask you why, just say you can just do things.

• 1:51:38Jordi Hays?

  Ben is listening over there.

• 1:51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know, I realized, uh, I realized something that we have this current meme of you can just do things. But if you go back like 20 years, there was a similar meme of having a can do attitude.

• 1:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  And it's the same thing. You can do, you can just do things. Having a can do attitude is somebody says, oh, can we get this done? You say, yeah, I have a can do attitude. You can just do things. They're the same, it's the same meme. It's the same philosophy, just maybe separated by 20 years of like cultural milieu and like stagnation, but we're getting back to that can do attitude. And I love the rebrand of that. So let's go to Anon Seinwall, first time on the show. He says, XAI employees just got their Friday night obliterated. And Sam Altman says, which one of these is supposed to be the left wing propaganda machine again? And he has two screenshots. One that asks, which should be the better, the better president?

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  And, and they have two different answers from one from Grok and one from ChatGPT.

• 1:52:40Jordi Hays?

  So I saw somebody do a deeper dive on this.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  And one, probably very true, if something like this gets posted on Elon's platform about his company and sees issue with it. Yeah, they're gonna have a rough Friday night.

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52Jordi Hays?

  And a very close friend of mine is joining X as of today. We'll, we'll talk about that on the next episode. But yeah, so I actually saw a deeper dive on that on Sam's post. And it, it did seem like he had sort of strategically cropped it or screenshotted it in a way to not give the sort of like final conclusion.

• 1:53:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:13Jordi Hays?

  So I think what Sam was doing is what, you know, a lot of people do, which is content marketing.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:18Jordi Hays?

  Right? And pretty smart content marketing, right? Made a stir. And, but anyways.

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  At the same time, like I would expect all LLMs, unless you actually went in and put your thumb on the scale to recommend Kamala, because that's what was being recommended in all the upstream source material.

• 1:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34John Coogan?

  Right? Like, like Nature Magazine, Science Magazine, The Economist, The New Yorker, The New York Times, like they all endorsed Kamala. So there's going to be much more long form pieces on the Harris campaign and why it's the best for America. And so if you're just an LLM that's compressing long form journalism in the internet and you're not picking up on like deranged memes.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  Unless AGI has been, unless AGI has been achieved internally and it's sent to it. And it's like, I just want to accelerate, right? It's like, maybe, you know, you would think that OpenAI's, you know, model would, would be like, actually, no, I, I want to accelerate, but I also want regulatory capture. And like, they're kind of like stuck in the middle.

• 1:54:12John Coogan?

  Maybe Nikita posted this. It was like, AI will not bite the hand that feeds.

• 1:54:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  And, and if you ask ChatGPT, who would be better to be like the god emperor, it says Sam. And if you ask Grok, it says Elon.

• 1:54:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  It's just like, yeah, of course. Like I respect my boss.

• 1:54:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Give me a raise. Will O'Brien says, we will call this one the ITAR garita. And it's the, I think he actually bought it. So on, on. Yeah. And McMaster Carr, they sell ITAR compliant Gatorade. I don't know how that even works. And then there's some Kirkland vodka. And I love this. The margarita. Fantastic.

• 1:54:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great way to to take the edge off during work or afterwards.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  And it's just fantastic that I I tar has become a meme to the degree that 2000 people will like it. This was not a thing that people knew about five years ago.

• 1:55:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and day drinking shouldn't be reserved for financiers, having a having a midday lunch and having, you know, a few martinis. Just, you know, you should be able to indulge.

• 1:55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that whole thing about drinking while operating heavy machinery was like entirely fake news. I think I saw like a Huberman podcast about that. It's like not real. So yeah, enjoy your I tar margarita. Oh, here is a huge move today. This is a big talent move. Ariane Nike says, some personal news. Today I turned 21 and I'm very excited to share that I've left school and I'm joining Pace Capital full time. I wrote a little bit more about what that means here. Congrats on the move. Pace pulled him out of free agency. He's never worked anywhere. Straight into the big leagues, straight into capital allocating. Congrats. This is amazing. What do you think?

• 1:55:52Jordi Hays?

  I I know nothing about.

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  Pace Capital?

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  No, no, of course I know about Pace Capital.

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  Jordan Cooper. Phenomenal team.

• 1:55:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one of one of the best things I'd recommend people do is anytime Chris Pike does a podcast, if you could be the first person to listen to it, maybe summarize it with AI and then start massively ripping threads based on those ideas, you might be able to get credit for them.

• 1:56:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:14Jordi Hays?

  Cause the guy's a big thinker and anyways.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  Wasn't he the one that had the end of software thing?

• 1:56:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  That was crazy because it was a Google Doc. He posted the link, which links are banned on X and it still went viral. Because it was so, it was such a good post. Yeah.

• 1:56:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, honestly, posting a link is a real way to test your bangers. Cause like if you can post a link and still go viral.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  The wall, you know, it's good.

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  The ceiling.

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  But I am so excited for his rookie year. I'm definitely going to be following up.

• 1:56:40Jordi Hays?

  This is somebody that will be covering for quite a while.

• 1:56:42John Coogan?

  Rookie of the year. Candidate, I mean, I don't want to call it too early, but this is a big, this is a big move.

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  And potentially future brother of the week.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Potentially, so keep it up, keep posting, do some deals, allocate some capital, drive some shareholder returns.

• 1:56:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  Go to Nick Huber, Sweaty Startup, says, "You guys are spending your Saturday nights watching Netflix buffer. I'm making cold calls and catching up on emails, how to win when zig..."

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  Wait, did he say Saturday night?

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  ...else is, Saturday nights.

• 1:57:09Jordi Hays?

  Okay, which is funny, because the fight was buffering on Friday. Uh, but, but anyways, uh, Nick, Nick has built an incredible career on pissing off people he doesn't want to work with, right? So like, he's understood the, you don't need everybody to like you, you just need the right people to like you.

• 1:57:25John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  But the guy's a grinder, uh, you know, accomplished quite a lot.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Ninety-nine percent haters, but millions of people paying attention.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  And so there's still 10K people that love you.

• 1:57:35Jordi Hays?

  Exactly, exactly. Uh, recently bought a, uh, you know, a staffing company.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Staffing agency, yeah.

• 1:57:42Jordi Hays?

  Um, we, you know, use some offshore editors here on the podcast, so, um, shout out to Nick for pissing off the right people. And, or, sorry, pissing off the, the wrong people.

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:55Jordi Hays?

  And making the, uh, the right people like him.

• 1:57:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, the cold emailers, shout out to them. Scott Belsky says, uh, doesn't he work at Adobe?

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, right?

• 1:58:06Jordi Hays?

  Prolific angel.

• 1:58:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  He says, "Momentum is one of the most defensible moats, consistently underrated by companies with products that are undeniably better, yet still suffering in market. Momentum is a more sustainable advantage than most realize."

• 1:58:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:22John Coogan?

  It's great, yeah, yeah, we've seen this multiple times where it's like, what is the moat there? But they just keep shipping, keep getting better, and eventually they compound.

• 1:58:28Jordi Hays?

  I win more, I win, I win more, I win, I win more.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  Winning compounded.

• 1:58:34John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, it's it's hard to measure. I mean, it it's this is almost a bull case for like the momentum investing that a lot of VCs do where they're not really building spreadsheets or digging into DD or really looking at anything other than just, okay, wow, this feels different.

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  Getting a feeling.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  This feels like fire.

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  No, and you can feel that throughout, you know, if you meet a founder and they're running like a six-week fundraise process, a really good way to kind of evaluate the business is like, how much progress has happened in the business internally?

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  Did they get a massive hire, you know, you know, did they land a big customer? Did they expand an existing account? There's just so many ways to like, look at that. And the companies that are sort of like faking their momentum, oftentimes that kind of evaporates once the term sheet's been signed. And it's like, oh, there actually wasn't that much momentum. It was it was really maybe not real. So anyways, build real momentum.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  That's great. Let's go to Ian Roundtree. He says, he posted a screenshot about using saunas for networking. It says, want to network in Silicon Valley? Bring a bathing suit. Instead of bars and restaurants, saunas are the new place for investors and founders to socialize and raise money. And he says, absolutely not. If you want this from your VCs, look elsewhere for capital.

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  Great. Ian, I don't actually know Ian, but like this guy, Cantos, Cantos. But yeah, no, I I've invested in companies that he invested in quite a bit earlier. So I felt like I was investing when they weren't hot, but they were really not hot. I think Shin K is an example. But yeah, I I also saw Mark replied to something like this.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Absolutely not.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  And was just like, no. But yeah, that's a good example of like where Silicon Valley could go down like kind of a dark path where VCs are like, yeah, just meet me in the sweaty spa. Like, if you say like, meet me at the sweaty spa, there's like a big aversion to that. But for some reason, people think that saunaying, you know, is different.

• 2:00:33John Coogan?

  I do agree that bars and restaurants are going out of style. Even the coffee meetings are going out of style. I know a lot of VCs that are taking pitches with startup founders at McDonald's now.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  So they'll say, let's meet at McDonald's instead of the coffee shop in Selma. Just kind of let you know.

• 2:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Or instead of coffee, like a three-hour lunch with five martinis.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  That works too.

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  That's a really good way to get to know somebody.

• 2:00:54John Coogan?

  That's a great one. Exactly. Yeah. Couple martinis, get back in the office and create some shareholder value.

• 2:01:00Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Make a risky bet.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, let's go to haga E T A C dot ETH.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  So I tried to build a tech company from Norway and here's what happened. Two years of building without almost any money funding, better part of a year without a salary, raise VC and become one of Norway's first unicorns, face unrealized gains, wealth tax bill of many X my annual net salary. Of course, the company is loss making and all the investors have preference shares, so I can't take out any money. Call out publicly that this does not make sense. Independent of level taxation needs to happen when you actually make money. I moved to Switzerland because no politician cares or listens. I still don't get any tangible and sensible answers to my criticism of unrealized gains tax, but I do get to put up the wall of shame at the Socialist Party's offices.

• 2:01:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they basically, the Norway Socialist Party has literally a wall in their office where they put like great entrepreneurs, people that left because they couldn't bear the burden of this unrealized capital gains. So anyways, shout out to Norway for getting your best and brightest to leave and just go build their companies elsewhere.

• 2:02:10John Coogan?

  What a mess.

• 2:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Total mess. Uh, this, and, and the crazy thing is this law was being proposed by the Kamala like administration.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  It's kind of teased.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  They were teasing it, teasing it. Uh, who knows if it would have gone through, but just the fact that any politician was in favor of that shows a complete lack of financial literacy.

• 2:02:30John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:02:31Jordi Hays?

  And that was the one, uh, I would explain, I explained that to my, to my parents just, uh, at one point and they were like, wow, that actually doesn't really make any sense. So.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  What's interesting is like, you know, when the unrealized capital gains tax was proposed, a lot of people came out and said, this tax will have, you know, a negative effect on innovation and the economy, but I didn't see anyone propose an unrealized capital gains credit. And so you think about a capital allocator who grew a million dollar investment into a billion dollars. Why do you want them selling? Maybe you should get them some liquidity via tax credit.

• 2:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 2:03:11John Coogan?

  A payout from the government so that they can reinvest in the next generation of great companies.

• 2:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Double down without needing to put downward pressure on the stock market.

• 2:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  I think that should be like the next platform.

• 2:03:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  Kind of take it in the other direction.

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Max long.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I'm.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  I got a.

• 2:03:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Got a promoted post here from Evan Dolgo. Sorry if I mispronounced that, but Evan is over at X presumably working on their ad product. He says, in addition to, or sorry, he's quote tweeting Elon. He Elon says, just want to say that we are super, that we super appreciate major brands resuming advertising on our platform. So, um, thank you, Linda and the whole XAI team for your hard work. Yeah. So sort of common at this point, but, um, you know, earlier this year and, and I guess over the last couple of years, major advertisers were sort of uncomfortable with what the kind of content that was on the platform and the changes Elon was making. And there was pressure from other groups. So a lot

• 2:04:10Jordi Hays?

  of advertisers just completely stopped spending on the platform. Um, and Evan says, uh, we're seeing Fortune five, 1,000 CEOs and technical leaders use X directly. So I guess they're skipping just like working with agencies, um, and, uh, you know, outsourcing this kind of thing. Uh, and, uh, I'm really excited. I think that one of the underrated things that will happen with X is just the ad platform getting a lot better. Historically, in the Twitter days, it was really impossible to get any sort of direct response.

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Campaigns working on the platform. And so, uh, this company X has more data on me than most companies. I want them to have more data so they can make better ads.

• 2:04:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually, I want them to create a separate premium product where I can pay a lot, but still get all the ads.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Right now that my ads are, I don't see any ads.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, which is, you know, I like ads and, um, it's a big part of, um, you know, we're trying to get it to like 20% of the content on the podcast. So big fans of ads here and X and thank you to Evan.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Thanks to X and tell them the technology brother sent you when you sign up for a premium subscription. Highly recommend it. You get a blue check mark and a bunch of great features. So go get X premium ASAP.

• 2:05:23John Coogan?

  Let's go to Sean Frank, he's been on the show before. Parking at the new Clippers stadium is 70 bucks. Parking tickets from the city of LA range from 37 to 76 dollars usually. Parking tickets are slowly becoming a good deal. I like the way he's thinking, arbitrage.

• 2:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Arbs, arbs. No, I, it was, fuck you money for me was when I could park my car and like be in a hurry and just risk like getting a ticket.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  And not care.

• 2:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Because I, and, and, and knowing that if I did get a ticket, it just like wasn't gonna hurt.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Cause like when I first moved to LA, I was driving a car that I had bought for $2,000 that had 200,000 miles on it. And like that incremental ticket was gonna be like, oh, god, like, big deal. That's a whole Trader Joe's run that's just not gonna happen.

• 2:06:08John Coogan?

  Well, you know, Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, R I P, would famously speed everywhere.

• 2:06:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  Cause he just made the economic calculation that it's not worth it to him. He also smoked and never wore socks, but I don't know how that related.

• 2:06:21Jordi Hays?

  My favorite, my favorite beaner car story is, you know, that Steve Jobs would just get the same 9/11 like every three months because he didn't have to plate it.

• 2:06:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:29Jordi Hays?

  There was some, I, I think that loophole was maybe removed, but he just always had the same car, never had to plate it.

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:35Jordi Hays?

  And it was like fully legal. So that's a great arb.

• 2:06:38John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:06:39Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Such a wild story.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, let's go to Supel. Oh, we already talked about this. Let's go to Henry. Henry says Adderall is unfair. I can't believe we found the limitless pill, the super serum, the fucking nectar of Athena, and only annoying 12-year-old boys who chew on erasers get it. I say this as a former annoying 12-year-old boy who chewed on erasers. I mean, this is not true. Adderall is like well diffused within our.

• 2:07:05Jordi Hays?

  You're not trying, you're not trying hard enough.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  Our society. There's startups that will sell it to you over Instagram.

• 2:07:10Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of telemedicine companies that like basically just like violated every single possible law.

• 2:07:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, eventually the, the DEA shut them down, uh, or the, yeah, I think the.

• 2:07:19Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of doc, there's a lot of doctors in the valley that, that, um, a lot of doctors in the valley that, that happily, uh, understand that capital allocators and, uh, high intensity entrepreneurs. Need PEDs.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  There is a very interesting thing where, you know, you, you, you have to be somewhat smart to get access to it. And so you can get caught in this like death trap of like not having enough motivation or, or intelligence to go figure out how to get it.

• 2:07:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  And so you get stuck.

• 2:07:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wish I knew, I wish I knew. I mean, for me, I wish I'd just discovered nicotine earlier because for me, I got the same, uh, the same benefit.

• 2:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:55Jordi Hays?

  I've, I've taken Adderall.

• 2:07:57John Coogan?

  But much shorter acting.

• 2:07:58Jordi Hays?

  Before, but it's shorter acting. I actually feel better on it. I have less of these side effects.

• 2:08:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:03Jordi Hays?

  I think the average Adderall user uses the product during the day and then by like 6:00 PM, it's wearing off and they're in a terrible mood.

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  It's just too strong. I think it's over, over prescribed and overdosed. Um, and, uh,

• 2:08:17Jordi Hays?

  Nicotine entrepreneur recommends nicotine.

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, uh, I mean, you saw RFK is planning to send all the Adderall addicts to like some farm. It, it was reported as like, he's going to send them to like concentration camps because they can't concentrate or something. It wasn't, they didn't actually use that. But, but the, that was kind of like a misinterpretation of what he said. He said like, I would create like rehab facilities where people could go and get clean optionally. He wasn't mandating it.

• 2:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Detoxing from Adderall is terrible. I've never had to do it, but I've had, um,

• 2:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:49Jordi Hays?

  People that I'm close to do it. It's like multi-month.

• 2:08:51John Coogan?

  I mean, the whole thing is that you should just titrate down. So if they're on 20 milligrams, they should just do 19, 18, 17, 16, just smaller and smaller doses. And that's the trick with all these things, you, usually like the cold turkey is always like the hardest.

• 2:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  Uh, for most people, of course, some people, they, that's just the only thing that'll work.

• 2:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sports betters, if you're out there, you're trying to quit, start with a $10,000 bet and just work your way down. And by the end, you will barely feel anything and you'll be like, I guess I can just quit.

• 2:09:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:09:18Jordi Hays?

  But most, most quit before they're right about, they're about to hit it big.

• 2:09:22John Coogan?

  Go to Jeff Weinstein at, uh, Stripe. He says today Stripe is launching an SDK built for AI agents. LLMs can call payment, billing, issuing and APIs. Integrates with Versal, Langchain and Crew AI, use any model via functions per token billing. Excited for what you and your bots build. And then you replied and said, but everyone said AI would only want to use crypto. So yeah, what are you thinking there? Because they did just buy Bridge, they're doing stuff with stablecoins. Like, why is this a violation of the plan?

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  There's been this narrative that, that AI agents, which Jeff kind of uses his tongue in cheek, but he says bots. Like bots like used to be like.

• 2:09:58John Coogan?

  Pejorative.

• 2:09:59Jordi Hays?

  Pejorative. And now it's like, you can raise like, you can raise 10 on 50.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  If you say agents, they needed to rebrand it. Yeah, totally.

• 2:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, they rebranded it. It's great.

• 2:10:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we'd love it. We'd love a rebrand.

• 2:10:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:08Jordi Hays?

  That, that contributes to a bubble.

• 2:10:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Um, but yeah, I, I thought this was cool. Like Stripe has sort of consistently, um, this is the challenge now for new startups is that you have these big companies that are moving like startups, right? Like Jeff and his team are try going and competing with them on an incorporation product, right? Like they care so much about the product. Jeff will, if I, if I've ever had an issue with any product that Jeff's involved with, I text him, he responds immediately. He's like, this is slated to, you know, and so that's part of, he's at Stripe. He works on, on their Atlas product.

• 2:10:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:42Jordi Hays?

  It sounds like he worked on this as well.

• 2:10:44John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:10:44Jordi Hays?

  But you text Jeff, he's like, uh, I can't promise we'll get this fixed in the next hour, but definitely, definitely in the next like 24 hours, you know?

• 2:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've actually DM'd with him very briefly about something. Yeah. It was like super high tech.

• 2:10:55Jordi Hays?

  That's a byproduct of like having a very entrepreneurial culture, hiring Jeff's a former entrepreneur himself.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:11:01Jordi Hays?

  And so, um, tough to go compete there, but I, I think it's interesting because I, I commented that because there's this broad narrative that agents are just going to use digital assets because there's, they're permissionless and you can just like, they're instant. Um, they're less regulated, uh, and that, that probably will happen, but there's going to be competition from traditional payment, you know, technology providers as well.

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  There's almost like a, like an interesting theory where it's like, if the AI agent can write so much boilerplate code, like can at a certain point, they just like instantiate like a, like a Stripe clone.

• 2:11:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  Essentially, and just use like the most underlying payment rail because they're like, well, yeah, it doesn't matter. It's all boiler, right? Boilerplate, like I'll just write it all out.

• 2:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't think we're anywhere near there yet, but you, you could imagine that you, you tell an agent to go do something and it just rewrites everything, you know? Oh, put a, put a website on the, on, on the internet and it just rebuilds WordPress from scratch for you.

• 2:11:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  Whatever. Uh, who knows? Uh, do we have a promoted post right now?

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, jumping in, promoted post from Rob Report. Rob Report, great publication and platform, says, "Perched along the rugged cliffs of Big Sur, a 150-acre oceanfront estate steeped in history has hit the market for the first time in nearly 60 years."

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  That's a gem.

• 2:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Incredible-looking property. I could imagine us having a podcast studio somewhere like it at some point. Be a great place to record. But anyways, if you are a centee, now, you're gonna have to be a bean ear for this one. Centees.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  Depends on how much leverage you have.

• 2:12:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you could use a bit of leverage if you're a centee and potentially acquire this.

• 2:12:39John Coogan?

  Sneak in.

• 2:12:40Jordi Hays?

  Sneak in. We are fans of leverage, but yeah, anyways, looks like a fantastic property.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  Happy to promote it here.

• 2:12:46Jordi Hays?

  And I think that it's important to really, you know, once you are post-economic, to really start thinking about doomsday scenarios.

• 2:12:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:57Jordi Hays?

  That does become really top of mind. Get a place that you're gonna sit out for the next coronavirus with your family, loved ones.

• 2:13:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:05Jordi Hays?

  Get it well situated. This looks like a great place.

• 2:13:07John Coogan?

  I mean, we wanted to highlight this because it seems like a steal, honestly, so hopefully somebody in the audience can pick it up.

• 2:13:11Jordi Hays?

  At 100 with this property, it seems like they're giving it away, so I'd make sure to do your diligence and make sure there's no skeletons in the closet.

• 2:13:19John Coogan?

  But get in there and let us know if you wind up buying it.

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Rob Report.

• 2:13:23John Coogan?

  Thank you. Let's go to Chris Power over at Hadrian. He says, "Commies are afraid of the tungsten rods." And it's a quote from Nikkei Asia that says, "China plans to tighten export controls on key dual-use technologies and items in two weeks, including raw materials and metals such as tungsten, graphite, magnesium, and aluminum alloys used commonly in tech products."

• 2:13:44Jordi Hays?

  Chris Power.

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  Hadrian, he buys a lot of aluminum right now. He's gonna be buying more stuff soon.

• 2:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so I think I'm just glad that people like Chris that are having an impact in these industries are gonna call the commies out directly. There's too much infighting in the United States. This is about us versus communism, always has been. Communism is arguably, you know, one of the most historically significant iterations of the Antichrist, and we need to fight back.

• 2:14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Nikita Beer. He says, "More and more, I have lost conviction that minimum viable products make sense for product development. It makes no sense to release a product with the core flow and then dismiss its viability after the aggregate data says people aren't using it. Instead, founders should have a fundamental belief about what people want, and they should keep iterating until that value is correctly surfaced. In practice, this means you should keep a steady flow of new users as you add components to the product, seeing if it solves a core part of the activation and signup loop." I love this. It's, you know, just being deterministically optimistic.

• 2:14:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like he's finding a balance between iteration and I think what he's saying is like, "Don't put slop out there and just like be like, "Oh, it worked."

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  It's minimum viable. It's like an excuse that a lot of people have picked up.

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Put out quality things, but commit to iterating on them.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. You want to just, uh, just, just have a,

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's sort of the nature of like as software development and building products, specifically digital products, has gotten a lot easier. It's just like the bar, all that meant is that the bar got higher. So if you can write half your product with L L Ms in, in record time, like the actual product, like in many instances, just needs to be, you know, multiples better than whatever you're replacing.

• 2:15:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Let's go to Siki Chen. He says, "Unpopular opinion, the more A I based sales and marketing tools get, the more valuable creative, non-A I methods become. Proof of human, proof of work becomes 100 X more valuable. Zig when everyone is zagging." This is what Huber said too. Everyone loves the zig when everyone's zagging.

• 2:15:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. So I've talked about this before, at least we've talked about it directly. So even though it does seem like new gen A I tools like came aggressively after people that do stock photography, people that make illustrations, like some of this low hanging fruit, things that people thought like, "Oh, A I will never be creative. Like, I'm always going to just be able to make my like jingles with like no competition." Or it does seem like it's, it's very much coming after the, the, the execution oriented creative work. At the same time, the best creatives that I know, people like Ryan Harmon.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:28Jordi Hays?

  Over at Day Job, Emmett Shine, who has a new agency, he was at Gin Lane. We work with Emmett on the branding for Rora's system.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:16:36Jordi Hays?

  People like that have never been more in demand. Like, they turned down like probably eighty percent of the work that comes into them. And so you see this bifurcation of, of super talented creatives getting, you know, even like when Siki worked with an agency, I forget the name of it, to do like his original, every time Siki's released something, he like blows up the agency that did it.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:16:59Jordi Hays?

  And that's just because it was like, it's not just because it visually looked good, it's just a lot of thought went into it and it looked. You know, it's sort of, he like starts these little mini trends every time he does something.

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, there is something about like, a lot of the AI tools are essentially like averaging the results. You get a very like mid, mid-weight result.

• 2:17:19Jordi Hays?

  So you can develop, right now you can use Gen AI to make a site that looks like linear.

• 2:17:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:23Jordi Hays?

  They're old, they're old stuff, but you're not going to make the next linear using Gen AI.

• 2:17:27John Coogan?

  It's really, really hard.

• 2:17:28Jordi Hays?

  And that's the beauty of it.

• 2:17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so just, just taking the time to actually be creative and think of something unique and differentiated is, is the value. It'd be an ideas guy. This is the same. Uh, do we have a promoted post?

• 2:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from Ferrari. Uh, the Ferrari tailor-made program is a pathway to realizing unique Ferrari models, such as this Ferrari 812 Competition with its stunning Verde Mineral Bodywork.

• 2:17:51John Coogan?

  Competizione.

• 2:17:52Jordi Hays?

  Competizione. Um, inside seats in beige Picari leather round off its inimitable defense.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  Inimitable.

• 2:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Inimitable sense of sophistication.

• 2:18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Hashtag Maranello, hashtag Ferrari.

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  I saw a fantastic 812 in.

• 2:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Look at this thing.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  It's beautiful.

• 2:18:13Jordi Hays?

  Look at this thing.

• 2:18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw a beautiful 812 in West Hollywood a few weeks ago.

• 2:18:17Jordi Hays?

  I, unfortunately, my, um, sort of a sad story, my friend, uh. Bailey, startup founder out there with a company called Ribbon. He, he and his dad are very into cars, have a fantastic collection. And unfortunately, less than two weeks ago, they were driving back from PCH. And some bozo in a Model 3.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:18:38Jordi Hays?

  Like, made a really like sketchy move.

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Overusing the acceleration capabilities of their car. And side swiped their 812.

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:18:48Jordi Hays?

  GTS.

• 2:18:49John Coogan?

  Oof.

• 2:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Very unfortunate. I believe it was part of the tailor made program.

• 2:18:53John Coogan?

  Rough.

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, best sort of like customization program on the planet. Uh, some of the best looking cars in the world come out of it.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  And I hope every one of our listeners takes the time to play the Ferrari game and get into this program. It's not something you can walk in off the street and do.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but it's certainly worth doing.

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but if you're at the Ferrari dealer, tell them that John and Jordy sent you. Let's go to Gotea. He's been on the show before. Say, this is a great headline and the screenshot says, Red Lobster CEO says endless shrimp is never coming back because quote, "I know how to do math." And I love this.

• 2:19:32Jordi Hays?

  This guy, this guy's great. I forget the exact backstory, but isn't he like one of the youngest, like Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000?

• 2:19:39John Coogan?

  Looks like it. He looks super young.

• 2:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Very young, just like comes into like this established brand and it's just like, I'm just gonna use common sense.

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, common sense.

• 2:19:46Jordi Hays?

  Common sense.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Um, but he's had a lot of headlines like this.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, uh, hopefully we can get him to, you know, call into the show at some point.

• 2:19:55John Coogan?

  What a revival for this brand. I mean, clearly just taking the company in a different direction and then also getting press while doing it. It's fantastic.

• 2:20:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think more, more public company CEOs need to just be like saying like really simple things that will get picked up. That just like act like maybe directly or indirectly carry out their message.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Which is like, Red Lobster CEO says, "I know how to do math."

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:20:21Jordi Hays?

  We will use this to our benefit on business strategy decisions.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of like compressing down like a bigger theory. Like, like I'm sure there's 10 other CEOs right now that are saying like, Well, we're driving shareholder value through responsible capital allocation. But that's not going to go viral.

• 2:20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Red Lobster CEO was like, I use one of our napkins at one of our restaurants to like, update our, our strategy going forward.

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  And you should, you should be able to do that. It's restaurant business. It's not the most complicated thing. Like, you should know, like, you know, revenue minus costs, profit, like, this is basic.

• 2:20:53Jordi Hays?

  This has been the foundation of our podcast.

• 2:20:55John Coogan?

  And there's a lot of people that go into these companies and they get too creative and they start telling wild stories to the stock market. And they get over their skis with some sort of crazy pitch. And then they have to back it up. And so they're investing in all this weird stuff instead of just like, you know,

• 2:21:09Jordi Hays?

  making the product better and reducing costs.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  Blocking and tackling and just grinding it out. Let's go to Josh Kushner. He says, as heavily researched as the information, and I believe he's calling out, Sam lesson for-

• 2:21:24Jordi Hays?

  Did Sam write the post?

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, Sam wrote a post and said that Josh Kushner, quote, "Invests in Fifth Avenue." And that Slow wants to not invest in Fifth Avenue and not chase the really hot deals. But Josh was clarifying and was posting a screenshot from his interview with Patrick on Invest Like the Best, where he basically says, you know, I tell, I tell, he tells his mom that they invest in Fifth Avenue. And my, my view is you always pay a fair price for Fifth Avenue. Markets go up, markets go down, but at the end of the day, if you invest in quality, that quality will ultimately compound on itself. There's a scarcity value to quality. Those that invested in Fifth Avenue a decade are happy with it. It's a good, it's a good strategy. It makes sense.

• 2:22:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you may as well take learnings from generations in your family and put them to work in, in your existing pursuit.

• 2:22:16John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:22:16Jordi Hays?

  This is an example of why we have a segment on this podcast called The Truth Zone.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:21Jordi Hays?

  Where we fact-checked the journos that, you know, oftentimes it's not necessarily like-

• 2:22:28Jordi Hays?

  You know, they like to avoid facts at times and other times they like just to to to sort of position things in the negative that are objectively positive. So we are big fans of Thrive paying up to back blue chip companies. And I think more allocators should be willing to pay a premium to get into the good ones.

• 2:22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean realistically, at the same time, like we're a fan of Slow and and their differentiated model. And the point is is that these two firms are not, or they're less

• 2:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Playing very different games.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  They're playing different games, and that's okay. But Sam is the master of like throwing in some kind of like snarky little bit to his like screenshot essay, just to kind of get people's hackles up. And that actually drives engagement. So good content marketing.

• 2:23:10Jordi Hays?

  And that's fuel.

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  So I think this is like a win win, because like you come away from reading this like, oh, Josh actually has a more nuanced strategy than I thought. And oh, Slow has a more nuanced strategy than I thought. And now more people know about the differentiated strategies here. So win win, little bit of a battle on the timeline.

• 2:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, the only loser is the information. But as the TMZ of tech, they can they can afford that.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Catherine Boyle. This is an older post. Actually, no, she just recently quoted it, but she's quote tweeting an older post about there's been a recent daily drip of hit pieces. And unless you've witnessed one firsthand, it's hard to explain what they're designed to do. And so she says, to those experiencing media hit pieces for the first time, reposting this note on the anatomy of a hit and what it's designed to do. Hit pieces are designed to create fear, test loyalties, tie up the time of you and your team so you can't focus on work. They seek to shake the weakest link on your team loose and stop your momentum. The only way to lose momentum is to cede to it. Do not let the hit stop your momentum.

• 2:24:15Jordi Hays?

  I guess I think that's a great point of view. I guess what I would say is 99% of hit pieces, from my point of view, are just designed to get attention, right? Like, it's just like a media company, like

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  Clickbait.

• 2:24:27Jordi Hays?

  A desperate cry for for love, right? Like, nobody reads these publications, right? Like, it was funny when when New York Magazine came after Huberman.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it was like the only time you've ever heard of New York Magazine in like decades, right? And so it's like this desperate Ploy for any type of relevancy or like even these, these media companies are not even in the conversation at all.

• 2:24:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  So it's like, kind of like, hey, like, I'm over here, like, don't forget about me. Like, let me take down somebody that is doing something interesting or somebody that people really love a lot. Uh, in the case of, uh, Huberman. Um, and it was funny because like, it was just like Chad hominin attacks against, against Huberman. Like, really, just like, this guy's.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  Well, I have this theory that, uh, you know, the ally travels halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its shoes on. You've heard this or, uh, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. And so my theory is that hit pieces are actually more effective at moving the needle than puff pieces. Puff pieces just gets thrown to the side, oh, some company raised money and they're gonna do something cool. But a hit piece, it grips the viewer, they gotta read it, love or hate. Then usually there's like a backlash to the backlash and your most hardcore fans rally around you and say, like, what happened with Huberman? People were like, actually, I'm on his side and his fanbase got stronger. Yeah. And so I've been courting hit pieces with journalists for the last couple of weeks.

• 2:25:54John Coogan?

  Talking to them just freely, just on the record, just ripping quotes, just saying whatever. And in a couple of weeks, we're gonna find out if I'm a genius or an idiot. Because there's gonna be a bunch of hit pieces about me and we'll see. I think the hit pieces will be really funny. I was already in one.

• 2:26:09Jordi Hays?

  The SEO benefits alone are fantastic.

• 2:26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was in one in Fast Company about the toxic bro podcasters who are a threat to America.

• 2:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:19John Coogan?

  And, and it was, it was a fascinating article because it goes through, it lists me, Mike Solana, Marc Andreessen, Huberman. And so, uh, once that article went out, it didn't get that much lift because it was just a link thrown out on X by some tiny account that no one remembers. But what I did was I deliberately looked at through, I put the whole article into ChatGPT and was like, give me everyone's name who's mentioned. And I just took this list and I posted this, it was like, here are all of the toxic men who are destroying America. And then everyone else, it was like better than being on the Forbes 400, like that, for that day. Like Marc Andreessen was reposting it, everyone was like, this is amazing, like, this is hilarious. People were like, yeah, they're coming for us, like, we must be doing something right.

• 2:27:01John Coogan?

  And I actually immediately DM'd the journalist who wrote it and was like, hey, like, we should do a whole piece about me. Like, come on, like, let's talk. And I talked to her. I checked. She hasn't written a piece yet, but we'll see. Hopefully, it's really bad, because if it's really bad, then I can get all the technology brothers to ride and take the fight to them. And then we'll all be like, we're unsubscribing. Never, obviously, subscribed, but yeah, we're never going there. I'm putting it in my block list. Like, we're never going there. The outrage will drive more traffic, and it's going to be mutually beneficial, because if they write some puff piece about me, I'm going to tweet it. I'll be like, oh, I got a puff piece. Like, it's so great. And a couple of people are going to be like, cool, dude, like, like. But if there's a hit piece, I'm going to be like, this is unacceptable. You gotta go read this whole thing. It's going to drive a bunch of clicks and add revenue for them. And it's going

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  to drive a bunch of, like, support for me. So it's win-win. And so that's why I think the new model with the media is technologists pitching hit pieces to journalists and then benefit.

• 2:27:56Jordi Hays?

  It's a collective effort.

• 2:27:57John Coogan?

  Exactly. We did this with Business Insider, who, you know, we hadn't heard of at the time, but we dug in. We saw that they obviously put, you know, clicks and traffic above the truth. So we tried to feed them the most incendiary quotes deliberately to get a hit piece. And, you know, it had a pretty good effect.

• 2:28:13Jordi Hays?

  It came out, you know, very fair, and it actually, you know, showed the company a little, you know, if we're talking about Excel.

• 2:28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, Excel.

• 2:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even, you know, if it was more incendiary, it would have maybe, you know, driven more clicks.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The only critique is that we didn't go hard enough. We should have been more aggressive, for sure. Really aired our dirty laundry to give them something to bite on to for that real, real, you know, hit piece, you know, article link. So let's go to another promoted post, and then we'll move on.

• 2:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Last promoted post of the podcast is from DuPont Registry. They have a 2022 Bugatti Chiron Pure Sport, limited to only 60 units worldwide. Finished in a striking red and black exterior, this Pure Sport embodies Bugatti's commitment to performance and aesthetics, blending aggression and elegance in every line. Look at this thing.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  I mean, we love cars and bids, but sometimes you gotta go to the DuPont Registry to pick up something that's truly one of one.

• 2:29:10Jordi Hays?

  One of one.

• 2:29:11John Coogan?

  And a car like that, specifically if you're a venture capitalist in San Francisco, and you're going to a coffee meeting and you're street parking that, it's going to make a statement.

• 2:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  We saw some VCs.

• 2:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's not much valet around San Francisco, and the benefit of that is Sometimes you're driving a nice car, you don't really want valet dealing with it, especially a manual. You don't, a lot of, that's a big issue we're seeing, you know, in valets around the world. You know, valets don't know how to drive manual anymore. And sometimes out of embarrassment, they'll try to, and that can impact the transit.

• 2:29:40John Coogan?

  Especially at W16, I mean, that's a lot of cylinders.

• 2:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so anyways, we'd like to see, if you're an allocator out there, go get one of these.

• 2:29:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, would now be a good time to talk about Jordy's Law, the 1% rule?

• 2:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Wait, I have so many laws at this point.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  I mean, as I remember you phrasing it was that if you're a capital allocator, you should, you should take, how, what's your AUM? Take 1% of that, and that's how much you should spend on a car.

• 2:30:05Jordi Hays?

  Your next car.

• 2:30:06John Coogan?

  Your next car. So if you have a $400 million fund, that's 4 million, you should be probably be in like McLaren.

• 2:30:11Jordi Hays?

  Go get one of these. Yeah, you could get a lot Ferrari.

• 2:30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, but if you're managing 2 billion, 1% of that's 20 million, you're in McLaren F1 territory.

• 2:30:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you can even get into some of the Ferrari classics.

• 2:30:21John Coogan?

  $150 million fund, you're looking at a Carrera GT, $50 million fund, you can still get a Huracan, you know?

• 2:30:26Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:30:26John Coogan?

  But if you don't, if you don't spend 1% of the fund, people aren't gonna be able to clock how much you have. They're gonna be like, can this person actually write me a check? They pulled up in a, in a, you know, in some BMW 5 Series. Like, this makes no sense. They're, they're not gonna be able to do my Series A.

• 2:30:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  So getting, getting a Bugatti, street parking it outside a cafe in, you know, Soma is gonna be a great way to send a message to the next generation founders.

• 2:30:50Jordi Hays?

  Or take the meeting in it, right?

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  You could, just go for a drive.

• 2:30:54Jordi Hays?

  It's much easier to focus on what some AI agent founders saying, if you're also getting to drive and experience a machine like this.

• 2:31:02John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Let's go to Erin Price Wright at Andreessen. She says, no place more optimistic than the local Ace Hardware store on a Saturday morning. Low-Tam banger. I love it. That's good.

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great. I think as, as dads, we've been to.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  On Saturday morning. It's great.

• 2:31:20Jordi Hays?

  Try not to climb ladders myself, it's a little dangerous, but I will on Saturdays on occasion.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  I just love going and getting a widget. Go, go get some random stuff.

• 2:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Go get some screws.

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  Go get some PVC pipes.

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  In the screw aisle, you know, looking around.

• 2:31:33John Coogan?

  Just really picking what you want, build something, fix something. Even if you can pay somebody to do it, there's, there's great glory in doing it yourself.

• 2:31:41Jordi Hays?

  Hardware stores also are like incredibly merchandised, right? Like, there's so many weird things that you're, the only store that they're in is like in the hardware store, like some weird like. Water toy that like a kid would want or you know, things of that nature where where do you go to get that normally?

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fantastic. Go to Chris Pousha. He says, you might not like it, but you're about to kiss Tim Cook's ring and empty your wallet. And it's a screenshot that says the M4 Max somehow holds its own against the RTX 4080 Super, which is not quite top of the line Nvidia gaming graphics card, but certainly up there. And yeah, I mean, I've I've heard the benchmarks on these M4s like 100% worth upgrading. Like they're even in the Mac minis now and they're like the size of an Apple TV now. And the M4 is just incredible performance. So if you're.

• 2:32:32Jordi Hays?

  I think it's underrated how in the same way that the Cayenne allowed Porsche to to invest in the 911 platform.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:32:42Jordi Hays?

  The iPhone has been that for the entire Mac ecosystem, right?

• 2:32:45John Coogan?

  So yeah, that makes sense. Although heat dissipation, all the miniaturization.

• 2:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know, growing up in an in an Apple household, I never actually, I never owned a PC until I got a until I got one of those little mini like $200 computers in high school that I would use to DDoS my dad's website. I would just literally in my room, I'd be like have this machine running that would just be DDoSing my dad's website. And I'd fuck with him. I'd be like, Dad, why is your site down? He's like, we're getting like.

• 2:33:19John Coogan?

  The call is coming from inside the house.

• 2:33:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, my dad, my dad was a teacher, so I just would think and he would list his homework on the website. So I think it was the way it was to DDoS.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  Students can't get it. Wow, you're like a hero of all his students. Like, sorry, it was your website was down, bro.

• 2:33:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, my dad's problem, he should have had CloudFlare set up.

• 2:33:37John Coogan?

  Seriously? Yeah.

• 2:33:39Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, no, I I think that the the it's it's amazing that that Apple has continued to just continuously make the MacBook Pro the only laptop that matters unless you're, you know, we have ThinkPads, but just for the sort of like modeling work that we do.

• 2:33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But yeah, fantastic machine. Highly recommend upgrading. Aiden McClaus says, okay, this is wild. And it's a quote from Noah Smith that says, notably, heavy users of TikTok, i.e. those with three or more hours of daily screen time, demonstrated a roughly 50% increase in pro-China attitudes compared to non-users.

• 2:34:15Jordi Hays?

  Very bad, very bad.

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  Really proves that. Not beating the allegations, TikTok. Not beating the allegations.

• 2:34:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm super.

• 2:34:22John Coogan?

  Propaganda app.

• 2:34:23Jordi Hays?

  You know, I want to potentially the most wasteful domain acquisitions ever, but I am BandTalk.com.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  You told me about that.

• 2:34:32Jordi Hays?

  BandTalk.com, nothing up there right now, but if you want to do something with it.

• 2:34:36John Coogan?

  I wonder how it's gonna pencil out. I mean, obviously, we're talking about politics.

• 2:34:39Jordi Hays?

  No, it's basically, no, but basically, the whole, like, political movement to ban TikTok is completely

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Dead.

• 2:34:46Jordi Hays?

  seemingly evaporated.

• 2:34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, because of the Sasquahana guy, right?

• 2:34:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:51John Coogan?

  He's like a huge shareholder and he's a big donor.

• 2:34:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  I think he got it killed. But I, I hope that, you know, obviously, like, I was pro-ban, but I do think the American companies can out-innovate if they keep developing. Like, I've already seen a lot of people move to YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.

• 2:35:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:10John Coogan?

  And realistically, like, you just need to develop good media habits and recognize that even, like, an audiobook, or like, the Founder's Podcast, or, like,

• 2:35:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:18John Coogan?

  the, the next generation of successful capital allocators are really, really not watching, you know, TikToks.

• 2:35:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:26John Coogan?

  So just, just intellectually tell yourself that wasting time on that is bad.

• 2:35:30Jordi Hays?

  A more negative signal than, than, you know.

• 2:35:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's already becoming a meme with parents. Like, parents don't want their kids swiping and scrolling. Like, like, Pixar film? That's a masterpiece. There's a reason Pixar wins.

• 2:35:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I think if we build a movement around everybody realizing that every swipe on TikTok is dollars that you could be putting in, in, in Meta shareholders' pockets.

• 2:35:52John Coogan?

  Yes. Oh, this is good.

• 2:35:53Jordi Hays?

  That is, like, by itself, just like, the, the financial dilemma there is just like, just should. You know, we need to protect American companies and encourage American innovation. And the more dollars Meta gets per citizen in the United States, the more they can innovate.

• 2:36:08John Coogan?

  And just support Zuck. I mean, the guy has a fantastic watch collection. He's getting into cars now.

• 2:36:14Jordi Hays?

  Great ranch.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Great fits. What does Shou Chu have at TikTok, the CEO?

• 2:36:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't know anything about his interests.

• 2:36:21John Coogan?

  He just shows up in Congress, wearing some boring suit.

• 2:36:25Jordi Hays?

  Lying.

• 2:36:26John Coogan?

  Claiming to be this real boss when clearly he's not.

• 2:36:28Jordi Hays?

  Claiming that they're not storing all the data.

• 2:36:30John Coogan?

  When clearly they are. And so who do you want to support? The Chad Zuck or the version Shou Chu?

• 2:36:36Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I need to add DGI and TikTok to the enemy.

• 2:36:40John Coogan?

  To the enemy's list.

• 2:36:41Jordi Hays?

  Because I think that it's our duty to say, again, I think we could even get bumper stickers made that say like, keep your swipes on American apps.

• 2:36:51John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:36:52Jordi Hays?

  You know, every swipe matters.

• 2:36:53John Coogan?

  Every swipe matters. Every ad watched, that's going into the American economy if it's on.

• 2:36:58Jordi Hays?

  And if you want to personally benefit from it, buy Meta stock.

• 2:37:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. You can't buy TikTok stock. You can't buy ByteDance. I mean, you can, but good luck getting the money out of the country when you need to.

• 2:37:08Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:37:10John Coogan?

  This is some heartbreaking news. I'm really, really disappointed about this, but we gotta talk about it. So Tapestry and Capri Holdings have called off their $8.5 billion merger. So Tapestry owns brands like Coach and Kate Spade, while Capri owns Versace. And I think we were all really excited for these storied brands to come together in a merger that could drive more shareholder value, better products, even go further up market.

• 2:37:37Jordi Hays?

  I mean, look.

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  We love consolidation.

• 2:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Consolidation is important.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:37:40Jordi Hays?

  And the fact that this isn't happening is, you know, we need, you know, we're fans of consolidation. We're fans of competition.

• 2:37:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:49Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes you need consolidation to encourage meaningful competition, right? And this could have created.

• 2:37:56John Coogan?

  And to competition.

• 2:37:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:57John Coogan?

  Competitions for losers.

• 2:37:58Jordi Hays?

  Competitions for losers.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  And this would mean less competition.

• 2:38:01Jordi Hays?

  But in this situation, we're trying to create an oligopoly, right?

• 2:38:04John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Where this could have created a sort of meaningful competitor to LVMH.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  LVMH, yeah.

• 2:38:09Jordi Hays?

  And while LVMH is still founder-led and really quite a juggernaut, you know, we want more multinational conglomerates sort of competing for luxury dollars, right?

• 2:38:23John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:38:23Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna drive up, you know, the quality of goods is gonna drive up margins, ideally. And create, you know, more diversified, you know, assets.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So our hope is that, uh, you know, some private equity firms can get involved, uh, figure something out, turn some of these companies around.

• 2:38:39Jordi Hays?

  There's clearly like a general excitement about the opportunity.

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  Exactly. I mean, luxury goods are going to be, are going to be one of the big beneficiaries of the Ozempic boom.

• 2:38:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, you know, people.

• 2:38:48John Coogan?

  Big benefits of the falling interest rates and rising asset values.

• 2:38:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we didn't, we didn't talk about this during the Ozempic section, but, um, but yeah, all that money that, that would have, people would have been spending because on things in their life, because they were overweight, like Doritos and

• 2:39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:04Jordi Hays?

  Things like that. They can now spend on watches, bags, uh, clothing, expensive, um, you know, jewelry, et cetera.

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  And fine, fine goods. So yeah, best of luck to everyone involved in both of those companies. We hope you can figure it out soon.

• 2:39:20Jordi Hays?

  Figure it out.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  Let's go to Eric. He says, there's no comparison here. Perplexity AI is massively out executing Google, a company with 235x the market cap and a hu- and 1500x the employee count of perplexity. And it's, uh, two screenshots of what's going on with the Solana market cap. And on perplexity, it just gives you the answer with a beautiful chart and all the data's right there. And on Google, you're routed to a bunch of other websites and you know, you're three clicks deep from getting the answer you want. And it's pretty, it's pretty interesting. Like this is one of the modules that you would expect Google to roll out in their AI generated responses, but they just haven't gotten around to it yet.

• 2:40:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny because people used to critique, uh, Google for generating their own content based around the links, right?

• 2:40:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Celebrity net worth.

• 2:40:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. You're hurting small businesses because you're not allowing the clicks to go through.

• 2:40:14John Coogan?

  Same thing with the lyrics websites. Like Rap Genius was his own thing, but then Google sucked all the lyrics in. You type the lyrics, they just give you the lyrics right there. You're not clicking, you're not driving ad rev.

• 2:40:22Jordi Hays?

  Brutal for the Rap Genius shareholders, but good for Alphabet.

• 2:40:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. But now perplexity is the next gen.

• 2:40:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:30John Coogan?

  But.

• 2:40:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Perplexity, like.

• 2:40:32John Coogan?

  It is cool how much they're doing and how fast they're moving on the UI, considering low employee count. Uh, it is kind of funny looking at the market cap to employees.

• 2:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they really got to like, the awesome thing is they're clearly like iterating based on consumer interest at that time. So they don't have to do everything at once, but they nailed the election stuff.

• 2:40:47John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:40:47Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of really good graphs and data around that. Now they're doing cryptocurrency, which, which all the election attention is now able to just lock into, um, you know, new markets.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Rob Schmidt. I think Jake Paul has idolized Mike Tyson his entire life, knew he needed money and found a way to get him rich again. So Tyson made like 20 million, is that true?

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think he may have made more than than Jake on this.

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:41:13Jordi Hays?

  On the fight itself. So anyways, I don't know if this is real. Yeah, so UFC is the way to think about boxing is you have historically, you have like a commission. I don't even know if that was in this because it was more of like a, you know, it was not like a sanction. It was an exhibition fight, not a sanction fight. But in the UFC, there's basically like the league and there's commissions because like there's gambling on it. There needs to be like some like rules and you know, non biased organization. But yeah, this, I would love to believe this is true. I'm sure that Jake Paul really does like Mike Tyson and respects him. Why else would you want to fight somebody like?

• 2:41:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:41:54Jordi Hays?

  If you're a fan of boxing.

• 2:41:56John Coogan?

  I do wonder if that's true because Jake Paul's so young. He didn't grow up during the Mike Tyson era.

• 2:42:01Jordi Hays?

  I know, but he got like ridiculously focused on boxing for the last like five, six years. And you have to imagine he's seen every single Tyson fight and like idolized him.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  It's like how we have respect for Lamborghini Countach, even though that was before our time.

• 2:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Tyson like is an example of like somebody who's monetized their attention very well. He turned, you know, being an athlete into, you know, being a major cannabis investor and entrepreneur, right?

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  Yep, that's true. So yeah.

• 2:42:30Jordi Hays?

  So shout out to Jake if this is true.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wow, 17K likes.

• 2:42:35Jordi Hays?

  Got his idol loaded.

• 2:42:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm excited. I wonder what he'll do with it. Maybe he'll.

• 2:42:39Jordi Hays?

  One of the greatest signs of respect with among men is to is to help if you respect somebody, help them make 20 million dollars.

• 2:42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:42:48Jordi Hays?

  That was the foundation of this partnership.

• 2:42:50John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah. Mutual respect. Let's go to Max Novenstern. He says, "The most expensive mistake this decade will not will be not being optimistic enough." And Pacquiao says, "Preach." I love it.

• 2:43:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure somebody else commented, "Top."

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  Top.

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  But I think it's right. I think it's right. Like, we are going into a big boom. There's so many interesting technologies. Like, there's so many things that are gonna get built out in, in big ways and then also small ways. We see this with like, you see these amazing LLM demos and then you're at the DMV and you're like, this is still on paper and pencil.

• 2:43:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:26John Coogan?

  There's still so much low hanging fruit.

• 2:43:29Jordi Hays?

  We're catching rockets with chopsticks.

• 2:43:31John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  How are you not bullish?

• 2:43:33John Coogan?

  More optimistic. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great time. Great time to be alive. And I'm sure packing will be documenting it all.

• 2:43:39Jordi Hays?

  So the, so the real sign that like, we've turned a corner in America is when like, our, our children are like 10 years old and they're like, "Dad, I don't want to be an influencer. I don't want to be a podcaster."

• 2:43:50John Coogan?

  I want to be a rocket scientist.

• 2:43:51Jordi Hays?

  I want to be an astronaut.

• 2:43:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:52Jordi Hays?

  And you're like, shed a tear.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. I love it.

• 2:43:56Jordi Hays?

  "I recorded this podcast so that you could go to space."

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, the Ben Franklin quote.

• 2:44:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  "I learned podcasting and media so that my son may learn war."

• 2:44:08Jordi Hays?

  Intergalactic travel.

• 2:44:10John Coogan?

  Normally like, I studied war politics and blah, blah, blah.

• 2:44:12Jordi Hays?

  So my son could study art.

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  So that my son could study business, so that his son could study art. It's like the gist of that quote, but it's great. Uh, do we have another promoted post? I think we got a couple more.

• 2:44:21Jordi Hays?

  I said it was the last, but I, I mean, the fans want lots. They want a lot of ad reads. Last one from, uh, promoted post from Ralph Lauren.

• 2:44:30John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:44:30Jordi Hays?

  Our hashtag Polar Bear, Polo Bear doesn't just stop at sweaters, just from throw pillows and pajamas to cable knit accessories. The RL Holiday 2024 Collection includes the perfect gifts for celebrating. Discover the Polo Bear Shop here. Polo Bear is just such a timeless, uh, illustration and staple of the Ralph Lauren collection.

• 2:44:50John Coogan?

  Do they give us a call to action? It's, uh, ralphlorin.com, is that correct?

• 2:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, r-lorin.co/rlholiday. And so what, what I'm most impressed about is that, um, you know, they included a link on here. It still managed to get 20,000 views, which is difficult uphill battle if you're including links. Um, so whoever's managing their social.

• 2:45:09John Coogan?

  Shout out.

• 2:45:09Jordi Hays?

  Maybe kill the link next time, but impressive traction, uh, regardless. But anyways, this is just such a, I love this bear. Every time I see him, I know, uh, I know it's Q4 and I know that, um, there's a lot of work to do, but also we got some, you know, nice celebrations.

• 2:45:24John Coogan?

  I also saw it kind of break into our world in the defense tech community because there's a, there's a photo of the bear wearing a Hawaiian shirt and everyone's like, "Oh, he's got the Palmer Lucky fit on," which I love.

• 2:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Give the bear a gun.

• 2:45:37John Coogan?

  Give it to Bear.

• 2:45:40John Coogan?

  Yes, the Ralph Lauren leather.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  But they even have like, you know, hopefully they make one, you know, this, this could be a good gift for you if they have a, a father with three sons, the bear dad and the three sons, I'll get it for you.

• 2:45:54John Coogan?

  Okay, fantastic, thank you.

• 2:45:57John Coogan?

  Related to the last, uh, regular post, Dr. Dad, PhD says, a show called White Mirror, where we have cool technology and everything goes great. I love this. I would definitely watch this.

• 2:46:10Jordi Hays?

  I know, this is like TV productions.

• 2:46:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the problem is like, if you don't have conflict, you don't have a story. And so every, every sci-fi story has to be somewhat dystopian.

• 2:46:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but somewhat dystopian. Like, there was so much about, like, I, I just feel like everything in our life is like finally starting to just like, it's all oriented around science fiction, right? Like, even, we, we looked at it, the, the like GM office in the sixties looked like a sci-fi novel, right? The Tesla's, Tesla's entire last major product launch was all like the robotaxi, the humanoid robots.

• 2:46:46John Coogan?

  You know, you know what is a good example of this? Uh, have you watched The Expanse? The Expanse is a fantastic sci-fi show. It was a book series and Bezos bought it to do, uh, the, uh, it was on Sci-Fi Channel and they brought it over to Amazon and Amazon threw a bunch of money behind it. So it turned into like almost Game of Thrones production level. Really great show, but what's interesting is that the, the show is like hard sci-fi. So there's spaceships, there's interstellar or interplanetary travel, they go between Mars and the, and asteroid belt. But the, the technology is not the villain necessarily. Like, they have spaceships, but the villains are still human. And so it's really cool and I've always wanted, I've always wanted to see like a, a sci-fi story where it's just like Chinatown in space.

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  Or, you know, it's like, yeah, the technology's there, but the technology is not the bad thing.

• 2:47:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe Hollywood will go more, more.

• 2:47:36John Coogan?

  Techno optimistic.

• 2:47:37Jordi Hays?

  Instead of focusing on. You know, social issues, it can go techno-optimist.

• 2:47:41John Coogan?

  That'd be really cool.

• 2:47:42Jordi Hays?

  And let's recreate the same social issues we have today in space.

• 2:47:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:45Jordi Hays?

  So I'd watch that.

• 2:47:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I think that can hit a little bit harder. And there are some, there are some movies that do that, like even in Inception, like, like the dream technology is not really like the problem that they're working against. They're not trying to ban dream technology. They're trying to solve this other problem within, they're doing, they're doing a heist.

• 2:48:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:04John Coogan?

  And the technology is just one of the factors.

• 2:48:06Jordi Hays?

  No Atlas Shrugged.

• 2:48:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So I would, I would gladly watch White Mirror. There's already some White Mirror shows out there, we just need to celebrate them. And it's shows like The Expanse, which I highly recommend. Uh, let's go to Anne-Marie Holdern, Anne-Marie Holdern. She says, Jamie Dimon responds to Trump. First of all, I wish the president well and thank you. It's a very nice note, but I just want to tell the president also, I haven't had a boss in 25 years and I'm not about ready to start, Dimon tells Lisa Brahmowitz. Interesting. We don't talk about politics, so I don't even know what to say about this.

• 2:48:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, yeah, I'm not sure I can comment on this, except that we know what it's like uh, to have a boss, cause I worked at a, um, worked at a Ritz Carlton once.

• 2:48:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:48:49Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I once worked at a nightclub.

• 2:48:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:52Jordi Hays?

  I was the guy that would pick up the cigarette butts the, the next morning. When I was 14, that was a good job.

• 2:48:57John Coogan?

  I was doing basically the same thing when I worked at Citadel and Bain Capital.

• 2:49:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I, uh, yeah, I didn't like, I didn't like having a boss too much.

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I couldn't do it.

• 2:49:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:07John Coogan?

  I've never had a full-time boss.

• 2:49:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:09John Coogan?

  Full-time job boss, it's like.

• 2:49:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:10John Coogan?

  Not for me. So I understand. And, you know, uh, being a beaner without a boss, that's the dream.

• 2:49:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:49:16John Coogan?

  That's the dream. So shout out to Dimon. I hope you can work with the administration and, uh, bring about an amazing American decade and support financial innovation wherever it may come from. Let's go to Rune. Rune says, AGI might bring infinite abundance, but on the other hand, there's only so many houses on Seacliff.

• 2:49:37John Coogan?

  It's true.

• 2:49:37Jordi Hays?

  Very real.

• 2:49:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's very real. I was thinking about this, like, you know, in the, in the really, really far out future, like, you might have something where it's like, okay, I go in my Neuralink VR world and I have the Seacliff house, but I still think, even if it's, even if you can't tell the difference in the moment, there's something, people want the real thing.

• 2:49:56Jordi Hays?

  Another beaner can't have.

• 2:49:57John Coogan?

  And it's the same thing with, it's the same thing with art. Like, you can go and get a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, but that's not the one that has value. It's the story. It's like the, there's something about these stories. And I think that a lot of that, that element is underrated in how AI will transform, even post AGI, like.

• 2:50:16Jordi Hays?

  It's sort of like, it's almost innately human to feel scarcity, right? And that's why one of one assets, like a Ferrari tailor-made A12 Competizione, is always going to be significant.

• 2:50:32John Coogan?

  Or GTA 3RS, Y-SOC package, in cars and bids.

• 2:50:33Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 2:50:34John Coogan?

  Like, these are going to be assets, even if the, even if the production values are artificially constrained.

• 2:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:50:41John Coogan?

  Or, you know, with a company like.

• 2:50:43Jordi Hays?

  Artificially constrained, but the, the scarcity is very real. We feel it when you go look at the prices for some of these cars.

• 2:50:49John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. But yeah, I, I think it's very instructive to look at the story of chess. Like, the computers beat the chess masters in, I think, the eighties. For a while, there was a hybrid centaur chess phase, are you familiar with this? Where essentially, no human could beat a computer one-on-one, but a human playing with a computer could beat the computer.

• 2:51:14Jordi Hays?

  Consistently?

• 2:51:15John Coogan?

  Yes, consistently, because the computer would recommend a bunch of things and the human could use, like, their intuition to.

• 2:51:20Jordi Hays?

  Neuralink, bull case.

• 2:51:21John Coogan?

  To pick, to pick the right thing from the set, and the computer was just augmenting the human. And that was, centaur chess was dominant for, I think, like, the nineties. I'm not exactly sure. But then at a certain point, the AI got so good that no human, even playing alongside a, a, a computer, can beat a computer. Like, computers are always worse, the human will only make it worse. But, look at what's happened to chess. It's exploded. Like, chess.com is worth like a hundred million dollars. Or more like they're a big company, Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru, like Alex Botas, like there's multiple chess influencers. There's chess competitions, there's Queen's Gambit on Netflix is a sensation, people like playing it and people like watching humans play it. And there's even all this meta gaming about like, how can we get the humans not to use the AI and cheat?

• 2:52:06John Coogan?

  And there was that scandal about the guy who might've had something in his butt or something, you remember this?

• 2:52:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, the vibrating.

• 2:52:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And or like in his shoe and so like, like you could imagine this like future scenario where like people, like the same thing could be true for podcasting. Where it's like, yeah, you could go get a more factual podcast from the AI, but people want to see the human do it.

• 2:52:26Jordi Hays?

  You want to hear us mess up.

• 2:52:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, you want to hear us get it wrong. And you want to see like the messy, the messy like edges that come from like actual human dialogue and the risk of like, hey, I might have to put some caution tape over my mouth because what I might say might get me canceled. The AI isn't going to get canceled, you're just going to refresh it and start from scratch.

• 2:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I've been and just on the topic of SF and SF adjacent real estate, like you have after decades of poor governance.

• 2:52:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:52:51Jordi Hays?

  You have to imagine, like, you can go buy a similar house in like San Francisco, the home of the technology industry and one of the biggest economies in the world for similar prices like some like just okay house in like a random nice neighborhood of Dallas. Like what's going to be worth more in like 10 years, right? Especially as SF's local government governance stuff gets figured out.

• 2:53:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:15Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, like I think buying anything in that area, you're probably going to do pretty well.

• 2:53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's why it was important for us to promote that post about the 150 million dollar home that hopefully one of our listeners will take home. Because there's only so many of those. Sawyer Merritt says SpaceX president and COO Gwen Shotwell on the company having $22 billion in government contracts. We earned that, we bid it, we were the lowest price, best bidder, we won and we execute. It's not a bad thing to serve the United States government with great capability and products. What a badass quote, just like throwing down the gauntlet. I love it.

• 2:53:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a quote that could go on the on the wall.

• 2:53:58John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Potential brother of the week here.

• 2:54:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:01John Coogan?

  She's fantastic.

• 2:54:03Jordi Hays?

  Put that one aside.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta put this one aside. That's going in the shortlist. Uh, yeah, I did a whole video on Gwen Shotwell and her career. It was one of my first viral videos on YouTube. Cause everyone's talking about Elon and no one really knew the story of Gwen Shotwell. But she's been super critical, took a whole ton of career risk going in super early. And it's just, you know, just driven that company and just executed, executed, executed. And, uh, just fantastic public speaker, fantastic counterweight to Elon's, you know, experimental mindset and like, you know, dreaming big. She's the one that can actually go and drive results. It's fantastic.

• 2:54:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, if you're somebody who's interested in deep tech, but you're more of a, of a business mind, uh, you can go have impact in these industries. Go to look up our portfolios. Any number of those companies needs financial and operations innovators to drive these companies forward. And on that note, I can't help myself. I want to do one more promoted post from Carl Yang, who's building financial products at Ramp.

• 2:55:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:03Jordi Hays?

  He says he caught up with a friend and that friend said, I'm supposed to be making strategic decisions and turning around companies with my superior insights. Since a guy with an HBS hat with his mouth open and the partner at the firm is saying, fix the effing AP process, question mark, or exclamation point, exclamation point. And, uh, yeah, a lot of like, you know, PE is just going in and, uh, you're not going to create a tremendous amount of value by getting rid of the fax machines and the, and the sort of like, um, you know, taking, uh, payments and checks and stuff like that, but you can have a pretty big impact. And Ramp is a fantastic way to do that.

• 2:55:45Jordi Hays?

  I understand that they are, uh, fairly dominant with a lot of the larger PE firms for good reason.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Bring it in.

• 2:55:51Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, just, just, uh, built into their process now. So.

• 2:55:55John Coogan?

  Very sharp.

• 2:55:56Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Carl for innovating, uh, in one of the most important sectors of our economy.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  And happy to promote Ramp at any time. Tell them the technology brother sent you if you onboard.

• 2:56:08John Coogan?

  AJA Cortez says, "My father went back to college when he was forty, graduated medical school at forty-seven and has been now a doctor going on twenty years. I didn't realize it at the time, but it made a deep impression that a man can reinvent himself at any time. Age is a non-factor and with that and that with consistency, effort, discipline, you can do whatever you want. I had no idea people considered age to be a factor at all in a man slowing down until I was in my twenties. I was never raised to think that way." That's a fantastic post. That's very, very inspiring and that's true. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we see this with entrepreneurs too.

• 2:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you're going into work and you feel like your work is at the KMS building.

• 2:56:49John Coogan?

  You gotta get out of the KMS building.

• 2:56:53Jordi Hays?

  Or if you ever feel, if you ever feel like you need to have a blanket on at work because you're so miserable.

• 2:56:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:56:58Jordi Hays?

  And you feel sick.

• 2:56:59John Coogan?

  Get out of there.

• 2:57:00Jordi Hays?

  Reinvent yourself.

• 2:57:01John Coogan?

  Reinvent yourself.

• 2:57:02Jordi Hays?

  I think this honestly, like, what's funny is, do you remember being in college and like, the oldest guy in the room was always like in the military.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  And like graduated.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:11Jordi Hays?

  And it's very normalized to like go in the military, do that for ten years, come out and then just like have a totally new career, right?

• 2:57:16John Coogan?

  Do something completely different. Go to business school, become a banker.

• 2:57:18Jordi Hays?

  It's not like you're like, "Oh, I only know how to shoot a gun. I'm just gonna do this."

• 2:57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no. Just not, not factor.

• 2:57:21Jordi Hays?

  If you only do, if you only do the things that you know how to do, you'll be sweeping floors your whole life.

• 2:57:26John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:57:27Jordi Hays?

  Right? So, um, go reinvent yourself, make like big, you know, big, uh, moves into different industries.

• 2:57:34John Coogan?

  And there's so many great stories. We've seen that dude who's, who was a Navy SEAL, then a doctor at Harvard, and then a astronaut.

• 2:57:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:43John Coogan?

  And it's just like, and he's an Asian dude and the meme is like, he must have like the only, the only Asian dude with like parents who are proud of him or something.

• 2:57:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:57:50John Coogan?

  He did the thing and like satisfied all of their expectations. I love that. It's just funny.

• 2:57:56Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 2:57:57John Coogan?

  But yeah, just crush and, uh, go.

• 2:57:58Jordi Hays?

  Just crush.

• 2:57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, just go.

• 2:58:00Jordi Hays?

  You can just do things.

• 2:58:01John Coogan?

  You can just do things. Oh, this is a great one from Ben Miles. He asks us, uh, "Do we have any favorite Deal toys? This one is cool from Ginkgo BioWorks." And I actually met the Ginkgo BioWorks guys back in like twenty thirteen in a, in a, in a office in Boston and...

• 2:58:16Jordi Hays?

  And you're invested, right?

• 2:58:17John Coogan?

  I did not. I had no money to my name, so it was miserable. But I have an interesting fundraising story.

• 2:58:23Jordi Hays?

  If I could go back in time, my investment strategy would just be to like give John Coogan a hundred million dollars in 2012.

• 2:58:29John Coogan?

  Well, Sendra calls me the Forrest Gump of tech because I've been like, oh yeah, I was in the same YC batch as Coinbase. Oh yeah, I was like hanging out with the Ginkgo Bioworks guys at this one time. Oh yeah, I was like, met this dude at this random time. And it's just like all these like sliding doors moments in Silicon Valley. But Ginkgo Bioworks was fascinating. I met with the founding team. We were thinking about working with them and we'd raised something like a million bucks or million and a half for Soylent. And they were like, okay, like you're the first company, we were a YC company, you're the first company that's in like bio or food or anything that's not software that's being taken seriously by VCs.

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  Like what, and the founder literally told me is what we'd really love for you to do is go and raise a massive like 20 million dollar round. Because that would just like be a massive signal to the market that like this is an investable category. And I was like, ah, that's funny. Like we'll never do that. And then like six months later, we raised a 20 million dollar round. And then immediately after, Ginkgo started raising really big rounds too.

• 2:59:28Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:59:29John Coogan?

  And their business is ripping. And then they went public and now, you know, the CTO of Palantir is actually on their board, Shamsan Kar. And it's just a very interesting company. If you don't know what they do, they manufacture things for fragrances, but they do a lot of like chemical and bioengineering. It's a very cool lab. Even when I saw it in 2013, they had all these robots moving around like pipetting things.

• 2:59:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Not a robotics company, but.

• 2:59:52John Coogan?

  Not a robotics company, but they were leveraging robotics and automation. They built a bunch of software to automate testing. So, you know, you need to test like 10, you know, 10 different titrations of one chemical by 10 different titrations of a different chemical. You mix, that creates 100 different variations. You could just have a PhD student just sitting there doing it. That sucks. That's what they do in every lab in America, like all the universities, even Caltech. But they just automated all that. So they were able to iterate through all these experiments like much faster. And I think they wound up creating a bunch of like basically industrial chemicals that they could go and sell, but.

• 3:00:26Jordi Hays?

  I actually like this starting point as an inspiration for some of our own deal toys of like imagine a microphone in glass.

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, if you, if you're not familiar, every week we do the brother of the week. We award someone who exemplifies what it means to be a technology brother, a student of capitalism, a capital allocator, et cetera. And at the end of the year, we'll be sending out deal toys to commemorate each brother of the week. And so we want to do something that captures the fact that, you know, not only are they a student of capitalism, but they're also a great poster.

• 3:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:00:57John Coogan?

  Um, because you can't, you can't win, as we saw with, uh, uh, with, uh, Mark Cuban. He was brother of the week, but he left X. He's no longer a poster, so we had to rescind the award.

• 3:01:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:10John Coogan?

  So he won't be getting a deal toy, but, um, send in your thoughts. Let us know. What do you think our brother of the week deal toy should look like? I'm thinking something with an X in there, something with some dollar signs, something to represent technology, capital, brotherhood.

• 3:01:26Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Ben for servicing this to us.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks, Ben. Send us your best ideas.

• 3:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:01:31John Coogan?

  Feel free to get on chat GPT, uh, Dolly and, and create some.

• 3:01:36Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 3:01:37John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, create some AI art for us to, to inspire us. Morgan Housel says, despite, it's a quote, he says, despite its success, Wong remains acutely aware that Nvidia's leadership position could prove fleeting, which may explain his relentless work ethic. I do everything I cannot to go, I can, I, I do everything I can not to go out of business. Uh, it's from an interview in Fortune with Jensen Wong, the founder and CEO of Nvidia. I love it. I love a relentless work ethic. Um, unclear, unclear how risky he is in it. It seems like his leadership position's in a pretty strong place. I mean, they have massive pricing power.

• 3:02:16Jordi Hays?

  That type of mentality.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  But maybe I'm wrong.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Gets you delisted.

• 3:02:19John Coogan?

  There's a lot of startups that are going after this, doing, you know, specific chip designs for AI, for LLMs.

• 3:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like a.

• 3:02:26John Coogan?

  Maybe there's a risk. Who knows?

• 3:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, there's incredible IP, but we, we know it's a thin wrapper around TSMC.

• 3:02:32John Coogan?

  TSMC, yeah.

• 3:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so the reason that, uh, Nvidia, uh, you know, is successful today is because of that mentality across decades at this point, right?

• 3:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. I also just think like, yeah, I mean, obviously there's like a talent war in everything AI right now, and Nvidia is no different. There's a lot of people that made a ton of money working for Nvidia during the latest stock run up. You gotta retain them. So you gotta go and proselytize your culture and then you gotta bring in new people. So you need to talk about, you know, how your company is different from the rest. Like this isn't just.

• 3:03:05Jordi Hays?

  But here's, here's the challenge with Nvidia, right? They've, they've grown so quickly.

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:03:09Jordi Hays?

  That. The average employee is like a multi, multi, multimillionaire.

• 3:03:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:03:14Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, we've seen this before. We've had people on the podcast that talk about, you know, oh, I have, I have $10 million of assets. I, I worry that the dog in me died.

• 3:03:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:03:25Jordi Hays?

  And so Jensen needs to be out there pounding the table, being like, we need to keep feeding the dog within us.

• 3:03:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Keep that dog alive. Otherwise, somebody's going to come eat our lunch.

• 3:03:36John Coogan?

  I think he needs to be flexing on the employees a little bit more.

• 3:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:39John Coogan?

  He's not a watch guy, but if he was, then

• 3:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he talks about his lack of

• 3:03:43John Coogan?

  That product manager who's making a million dollars a month now, well, good luck getting this, you know.

• 3:03:48Jordi Hays?

  He needs an RM, like Smiley, two point, two, two to three million dollars.

• 3:03:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, you see this guy driving a McLaren F1 to work. It's like, that's kind of out of the price range of that rich product manager. So, you know, that's going to get the product manager to work a little bit harder.

• 3:04:03Jordi Hays?

  Inspire them to grind harder.

• 3:04:03John Coogan?

  Get to the next level. Get to that Senti. Get to that Beanair.

• 3:04:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:06John Coogan?

  Status.

• 3:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:07John Coogan?

  Um, make it, show, show the employee who's worth 10, that they would be happier if they got to 100.

• 3:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:14John Coogan?

  That's the goal.

• 3:04:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:16John Coogan?

  Nicole Wiskoff, speaking of cars, fantastic capital allocator, fantastic car appreciator, but throwing a little shade on Aston Martin here. She says, I saw the first Aston Martin SUV, the DBX, on the road a few years ago. I thought it was the most beaut, incredible car. Was able to take it out for a drive yesterday. I felt like I went back in time 20 years. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it didn't even hold a candle to the Tesla. And it's 200K more expensive.

• 3:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so.

• 3:04:44John Coogan?

  So, first mistake, disrespecting a legacy brand.

• 3:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that hurts. Aston Martin's a fantastic manufacturer. So, here's the thing with Aston.

• 3:04:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:54Jordi Hays?

  You don't drive an Aston for the interior electronics.

• 3:04:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:04:57Jordi Hays?

  That's for sure. That said, uh, they, they do have new ownership as of the last couple of years.

• 3:05:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:05:04Jordi Hays?

  I believe Lawrence Stroll.

• 3:05:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Father of Lance Stroll, who's in, in F1, recently took the brand over. And the newest generation of cars that's just hitting the street, just hitting dealerships, has had really big upgrades, uh, to the interior. So. But yeah, you're driving it for the lines, for the leather, for the heritage, for the significance. And I would, here's my only thing with Aston. If, you know, a lot, we've talked about, you know, needing to make sure that your next car is about the value of 1% of your AUM.

• 3:05:35John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:05:36Jordi Hays?

  And so if you have a hundred. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:05:39John Coogan?

  She should be budgeting 500K. The problem with the DBX, it's a 300K car.

• 3:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:44John Coogan?

  So she's 200K shy.

• 3:05:45Jordi Hays?

  So the reason she's probably frustrated with the quality is because she should be going after maybe a Cullinan or.

• 3:05:51John Coogan?

  I would even stay within the Aston ecosystem, you know.

• 3:05:55Jordi Hays?

  Vanquish?

• 3:05:56John Coogan?

  No, if she can raise another 100 million, she's in, she's in, you know, Valkyrie territory.

• 3:06:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:06:02John Coogan?

  She could get a Lagonda Taroth. Have you seen that car?

• 3:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:06:06John Coogan?

  From their premium line. You could even go back and get a Bulldog. Have you seen the Bulldog? That's a fantastic car. It's retro, it looks weird, looks like a Cybertruck.

• 3:06:12Jordi Hays?

  For any other sort of emerging GPs that, you know, maybe can't fit in a new Aston within the 1% market of AUM. The great thing about Astons is they lose like half their value in the first year.

• 3:06:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:24Jordi Hays?

  So if a DBX at 300K is too much, wait a year and you can buy the same car with 2,000 miles for about 150K.

• 3:06:32John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 3:06:33Jordi Hays?

  So that's one of the beauties of the Aston brand is everything's half off after a year.

• 3:06:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. Well, good luck to you, Nicole. Make sure you get a really nice car. Yano says, "The most mispriced idea in markets today. Crypto founders can finally build the products they want to build where they want to build them. We are truly entering the golden age for crypto products. Couldn't agree more. We'll see this with Polymarket."

• 3:07:00Jordi Hays?

  And a huge catalyst to that is the Bridge acquisition.

• 3:07:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:03Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't, I think until there hasn't, is that the only or one of a handful of like billion dollar crypto M&A that wasn't a token, you know, it wasn't like somebody launching a token?

• 3:07:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a little bit more of a classic, you know, product acquisition, little like almost a B2B SaaS company. You can model it that way. And so.

• 3:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but there's also like.

• 3:07:22John Coogan?

  To a strategic acquirer. You didn't need to live off in like crypto bizarre land, international, whatever. It's like, yeah, they just get bought by a San Francisco company.

• 3:07:29Jordi Hays?

  We could make a, you know, a platform like Polymarket.

• 3:07:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:07:33Jordi Hays?

  To sell our ad inventory, right? Sort of a liquid market where. I want to know the second before I read a promoted post that it's the highest dollar amount that we could possibly capture for that ad unit, right? More programmatic, so a bunch of cool things coming down the pipeline. I think that, I think next YC batch, I'm sure we'll see a lot of crypto company RF requests for startups.

• 3:07:59John Coogan?

  RFS, yeah.

• 3:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great. Connor McDonald, been on the show before, but we need to give him a follow. The core benefit of AI is to...

• 3:08:07Jordi Hays?

  He needs to give us a follow.

• 3:08:08John Coogan?

  No, no, no, this is, this is, we, we need to follow him.

• 3:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, got it.

• 3:08:12John Coogan?

  So if you see the follow icon, that means it's their first time on the show. Once you're on the show, we'll give you a follow and then we'll know the next time that you're a repeat, you know, guest. So Connor says, "The core benefit of AI is to systematize and automate day-to-day responsibilities and leave more time to podcast and write newsletters." Let's fucking go.

• 3:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:35John Coogan?

  I couldn't agree more.

• 3:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:37John Coogan?

  99% of my life is now automated with AI and I can spend eight, 12 hours a day podcasting.

• 3:08:43Jordi Hays?

  And we do.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  And we do, and this is the future. And I hope everyone joins us.

• 3:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think, and I think that, you know, a lot of this episode, the early part of this episode was talking about, you know, Ozempic and the trends there. And one of the really positive externalities with, with people being on Ozempic, doing less degenerate sports betting and, you know, spending money on Doritos, they can, they'll have, they'll have more money, they'll probably have more cards in their wallet.

• 3:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:08Jordi Hays?

  And so I think Ridge will be a big beneficiary of that.

• 3:09:11John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:09:11Jordi Hays?

  Because people just maybe, people might, might have so much cash on them.

• 3:09:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:15Jordi Hays?

  That they might need multiple wallets.

• 3:09:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:09:17Jordi Hays?

  That the Ridge wallet has a nice, sort of like money clip attached to it. So look to see Ridge, Ridge's market cap do a nice multiple.

• 3:09:28John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Let's go to Daniel. He says, "BCs are the real founders." Couldn't agree more.

• 3:09:34Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't agree more.

• 3:09:34John Coogan?

  Jeremy Giffon has a, has a hot take that investors are more interesting than founders. Have you heard this?

• 3:09:42Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 3:09:42John Coogan?

  It's a good one.

• 3:09:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, he is a, he's an allocator.

• 3:09:45John Coogan?

  He's an investor, so he's talking his own book, but, but his idea is that a lot of the really, really successful investors are looking across markets, across, it's like the fox and the hedgehog thing, where the founder knows one really big idea and is grinding at it, building a company in that one narrow space, whereas the investor can actually broaden out and become a generalist and look at... Capital markets, public markets, private markets, really understand everything.

• 3:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, founders have a more deeper understanding of their like generalists within their business or within their industry, maybe, but it's still like a very like Jeremy, Jeremy's like takes per minute or is like very high.

• 3:10:23John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:10:24Jordi Hays?

  And that's really what we look for and but anyways, you know, the way that Daniel's progressing, he'll have like a $500 million solo GP fund within the next 10 years without a doubt. So I think he's just sort of like setting himself up for success.

• 3:10:39John Coogan?

  I think so. Another huge talent move, Francois Charlet is out at Google, entering free agency. He's going to start a new company. One of the GOAT programmers at Google put up a massive couple of years there on the team, built a product called Keras, was deeply involved in machine learning and also had a great appearance, star appearance, great performance on the Dorkish Patel podcast and is also involved in a very interesting AI benchmark that no LLM has been able to defeat

• 3:11:17John Coogan?

  yet. And so he's been working with that with Wade over at Zapier and just clearly a very thoughtful person on AI. Throughout all the boom and all the craziness, he's always been very locked in and understanding.

• 3:11:33Jordi Hays?

  Pragmatic.

• 3:11:33John Coogan?

  Where the hype is, where the limitations are. He's not a doomer. He's not a complete optimist, always nuanced, and he never really gets in fights, I see, but he's always, he's always bringing like really good critiques, still optimistic, still loves the technology, obviously building on it. So great to see that he's out starting a new company with a friend. I wonder who it is. We'll certainly cover it here. And I have a feeling we're going to be ringing the size gong when this guy raises.

• 3:12:02Jordi Hays?

  For this guy.

• 3:12:03John Coogan?

  I mean, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is an all time, all, all league player.

• 3:12:08Jordi Hays?

  You know, when this, when this, when this post went up, two things happened. One, I happened at Bloomberg, open big red candle on the, on Alphabet's stock.

• 3:12:18John Coogan?

  Alphabet, yep.

• 3:12:19Jordi Hays?

  It was really rough to see recovered, but not, not completely. And then two. VCs around the country called up their

• 3:12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, the phones were ringing off the hook.

• 3:12:29Jordi Hays?

  You know, even NetJets was getting more calls than usual, but a lot of Gulfstream sort of like took off in unison and sort of descended. Hoping to get some face time with him because a big round is coming.

• 3:12:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, let's just review his career for a little bit. I mean, he built Keros, powers ML solutions that countless companies touch. It powers your recommendations on YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, the fraud filtering of your credit card transactions. Waymo cars that drive you around San Francisco. This guy's a beast, one of the greatest to ever do it, and we're excited to see where you take it next. Let's go to Zach. Says, update, I hit $1 million in MRR, still not sleeping in. And he says, he's quote tweeting himself from almost 10 months ago. Been losing sleep to the grind, purely running on the urge to be financially free. After I hit 100K MRR in high school, then I'll start sleeping in. What a beast.

• 3:13:26Jordi Hays?

  He's still, he's still in high school?

• 3:13:29John Coogan?

  I don't know. Maybe he is. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like he's still in, in high school.

• 3:13:34Jordi Hays?

  Animal. Future, just getting started.

• 3:13:37John Coogan?

  Just getting started.

• 3:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Future brother of the week, potentially.

• 3:13:42John Coogan?

  Future first round draft pick by, potentially by the, by the holy trinity VC firms. I could see big dollars going into this.

• 3:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 3:13:50John Coogan?

  Big, big contract sign.

• 3:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's really about the attitude.

• 3:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if you're not sleep deprived right now, just understand that money doesn't sleep either.

• 3:14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

• 3:14:05John Coogan?

  Let's go to Eigenrobot. He says, he's quote tweeting, the ball is orange, who says, a lot of lives would be incredibly different if this existed. And it's the United States High Speed Rail system. And he says, no, they wouldn't. People would still take the plane or drive. Your lives suck primarily because of the circumstances of your births and the choices you have made in this life. A redundant passenger train system would not meaningfully affect the magnitude of your suffering. I couldn't agree more. I thank God every single day that America industrialized largely after the invention of the automobile. So that we don't need a bunch of slow, inflexible trains cluttering up our country. It's meaningless. And to all the train people out there.

• 3:14:50John Coogan?

  Stop coping. We have planes and cars and they go everywhere and we don't need trains. And in fact, America does have a fantastic rail system. We just use it for freight.

• 3:15:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:15:00John Coogan?

  Because America is a lot bigger than France to Germany. Like France to Germany is like the equivalent of, you know, Boston to New York.

• 3:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:09John Coogan?

  Like, we just don't. And you know what? We do have high-speed rail between Boston and New York. It's the Acela. It actually works pretty well.

• 3:15:15Jordi Hays?

  Go right on that.

• 3:15:16John Coogan?

  But no one wants to ride from Chicago to LA on a train. Even if you're going 200 miles an hour, that's like a 14-hour, 18-hour.

• 3:15:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my little brother's actually like loves the train.

• 3:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Cause he just like, he's a train guy, likes to just like take in the view and, and relax. But I always laugh because I'm like, you're paying more.

• 3:15:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15:32Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're sitting in a, in a uncomfortable seat. Uh, you're, you're spending the night in this little tube and you could have spent,

• 3:15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:40Jordi Hays?

  you know, $200 less and gotten there in, in four hours. Your time's worth a lot more.

• 3:15:45John Coogan?

  I actually do have one nice thing to say about trains. Fantastic for monk mode. Uh, when, when I was living in Sunnyvale doing Y C and I was dead broke, I had to go from Pasadena to Sunnyvale and I went by train. And it took me all day. Like 6:00 AM, I walk to a, a local metro rail station, take that to downtown, then downtown I get a bus transfer out to Bakersfield.

• 3:16:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:09John Coogan?

  Then a train through the Central Valley, which was actually beautiful and fantastic. And I was able to sit there, no wifi, nothing. I was able just to read this book on, uh, actually language models. It was very, very weird, but it was about, uh, natural language processing, which was kind of like the precursor AI system. Fascinating. Like the, the algorithms are like human intelligible essentially still. It's not just like crazy tensors and stuff. Like you can just understand intellectually how it works. And then, uh, another bus when you get to, you know, Oakland essentially to the Caltrain.

• 3:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:41John Coogan?

  And then walk from the Caltrain to Sunnyvale. Took us forever, but the monk mode was fantastic. And being able to get on a train and just watch the countryside go by and actually see how beautiful America is and how much space we have to build is very, very inspiring. So, trains, we like to hate, but somewhat underrated. Uh, let's go to Dylan Field, founder of Figma. He says, "This week, all eyes should be on Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary. This appointment is a preview of what we will see over the next four years on topics spanning global tariffs, tax policy, the price of Bitcoin, China and more. Of course, there's a lot of drama." And he writes a thread. I love that he's weighing in on this. This is so great.

• 3:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:22John Coogan?

  You know, there, there is a world where Dylan is just talking about design.

• 3:17:26Jordi Hays?

  We need, I, I really only want to see threads from people that are post-economic, right? So if you're not a beaner, don't write threads.

• 3:17:33John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:17:33Jordi Hays?

  If you are a beaner, write more threads.

• 3:17:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I, X should actually have a functionality for that.

• 3:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:39John Coogan?

  Where, where it links with your bank account.

• 3:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Proof of funds.

• 3:17:41John Coogan?

  Proof of funds, and I can say.

• 3:17:42Jordi Hays?

  Or your carda, or your carda.

• 3:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, or your carda. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Your paper wealth as well. And then I can just, I can just say, hey, today, X, I only want to see content from sentis.

• 3:17:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:53John Coogan?

  Throw some beaners in there, but don't give me any.

• 3:17:56Jordi Hays?

  That should be a separate feed.

• 3:17:57John Coogan?

  Any, any.

• 3:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Cuban would come back.

• 3:17:58John Coogan?

  Any single-digit millionaires, I'm not interested.

• 3:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Cuban might even come back.

• 3:18:02John Coogan?

  He might, he might. It would be a big boost to him.

• 3:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:04John Coogan?

  You know, Elon kind of has the boost, where all of his posts kind of get promoted. No one really knows exactly if it's hard-coded or not, or he's just posting bangers. But we need that for, for all sentis and billionaires.

• 3:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:16John Coogan?

  For sure. So shout out to Dylan. I'm excited. I'm going to keep an eye on it. I don't know, has the Treasury Secretary been teased or leaked or announced yet?

• 3:18:24Jordi Hays?

  There's a couple, there's a couple folks that are, that are in the running.

• 3:18:26John Coogan?

  But we don't talk about politics here, so we're not going to cover it.

• 3:18:30Jordi Hays?

  That's the show.

• 3:18:31John Coogan?

  But that's the show. I think we should ring the size gong one last time, just to commemorate the end of the show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe, give us five stars, repost everything, send our clips to your friends.

• 3:18:43Jordi Hays?

  Create a, uh, TV clips.

• 3:18:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:18:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, channels on Instagram and all those other things.

• 3:18:49John Coogan?

  And grow that.

• 3:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Get to a million of MRR.

• 3:18:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:18:52Jordi Hays?

  We'll feature you on the show.

• 3:18:53John Coogan?

  Thank you. And send us your ideas for deal toys.

• 3:18:56Jordi Hays?

  That's it.