Top Signals, How Shaun Maguire & Augustus Navigated Backlash, Comet Review, VW Electric Bus Flops | Farbood Nivi, Sean Frank

(01:48) - Market Top Signals Timeline Reaction (34:26) - Timeline (37:58) - Perplexity Browser Review (45:19) - Timeline (53:33) - How Shaun Maguire & Augustus Doricko Navigated Backlash (01:08:42) - California Ranch on Sale for $50M (01:29:17) - Volkswagen Electric Bus Flops (01:38:01) - Farbood Nivi, an entrepreneur and health enthusiast, discusses his journey through various biohacking experiments, including gene therapy and peptide use, and emphasizes the importance of establishing consistent health routines over daily self-negotiation. He shares his current regimen, which includes morning light exposure, hydration, and brief, regular exercise sessions, highlighting that a balanced approach yields better health outcomes than extreme focus on single activities. Additionally, Nivi introduces "Protocols," an app designed to facilitate health routines among friends, underscoring the significance of community support in achieving health goals. (01:59:29) - Sean Frank, CEO of The Ridge Wallet, has led the company to over $100 million in annual revenue by expanding its product line beyond minimalist wallets to include men's rings, backpacks, and other accessories. In the conversation, he discusses TikTok's strategic shift from e-commerce to focusing on advertising, the challenges of live shopping in the U. S., and the impact of AI on business operations, particularly in data analysis and creative processes. (02:34:01) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Friday, July 11, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  The Temple of Technology.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  We got a great show for you. We have some maybe terrible news. There might be top signals in the market. There might be top signals all over the place.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  We've been building out an internal top signal tracker, crowdsourcing some of them.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  And it's a long list.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  We'll get through it.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  At the top of the list, podcasters have been wearing white suits recently to celebrate the market ripping. That feels like-

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  White suits are actually a top signal.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  It's a complete top signal. But of course, there is some good, there are some, the economy's strong. We're going to go through Joe Weisenthal's breakdown. Things are not doom and gloom, but there's a lot of crazy stuff happening and it's fun to dig through. I mean, the first major top signal, Bitcoin all time high.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  You know, that's always, you know, it is definitionally a top signal because it is at the top.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's go through the list here because it's quite substantial.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  Some of this has kind of anonymously contributed through group chats.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  Some of this stuff we've, we've observed. We're going to catalog it and see if we can turn the tide of the top signals to ideally-

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  So, starting off, yesterday, Trump made a post on Truth Social, calling, basically celebrating the state of the economy, the markets. You know, really calling out how many assets are performing well.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  I have it here. It's the second one.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to read through it? Do you want to read through it a little bit? Because he basically, get through the post and we'll get to the moment.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  So, Donald Trump on Truth Social, truths, tech stocks, industrial stocks and NASDAQ hit all time high, record highs. Crypto through the roof. Nvidia is up 47% since Trump tariffs. USA is taking in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. Country is now back. A great credit. Fed should rapidly lower rate to reflect this strength. USA should be at the top of the list.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  So low rates are actually just a reward for when the markets are ripping. It's a little treat that we give ourselves when things are great.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  Yep. And the White House is posting this screenshotted on Axe. The country is now back, says President Donald Trump.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  Every account controlled by the White House has been on a tear. Some of them, some of the posts I think are a little bit low class and vulgar. But others, others are quite funny. But there's definitely the the memers are in control.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Didn't ruin, say, every like, every politically aligned poster he knows, who is like pro-Trump, now works for the White House. But like, you just haven't seen it because they were like a nonce and they just kind of dropped off posting.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  They'd be getting death threats. So they have to, it's even actually more, in many ways, it's it's more controversial work than Doge.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah, maybe it's more under discussed because Doge had this big like question in the media about like, you know, is Elon doing something that's, you know, he shouldn't be, is he a government employee? Like, what's the relationship between the two? And so, you know, there was a lot of investigative journalism that went into figuring out what's going on with Doge, who's involved.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, nobody's investigating the memes.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Social media managers, which is maybe a big story.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  They need to be investigating the memes of production. But anyway, so going through my list here, that's great. Eric Trump, a while back, said, this is a good time to buy. This was a few months ago on Ethereum. And then it just went down for months. And now it's back up.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  I didn't follow that one.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  And he's saying, you're welcome.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  I do remember Trump, he called the bottom, right? He said, like, now is a good time to buy generally, and then the market ripped since then.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  He created it and he and he called it perfectly.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  It's wild.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  It's finesse. More going down the list. Coinbase, just who we love, but they did, they're a Fortune 500 company. They did update their profile picture to an NFT. Historically, that has been a top signal. I do think their profile picture is cute.

• 4:05John Coogan?

  Do you have any experience with NFT profile pictures?

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  You know, I've delved, I've delved over the years.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Experimented.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes. And if you, and if you look at maybe the moment that I did use an NFT profile picture in 2021, it was maybe only off by one or two months in terms of, in terms of the top.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  I never used an NFT profile picture, but I bought an NFT. Right near the top.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  A chain runner?

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Chain runner.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Which I still own.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Which actually, I didn't like over-invest, get over my skis, is very small portion of like-

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  That's an asset that will be passed down through your family, like-

• 4:38John Coogan?

  I like to-

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  A fine watch.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  I like to think of it as like a piece of 2022 lore.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  It's just like a piece of history. But, uh, yeah, for you, fun project. And I feel like to some degree, you know, you're not really, it's like a skin in the game question. Like, you're not really participating. You're not experiencing the, the market unless you're participating to some degree.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  But you don't want to get over your skis.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  And more-

• 5:02John Coogan?

  I also did the NFT profile picture at a really bad time and had to roll that back. Like, there's been a number of like NFT profile pictures that have been like-

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  It is a historical top signal. It could be, it could be now just a signal for the start of a, you know, generational run.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  New cycle.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  New cycle. But, uh, historically, it's a top signal.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  I do want to know if like-

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  So we gotta call it out.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  If, if NFTs are gonna make a comeback, because like, there's been, like crypto has been coming back. And Bitcoin went from what, 30 to 120?

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  When A-list celebrities are using them on their Facebook accounts.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  That was a wild time.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  That's the real test.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  X account, could see it happening early.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Facebook account.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Facebook.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Original Facebook account.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  There's gotta be new project then, because I don't think any of the old, old, old products or projects are going to, you know, come back. That would be crazy. Although some of them are kind of Lindy. Like, haven't the original-

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  Crypto punks.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Crypto punks, those have kind of held their value. But the board apes have sold off like crazy, but are still expensive, right?

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's unfortunate, board apes are not in gag gift territory yet.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  Because you, you think, oh, it'd be funny to get like your buddy like a board ape for their birthday.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  30K or something.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  But it's like, yeah, it's like-

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Tyler, what's the floor price of, uh, of board apes? I'm, I'm, I'm interested in now. While Tyler looks that up, let me tell you, Ramp, time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com. Also, we don't, we never shout this out, 4.8 stars on G2 with over 2,000 reviews. That's great. Shout out Ramp.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  World class.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Okay, so another-

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, what you got?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  The floor price is like around 10 ETH? So that's like almost $3,000.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  3,000?

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  30,000.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  30,000? Yeah, that's like not a gag gift. Maybe for the man who has everything.

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  Yes, for the man who has everything, great gag gift.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  It is, pink elephant.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  We'll see, we'll see.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  At Sun Valley.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  But, you know, by, you know, Christmas time.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  Do they do pink elephants at Sun Valley? I feel like they should.

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe. We'll have to ask some of our friends that are there this week. So in other news, Robinhood CEO Vlad is raising at $900 million valuation for a math foundation model startup. And Vlad and Robinhood have been on a pretty generational run. But this does feel a bit top signaling, right? Especially in the context of Grok one-shotting PhD-level math in the announcement on Wednesday. So interested to follow that one, optimistic, but again.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Mathematical superintelligence.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  Historically, when we've seen CEOs of public companies start ripping, you know, second companies and then getting these types of valuations without a lot of underlying revenue, it can end poorly.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Wilkinson is giving stock tips. He hit the timeline today, I'll read through it. He was highlighting a company historically a value investor. But this morning.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  He said things like the Warren Buffett stuff, right?

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  The Berkshire Hathaway for the internet.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  He says, "There are many ways to profit from the AI boom, but my favorite is Iren. I rarely buy stocks. The private market is way too attractive. But every once in a while, I see something that stops me cold. In 2025, it's Iren. I call it a Picasso I found at a garage sale. The stock is up 54% since he recommended it on My First Million, but it's still cheap. Here's the trade in a nutshell. U.S. capacity for energy and compute is highly constrained. Two, permitting and building facilities takes years. Three, AI scaling laws are continuing to deliver, but even if they don't, tons of compute is required for inference. Iren is a highly reputable publicly traded Bitcoin miner

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  with massive data centers mid-build in Texas." It pivoted away from mining Bitcoin at these new facilities to instead build them out for AI training and inference. Once completed, these facilities should generate in the range of $2 billion in new cash flow.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  What is this company's name? Iren?

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Iren. Even if AI completely fizzles, these facilities are highly valuable as traditional data centers or can be rolled back to mine Bitcoin. So it's an AI thesis, but if AI doesn't work out, we can still mine Bitcoin. The entire market cap is currently 3.8 billion. So, and Drew, I don't think this is investment advice, but it sounds like it. And interested to see, see where this one goes. But anyway, anytime you see a value investor start trying to cash in on the AI boom, should be a little bit wary. Harry Stabbings today was calling-

• 9:55John Coogan?

  Also not, like, it doesn't have earnings, right?

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no. It's, it's-

• 9:59John Coogan?

  It's trading around $4 billion.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's ever generated any profit.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  I mean, it says, it says 23 million in EBITDA, but in 2024. So I don't think it's like losing that much money. And I guess net income in the last quarter was 24 million, but the net income to market cap ratio there is 40, I guess. So still pretty high.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, the, the thing here is-

• 10:25John Coogan?

  It doesn't feel like a bucket stock.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  At the same time, Satya is pulling back on new data center development. It's happy to be a leasur. You have incredible NeoClouds that have deep domain expertise. The Iren team, I don't think has a bunch of team around running large AI training or inferencing. And so anyways-

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Just feels like they're a little bit late to that party because there's already like three or four. Did Iren make the ClusterMax Dylan Patel article?

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  I doubt it because they're not online yet, right?

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 11:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Yes. Because semi-analysis does the ClusterMax rating for all the NeoClouds, including the, the hyperscaler clouds. And I feel like they did not have, let me see, Iren, I don't think is on here. Tensor Wave, there are so many Run Pod, Lambda, Scaleway, SMC, Azure, Nebius, Together, Crusoe, Laptone, Oracle, CoreWeave, AWS.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  So, hyper competitive market, unclear if this Bitcoin miner is going to be able to pivot into AI training and inference in this, when they're up against the players that you just mentioned. Another top signal, I'm not going to go out and say that this is impossible, but Harry Stebbings is calling for $8 trillion Nvidia in the next five years. Private markets investor backed a bunch of unicorns, starting to make, you know, very specific sort of price predictions on the timeline.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, the specificity of the price prediction is interesting. I was thinking about that, like, should, like, as we talk about tech companies, should we be trying to, like, boil down to, like, price targets? And I just feel like that's not the domain of, of talking heads necessarily, or like, podcasters?

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  Or private markets investors.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, yeah, it's just, it's just hard, because like, to do a proper price analysis on a big public stock, like, you, you really have to look at the financial, like, you have to read the, the, the financial reports, you need to actually understand the underlying financials. It, like, a vibes-based analysis doesn't seem appropriate usually, but.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  Who knows? Sometimes vibes are all you need, John.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's certainly been like, it's, I mean, when was, when was Nvidia a $2 trillion stock? Like, when was last doubling? Like, in the last year or something? I don't know. We can pull up the Nvidia chart and see.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, moving on, we, another incredible top signal, Circle, a great American stablecoin company, is trading at a 2,300 PE ratio, nearly, at once, I think, they eclipsed Coinbase's valuation very briefly.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  Really? No way.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Despite the fact that they give half of their revenue to Coinbase.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  As part of their distribution partnership. So, again, lots of excitement around stablecoins. Feels like Circle could potentially be a little over its skis, but it's a great company, and they have a lot of advantages now, but the very euphoric multiple.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Another top signal we have is Soham Pareek. We had him on the show just a week ago. This same sort of thing was happening in 2021, 2022, where engineers were really ramping up moonlighting activity, right? They'd be working at Meta and then working at some startup or things like that. Covid maybe accelerated it, but again, if if companies are so desperate to hire great engineers that they'll run these like super fast hiring cycles, put up with people, generally talented people that are underperforming, right? Which Soham was was not delivering, was making a lot of excuses and a lot of people rightly let him go quickly.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just it's just the nature of like the dynamic of just competition. Like, if your competitors are hiring really fast and you need to hire really fast, you're just like, okay, well, we don't need to go deeper. So let's wind up fast tracking this person.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  So you wind up hiring, you know, same person five times.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  Yes, it happens.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  It is just like a funny anecdote that like is like, oh, wow, those are some pretty crazy times. Remember that anecdote? Remember this anecdote? It feels like we're in this.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  Moving on, Masa top blasting or potentially top blasting. Anytime Masa, historically, Masa getting into the headlines, whether that's Stargate.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Structuring this $30 billion investment where nobody knows, and the 500 billion, nobody really knows where the money is coming from.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  They're exciting, big headline numbers, but unclear if he will actually be able to deliver on that. I think him trying, you know, getting in the breakout, one of the breakout consumer AI winners, which is OpenAI, is smart. He should have exposure there. But I think everybody should be a little bit uneasy that he's pulling out the checkbook and and writing numbers of that size.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, also investing in not just OpenAI, but like a new company that is a data center holding company that may not have the same economics as OpenAI. So there's a big question there about like how much he deploys. I'm trying to remember the, I mean, we did that whole deep dive on Masa and, you know, he made a ton of money on AMD, but that, when he made that investment, it was like a way less frothy time. Or, you know, it wasn't AMD. It was, it was, what was the SoftBank chip deal?

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  ARM.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  ARM, yeah. When did that ARM deal happen? SoftBank owns roughly 90% of ARM. They acquired in 2016 for 32 billion and later took it public in 2023. Trying to think, 2016, was that a particularly frothy time for him to get into that deal? Because he has, he has done a number of really great deals, but when, like-

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other one is, the other one is Yahoo. You remember, he, he had this crazy meeting with the Yahoo team-

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  Where he basically was like, "Take my money." Or I'm gonna, and he was like, didn't he ask? He was like, "Who are your competitors?"

• 16:37John Coogan?

  I'm gonna give money to your competitor.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  And he didn't even know who the competitors were, but he said, "If you don't take my money, I'm gonna go give the same check to them."

• 16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so he, they ended up taking it. He acquired approximately 41% of the company, uh, at, um, somewhere around a $200 million valuation.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when Yahoo went public in 1996, this, uh, he had an instant paper profit of 150 million, but then at the peak of the dot com bubble, Yahoo was valued at 125 billion. So anyways, phenomenal investment, but, uh, very different, uh, valuation and, and ownership targets and, and, uh, unclear, um, I would love to see OpenAI get, you know, for profit and get public, uh, but, uh, for to, to, you know, we'll, we'll have to see.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Um, going down the list, another classic, Pomp, SPAC, that, uh, we, we had Pomp on the show to talk about it.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  SPACs are back.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  SPACs are back. Pomp's got a SPAC. A lot of people were calling that a top signal. I, I'm excited to see what, what Pomp does, uh, with, with his. Um, but in general, this, uh, this extreme excitement, retail excitement around these sort of Bitcoin treasury companies is fascinating-

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Jordi Hays?

  In the context of it now being very easy to get Bitcoin exposure in a variety of different ways. I, I'm not sure we need a bunch of net new Bitcoin treasury companies.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's mostly that like- Whenever there's a, whenever there's a new trend or bubble, they're like, there, it's very easy to map like, okay, there's one company that it's really working. This is massively successful. Like, everyone is using ChatGPT. Like, AI is a thing. It is, it is real. The internet was real. Google was real. Amazon was real. But the, the twenty-fifth Amazon copycat did not do well. And so

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  that's always the risk is that you've applied like the same overarching theme to something that's like so far down the power law that it will never grow into the valuation that it's been

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:52John Coogan?

  assigned. That's always the risk.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  What else do you have?

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Dwar Kesh updating his timelines. That happened Monday. We had him on the show. It was, it was fun conversation. I think Dwar Kesh has remained incredibly bullish and, and, and I think he rightfully is. He also is being somewhat of a realist and being like, I don't think that AI is priced in to the market broadly.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  But I do think that some of the promises of AI will take another couple of years, another five years, et cetera, to really deliver versus some of the much more hyper aggressive AI twenty twenty seven.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  You might say that AI twenty twenty seven itself was, in, in hindsight, that could end up being like the number one top signal, which is that basically, if, if you haven't read the, the, uh, kind of study paper essay, um, they basically say that by, by twenty twenty seven, you know, a single foundation model company could just be acquiring every auto manufacturer in the US to develop, you know, uh, millions and millions of robots that would then, you know, build, uh, you know, and, and we would hit the sort of fast takeoff.

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Meanwhile, Apple is like, we can't possibly get out a slightly lighter. VR headset until 2027.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  And this is what we do.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  We've been working on this for a decade.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  We make stuff like every year, we are the best at it. We make the most stuff and the best stuff, pretty much. The most complicated stuff, that's what we make. We're in the widgets business. And yeah, making that headset lighter, it's going to take us a full two years.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Refresh.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  And I liked 2027. It was a, it was a fun read.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Very thought provoking, but I, I think that we will be, we'll have to circle back on it 2030 or even 2027.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the, the, the big thing was, you know, our conversation yesterday with, with Meter about the actual, like, are we, are we close to reinforcing AI where the AI models are self-improving? And, and I was kind of, you know, like, okay, I, I really hadn't read the full report beforehand. So I didn't really know what to expect. I was blown away because I was expecting, you know, you know, something between like, you know, like Arc AGI, it feels like with Arc AGI, we're 10% towards solving something there, which is just like, you know, a basic versatility in AI

• 21:25John Coogan?

  that it can solve things that humans can solve and it's not narrowly defined. It's generalizable now. Arc AGI is like the perfect example of like, we maybe haven't hit, we've done intelligence, but we haven't done general intelligence yet. And everyone keeps saying, oh, this is AGI, that's AGI. And Arc AGI is really holding it back, saying like, well, if it was truly general, should probably be able to solve this basic puzzle that a kid can solve. And, and for that, it's like, okay, we're going from like 9% to 15%. Like we are still like, you know, 85% in not even like, you know, nowhere close. And, and the, the.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  The the meter report, I was expecting it to be like, well, you know, yes, we're seeing, you know, slight gains on self reinforcing AI development and the AI is starting to help build itself slightly. And the result was like, no, it's actually setting us back. In this domain, it's not working at all. And so that was like a pretty, pretty big like, okay, there's a, there's a completely different, like, not that it's not useful. The stuff's useful all over the place. I saw Rune talking about that. He was like, for so many different projects, it is useful. But for the frontier, like, it's not the product that's advancing the frontier at all.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, that probably bridges into the talent wars, but.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, bridging in, I do think that in hindsight, we will look back in maybe a year, two years, five years, 10 years, and think about the signing bonuses and general offers of AI researchers in June and July of 2025 as being somewhat of a top signal. I think it is very strategic and makes sense from Zuck and Meta's point of view, right? When you look at their AI capex, it makes sense for them to have the best possible team, and they have the balance sheet and the general profitability in order to do something like

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  that. But in general, AI researchers who, you know, six years ago, didn't get any attention, much attention at all from the media, the fact that they're now trading for more than NBA superstars, more than, more than, you know, Tim Cook's annual total comp. It will be an obvious one in hindsight. The other one, six and a half billion dollar aqua hire of I O. I think that, again, you can rationalize it in the sense that it's a couple of points of OpenAI to put together the best founding hardware engineering team

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  probably in the world that's available collectively. But at the same time, again, it's quite a lot, considering, you know, the company was barely, I think, a year old at the time.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting, because like, ChatGPT is so.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  It's so installed, like it feels like it's already Lindy and it feels like even if there's some massive correction like in the market or in AI generally or some pullback like people are still going to be using chat GPT as an app, right? In the same way that Amazon made it through the dot com crash. The question is like, what, what will it take for the I O acquisition to look like the Instagram acquisition in hindsight? Like they still kind of have to go from zero to one with that project, which is very different than Instagram, which is already a mature and growing business.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  And they, they'd figured out ads really well.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Well, Instagram, were they, were they doing ads?

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  They weren't doing ads.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  Saying, but Meta was like, we know how to make.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it was like a perfectly, perfectly complimentary business.

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  We know how to monetize social users better than anyone on earth.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  And you have gotten a bunch of social users and it's working and it's growing.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  And, and you're even.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  And we can actually accelerate the growth of the business in a bunch of different ways.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  So it'd be very different if it was like, okay, yes, I O is selling, you know, like, like it's, it's a small but growing hardware company that people love.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  For the product people love.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  The product people love, and maybe they can't manufacture enough of it. Or maybe they're, maybe they're under monetizing it right now.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  People love it, but it's like, it's pre-launch.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, multi-billion dollar acquisition for pre-launch is pretty crazy.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  Going down the list. What else do we have? I think, I think the tokenized private company shares, I, I think it.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  That is interesting.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  With, um, without, you know, Republic and, and Robinhood, both creating products that are completely unauthorized, basically derivatives. The companies that they're, they're offering are angry at them and saying, don't do this. And.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  It's a Spider-Man meme of like top signals pointing at each other.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, I'm excited about these experiments. I just think that, um, uh, I'm a little bit wary. Uh, and then last but not least, Satya doing two rounds of layoffs this year. Mike, we've talked, we've reported on this before. Microsoft does routine layoffs. I think they're pretty good at, at kind of identifying underperformers or people that should just move on to different, different roles. But Satya, I think has been, I think will look back and he's been, uh, excited, uh, but pragmatic, right? And, uh, I think that, uh, he will, uh, when the dust settles, I think he'll look pretty good.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, like, if there's some massive pullback in, I mean, I don't even know what that would look like. Essentially, like, if, let's assume that the current capability of AI models essentially plateaus for like a decade or something like that, just hypothetically. And, you know, they're useful, but it's not some reinforcing, fast-takeoff, superintelligence. Is Microsoft a big loser in that scenario? It seems like such is pretty well-positioned, right?

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Like, the company prints cash, is very healthy, has done these layoffs. They'd have to retreat from some stuff and some of the promises that they've made, maybe. But in general, it seems like they'd be really, really well set up to just like, like, stick through. But I'm trying to, I'm trying to think of going back to the dot-com bubble and, and the, like, you know, the effect of like Oracle's mainframe business, like, probably made it through pretty smoothly. Because it was just like really long contracts with companies that were getting true business value out of it and weren't about to churn because it was not this like experimental, like, if you had moved from paper to an Oracle mainframe, you weren't like, oh, this stuff's overhyped, it's not going to solve all my problems,

• 28:15John Coogan?

  I'm going to go back to paper.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  You know, and so, in the same way, it's like, if you're on, you know, Microsoft Cloud or Azure or, you know, everyone's using Excel and they're like, eh, maybe we're getting some value out of this Copilot upgrade that we did, maybe we pull back from that, maybe, yeah, we, you know, our employees like rewriting emails every once in a while. Like, if they pull back from that, it's not disastrous to the fundamentals of Microsoft.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we didn't even cover how there's a set of labs with billions of revenue. And then there's a set of labs that are valued similarly, that have zero revenue.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, basically, a hundred billion dollars of market cap with, with very little revenue supporting that at all.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  The, the question like a year ago was...

• 29:05John Coogan?

  What was the, who's actually making profit off of AI? And it was only Nvidia. Nvidia was making more than 100% of all the profit combined because all the other companies were loss making by comparison. And now, and now like that narrative has taken so much hold that Nvidia is the largest company in the world. And it's put this massive target on their back at four trillion where every, all of their major customers want to get off Nvidia, it feels like.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Like, Google did it, Amazon's doing it, and Microsoft's saying that they want to do it. And Apple's, you know, was never really a big Nvidia buyer, but the on-device inference is crazy, too. Like, if you think about, if, if we don't have any major breakthroughs in how AI works, like the capabilities, and we just want the current capabilities everywhere as cheap as possible, like on-device inference becomes really, really valuable, right? And all of a sudden, that drops demand for Nvidia, potentially, right?

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  We might need to do a SWOT analysis, John.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, Nvidia is an incredible company. Jensen's an incredible CEO. They were perfectly positioned for this, you know, multi-decade technology trend.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  And it was way underpriced at the start of the boom.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Like, the, the orders really did come in. The training runs really did happen.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  The question is just, is that next order of magnitude, the, like, the situational awareness from Leopold Oshenbrenner, this thesis that we're going to build a five, a five billion dollar cluster, then a 50 billion dollar cluster, then a 500 billion dollar cluster, like, is that going to happen? Or will there be a hiccup? And this is always the, this is always my question for, like, the doomers, everyone was saying, like, P doom, I'm, I, you know, what's my percentage chance that goes bad? And I was like, the much more interesting question is P stagnation. What is the probability that something happens? And whether it's technological or even regulatory, like, the, if you compare AI to nukes, with nukes, we had the ability to make nuclear reactors.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  And humanity as a whole basically just said, we're going to pause.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  And we stopped building them. And now we're talking about building them again, but if you look at that curve, it is a perfect S curve. It's like we had no nuclear reactors, then all of a sudden we grew them exponentially. And it looked like, wow, we're going to have energy too cheap to meter. And then it flatlined and we were and and for a variety of reasons. They're hard to build, hard, then there were regulations, there was just general fear. So there were a lot of different things and and I would always go to the doomers and just say like, even if you all of your assumptions about the capabilities of the technology are correct, what is the probability that there's just like, if you are successful doomers and you freak everyone out, there might be regulation that just says, don't build anything bigger.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Or it could be economics, it could just be, it could be physics, as we've talked about with this idea that at a certain point, like, you can't put more than 100% of global GDP towards building clusters, like, it's impossible. And so like, there should be this like S curve there. And and that's why, you know, all the all the AI researchers are now focused on like, the the compression of learning and like the actual algorithms and getting more efficiency, because like, there will be, you know, there should be some sort of like, you know, top, top, upper bound of the amount that you can build. But that certainly hasn't been like a thesis broadly in the market. People have just been like, yeah, like, we'll just, we'll just 10x computing and then 10x it again, and then 10x it again. And it's like, it probably will happen over a period of time.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  Great investment strategy, by the way, just get a 10x.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  And then 10x it again.

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  10x it again, and then 10x it again.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  And last but not least, almost, almost forgot about this one, but it should be included. The White House meme coins, which was, which feels like

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Crazy times.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Very long ago, it was the local top, basically, at the time.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  It was the local top.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  Many people were calling the top.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  Just hurling meme coins.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  Out of the White House.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. So that's the real question is like, is like, how, how local is this top? If, if, if it is a top, because it could be, we've been in the kangaroo market. It could just be, oh, a couple of months, even, even the, the interest rate sell off, the post SVV crash, that was like one hard year, right? And then we started building back and we got the AI narrative. And so there's this big question about like, like, you know, Dwar Kesh pushed his timelines back, but he's not saying that super intelligence will never arrive. He's, he's not saying that AI will never break through these things. He's just saying that it'll happen a little bit, a little bit further out. And so the question of, you know, like these meme coins being a, being a top signal

• 33:59John Coogan?

  or all this crazy stuff, it's like, there could be like a short term sell off and then rebuilding back up on something else. So I don't know, it's always hard to manage these things and predict, but it's certainly fun to highlight all these things and at least be aware of them.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  Keep track of them.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, you gotta be tracking the top.

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  Keep your own list, keep your own list.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free at graphite.dev. Let's go through some more timeline. Joe Weisenthal says, thinking about the recent episode we did with Charlie Mick Elgot, Elgot, where he referred to Trump as the human Vex. I like that. He just creates volatility out of thin air. It really is so true.

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

  Trump coin, Trump coin is up 20%.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  Over the last week.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  I mean, volatility traders have to be doing really well and probably will continue.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  Down dramatically since.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  What is the, what is like the actual market cap of Trump coin? Is it sticking around?

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  Circulating market cap is 2 billion, fully diluted is 10 billion. Uh, the price per Trump is current. It peaked at $45 and it is at $10 today.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Wild.

• 35:07Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  I like this one from I am developer. The dumbest person you know is being told, you're absolutely right by chat GPT. Like it, it is funny to imagine that that is somewhat. Like that like is is the glaze gate like deranging society in some way? Is the fact that everyone's getting this like constant positive reinforcement?

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Because if you go to it and you're like, hey, should I should I go 100x long in the market right now? It's like, yeah, you actually for my interactions like you you were at the level of Citadel. You're definitely you definitely could just be a hedge fund manager. If you if you went full time on it like you could do it like you're definitely not just like a retail trader who's gonna get hosed this time like every

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're different.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  You're different. You're different. Tracy Alloway has a funny post this week in a nutshell. Do you see this one? Markets don't like tariffs, but Trump just imposed more tariffs and markets are at all time highs because markets think he's gonna pull them back.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Hilarious. It's great.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  I mean,

• 36:11John Coogan?

  you know, we are just in this cycle of like even even the bad news is just like a catalyst for good news when it's reversed.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  And the psychology of the market is just like total up on.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  Credit to Grok right now. Maybe it really is super intelligence because I I asked it. Should I go turbo long the market right now? And it says deciding whether to go turbo long means using turbo warrants or similarly leveraged derivatives to bet on rising market prices requires careful consideration of your financial situation, risk tolerance and current market conditions. Since turbo long refers to a high risk leveraged financial product. Anyways, it breaks it down for me. I don't think it necessarily

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Does it make a recommendation, though?

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  It says, not advisable for most investors.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:59Jordi Hays?

  Should I ask it? But what if I'm built different?

• 37:05John Coogan?

  Well, we're

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  It says, haha, love the confidence. If you're built different and ready to roll the dice with a turbo long, let's cut through the noise and get real.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, honestly, it says if you're gonna do it, pick the right asset.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  Which is good advice. If you're gonna invest, invest in the good companies.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  It doesn't feel like talking to somebody. I would expect someone with with with super intelligence to have like strong opinions. And I feel like none of the AIs really have like

• 37:33Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, this is pretty, pretty sound advice.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  So the pro move is test your turbo long strategy on a demo account.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  To see if you're as different as you think without torching real cash.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  It does say not financial advice. Well, I'm gonna take it as financial advice.

• 37:50John Coogan?

  Tyler, have you been playing with Grok four at all?

• 37:52Speaker 02

  I have not.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  No?

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  Alright, well, sign up, sign up, sign up for.

• 37:56John Coogan?

  What about the, what about the new web browser?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm using the perplexity web browser. It's called Comet.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Okay, how is it?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  It's pretty cool. I mean, it's so.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Pitch me it. Like, why would I use that instead of Chrome?

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think the main thing is like, it can read what's on your screen.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  It can also like, sometimes interact with stuff on your screen.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  So I'm in Google Sheets right now. I have this list of names.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Uh, and I'm trying to get like, okay, where do these people work?

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  And so first I said, um, just give me a list of, of people on the screen and put that into the chat. And then I said, okay, where does people work? It gave me that and then it started to like load them in, like it would interact with the Google sheet. It would like input them in, which is like super useful.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  That's pretty cool.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  But then it kind of started breaking. So it's like, I, I think the product is like very early on still.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  But, and it's also pretty slow.

• 38:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  But I think this like, kind of paradigm, if it was, if it was like super fast and like much kind of cleaner.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  I think it'd be really useful.

• 38:54John Coogan?

  So, um, I'm hearing like it saves you a copy paste from like copying the sheet into a different tab of like chat GPT, basically.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  That, that's the first thing.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  It basically just moves two tabs into one.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  How does, how does the, how does the search is like, I'm assuming the default search is perplexity?

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  How fast is that?

• 39:13Speaker 02

  So that's pretty quick. Um, it's just when it's like interacting with the page, it's like really slow.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Interesting. Um, how, how does it compare to Cluley? Like the, like the, I don't know, the, the design trade off of like new browser, interacting with like only the website versus like the whole computer?

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Cluley is definitely more catered toward like the video call or like video input, audio input.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  It's like, I think that it's kind of different use cases.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Because.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Cluley's also more like proactive, right? Like, like, I would ask you a question over Zoom.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  And Cluley would just hear that question and automatically query it.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  As you've been browsing around with the perplexity Comet browser, has it ever just done something without you take, without you being like, go do a thing?

• 40:05Speaker 02

  No.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  No, okay.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  It's always like, I prompt it, it gives me something.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Where Cluley is like, you have it running and then.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  You can, you can query it, but it also will just give you stuff.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  I feel like this is that, this is that debate about like push versus pull from AI. Like, if I have to, if I have to tell the computer to go do something versus like, it does it preemptively for me, proactively for me. I'm thinking about like, Google Chrome will do like auto translation on websites. Like, if you land on a Spanish language website, it will just be, it'll just understand that you want it translated into English. It'll translate it and then just re-render it. And then it pops up a little bar at the top and then you can choose to go back to the Spanish language one, if you speak Spanish, I guess. And I feel like chopping down some of those like proactive ones. And you see this with like, when I go to the Wall Street Journal, they already, they have an AI on their side, an LLM summary

• 40:58John Coogan?

  for like three bullet points from every article. And they do that proactively on their side. I don't have to ask it. So there's always this question of like, where's the right place for the, for the interaction to sit? How expensive or wasteful is it just to like, do that interaction on everything? But like, you could imagine a situation where the browser, every time you hit a news website, it's, it's pre-populating the obvious questions or the extra, one layer deeper or one layer shallower. Like, here's a summary of what you're reading. And then here's extra context on things that are one layer deeper. Because when I go to a website or an article, I'm usually trying to understand like, give me the high level and then give me like, if I went through and clicked on every person in this article

• 41:42John Coogan?

  and went to their Wikipedia, that's usually how I browse. And so I guess if it could do that a little bit faster, that might be valuable.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it'd be cool. I mean, there's always a worry about you're basically just like have this like bar on the side that's just full of slop. If it's just like summarizing your page.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I also wonder about it in the context of that meter results like. Like, uh, Dorkesh has a post here. He says, surely this doesn't have any implications for how I use AI. And whether I'm fooling myself about how much more effective it's making my podcast prep, right? And I think that there might be something there where it's like. It's like, I could just read a Wall Street Journal article here.

• 42:24John Coogan?

  Or I could pull up a Wall Street Journal article with a sidebar of like. Chat GPT summary and also chat GPT extra queries to give me more data. But at a certain point, like, I just have to get the information into my brain one way or another. And so. Giving me like three layers of abstraction on top of it. It's like, it's not necessarily. Improving the actual time for me to understand what's going on with buyout firms poaching young bankers.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  The question is like, it's much faster to read a great summary of something. But you're gonna affect if you spend 10 seconds reading it, you're gonna retain a lot less of the context and the relevant information if you just spent five minutes reading the article.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:04Jordi Hays?

  So with chat GPT. Like, style summaries, do you just need to, like, spend, do you still need to spend? Five minutes of time reading a bunch of different summaries around the same topic in order to get the same level of of context?

• 43:19John Coogan?

  I think there's two things. Like, one is that, like, there's just no substitute for spending a full day with a topic. Like, reading a book and researching something and reading as much as you can about a topic, talking to people about a topic. Like, the more time that you spend on a topic. It, like, whether it's searching chat GPT or reading Wikipedia or reading articles or talking to people, like. It's just, the more time you spend with something, the more information you're compressing, whether that's a ton of summaries or a ton of long form. Like, there's just no substitute for, like, the amount of time that you put into something. Because if you're like, you read a summary of a book that was really good and I read the full book. I'm just, and I spent five hours with it and you spent one hour, like. I just have an advantage over you on the information. And then on the flip side, it's like, there is an art to summarization.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Like, the work of a great biographer is to summarize someone's life. And to summarize all these conversations that they have with about all the people around that person and read all the books about that person. And like, when you think about, like, you know, David Senra with the Founders Podcast, like, he reads a book, he summarizes it. But he does it in a way that is like 10 out of 10. And I feel like all the LLMs are very like mid at stuff generally. And they do, and they do a very 5 out of 10 job, like, like Dorkesh said.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is the crazy thing. R for Rock on X reported yesterday that this company, Headway, which is the number one book summary app, just released a Series A. Or, sorry, they just did a Series A. They are at 200 million of ARR, growing 2X year over year with 30% net income.

• 44:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  And you would just think that that business would be getting destroyed by.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  So I saw that and I was thinking about Francois Chalet had a tweet about this. Chalet, am I gonna find this? Chalet, how do I spell Francois Chalet? Here we go. He had, he had a post here that said, in my personal experience with Duolingo, I found that it isn't an education app, it's a mobile game. It's completely ineffective at teaching you languages, but it's quite entertaining and great at making you feel like you're learning. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that company is, in fact, less about actually teaching you that information any faster. And more just about repurposing information in an entertaining way. And it's giving you some sort of value that way.

• 45:45John Coogan?

  And so you're happy to pay for it because it's, it's just a good way to spend your time. And so I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if like, there's, there hasn't been any massive breakthrough in how you deliver information to a human being. Like, their brain has a certain IO and you have to get the information in. We don't just have like the matrix where you just go, now I know Kung Fu, right? That's not what we've created.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  But repurposing stuff in like a fun and different format certainly seems like it has value to the tune of Sirius Financials for that company. And, and I, I wouldn't, and I would say like, that, that is not, that is not. That company's success is very much independent of like actually game changing artificial intelligence. It's more about the actual implementation of the app and the experience of using the app.

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Anything else from the browser, browser wars?

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  Get on Dia, try it out.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Keep, keep playing around with it.

• 46:41John Coogan?

  Keep playing around with it.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  Can you download Dia?

• 46:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, download Dia and let us know which one you'd pick over those two because they're both AI browsers. OpenAI is going to have one in maybe a couple of weeks, I think. That was the Reuters reporting. So we'll have to try that too. Demo all these, see what is happening.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  The browser wars brought to you by Chromium, by Google Chrome.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  Well, the browsers will definitely be designed in Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams, build products together, get started for free. We should read through Joe Weisenthal's analysis because he says green shoots for the economy. I was texting with him. I said, there's so many top signals. He said, there's been top signals my entire career. Maybe this time is different, we'll see. He says it's not just the stock market that's booming. There are signs that the US economy has some wind in its back right now. And this is what was interesting about the Zerp era, even though there was so much froth, so many overfunded companies at 100 million, 100x ARR, it didn't destroy America because

• 47:44John Coogan?

  the health of the consumer, the health of the core economy was actually doing pretty well. There was just this like this tech layer on top that was extremely frothy, but the baseline of like where mortgages were, how much debt people had, defaults on car loans, all of that stuff was much, much more stable than 2008. And so that's why we didn't go into like a depression after SVB crashed. We just went into like what most people would call like a correction, not a depression. So that's interesting. So Joe is breaking it down and we're going to talk to Sean Frank about this too. The Amazon Prime Day sales data came out. So I completely missed it. Prime Day is in the summer. It's not Black Friday.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  It's like the, the opposite time of the year.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Smart for Amazon to basically be like, we're going to have two Black Fridays.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  It works, but apparently Prime Day sales dropped.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  And he says, well, Prime Day sales may be a worrisome signal about US economic momentum. I want to observe the counterpoint and the fact that maybe the economy is seeing some green shoots. But before I talk about the economy, let me talk about the market for a second. Despite all the uncertainty and negative seeming news developments, the lines keep going up. Trump recently announced 50% tariffs on Brazil due to the country's treatment of its former president. Nobody cares. Trump talked about more aggressive tariffs on Japan and Korea. Barely a blip. Maybe this, maybe the story is that none of these things will have much bearing on the major market growth drivers, namely AI, so they don't matter. Maybe the story is that Trump will cave in the end and so these headlines are just noise. We've seen this before, but I don't really know. Either way.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's the panic-ins getting off the sidelines.

• 49:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they learned their lesson if they sold at the bottom when Trump was saying like, don't panic, we're going up. Like, they feel stung by that. And so, you know, people learn the most recent lesson, most recently. But either way, there's just not a lot of sensitivity in the market to all of the latest headlines. Okay, but back to the real economy. Here, here the picture is mixed because actually some of the indicators seem to be going in a positive direction. So for example, initial jobless claims, a number I like to track closely, have actually fallen for four straight weeks. Today's Delta Airlines is surging 15% after the company reinstated its earnings forecast and said that demand is coming back. People are flying more.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  According to tracking from Civics, which runs a massive ongoing survey online, perceptions about the economy while still net negative are at their highest levels in years. And this is the chart that I think the guys were pulling up. It's a little bit hard to see because it's very wide. But basically, from 2017 to 2020, everyone was very optimistic about the condition of the national economy. Through Inauguration Day, the tax law sign, the stock market dropped, stocks began to decline. But people were still optimistic about the economy. And then coronavirus kind of changed everything. There was this massive, massive drop where we were hitting circuit breakers like every day for like weeks. It was terrible. I remember it very vividly.

• 50:54Jordi Hays?

  We barely had sports.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we barely had sports. Yeah, the NBA canceling was crazy. That was like the, okay, wow, this is really, really serious.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  I think everybody was looking around saying.

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  We're living through history right now and I, and I actually don't like it.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone lost their jobs who is in like retail or any sort of service industry. And then the NBA players lost their jobs because they're like, yeah, you can't even play basketball. And so it was, it was a disaster and, and since then, uh, the reporting for the last five years from the survey has been net negative, basically, but it's at its highest rate in, uh, in basically years. Um, and so all the way through inauguration day, still negative and, and, uh, dropping through Russia invading Ukraine and then, uh, dropped after the tariff inauguration day and, and the tariff announcement, um, but is climbing back up, which Joe is highlighting as, uh, potential

• 51:52John Coogan?

  green shoots. Um, so he says, yesterday, the New York Fed released its latest survey of consumer expectations and it said that respondents are anticipating lower inflation, improving job prospects and, and expect easier access to credit. A big theme from a month ago was that the economy was decelerating, but the Fed might hold off on rate cuts because of uncertainty about the ultimate tariff levels. But it also seems plausible, at least right now, based on a little smattering of data, that part of the story here is economic tailwinds. Oh, and by the way, Citi's US economic surprise index, which gauges how all data is coming in relative to expectations, recently turned positive again. It's good news. So, you know, I don't know, all these top signals, it might be, might be too much top signal, might be, might be too early, you know?

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we might just be getting started.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also Citi, uh, put on a buy rating on one of the companies that you were talking about.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  Which one?

• 52:46John Coogan?

  I forget. One of the ones that was like, was like an example of, of, of a top signal. Citi was like, buy it. I forget which one. Uh, maybe, I don't know. But. Switching gears. Vanta real quick. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  It's sock to time. Time for a debate.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  Time for a debate.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  The great debate.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Sean McGuire versus Augustus D'Arcy. Good friends of the show, hung out with them both multiple times. Very interesting PR dustups.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  This week, very, very interesting how they got in the pickle they got in.

• 53:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  The different pickles and then different strategies getting out of it. And I want to compare them and see if there's any lessons from how you should handle a bunch of negative attention. And so Augustus, we had him on the show Monday, was, was, was sort of like being attacked or canceled, but by the right, by the far right, by conspiracy theorists, kind of the, the tinfoil hat, right wing crowd all around this idea that he was cloud seeding, what, two days before the massive floods in Texas that wound up killing a lot of people. And so it was this very, very serious scenario. People were dead. It was, it was a natural disaster and he kind of was just going about his business,

• 54:13John Coogan?

  like cloud seeding, oh, someone bought it here. I'm going to go deliver it. I'm going to, someone bought it there. He's running his business and then he gets dragged into this thing and he has to all of a sudden.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, very fair and, and good that people were asking questions.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  Like natural process.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  Like the question should be asked.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  Teach cloud seeding in high school. So I think.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  And it's a, and it's a scary topic. People are gen- generally kind of wary of weather modification, whether it's from a religious angle or health reasons or chemtrails or whatever, whatever they sort of subscribe to.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  I think it was right for people to ask questions.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  So many examples throughout history of like, of like, there's a technology that's great. It has a promise to do X, Y, or Z. And then there's like a negative side effect that comes out of that. And so Augustus has had to, he just got sucked into this because there's like this very acute story about the Texas floods and he's right there. And, and so he has to go explain cloud seeding and what he does and make his case as aggressively as possible. Sean McGuire, on the other hand, kind of waded into a debate or like a like an argument over Mom Donnie, the mayor of New York, in a very different world. Like Sean lives in

• 55:39John Coogan?

  California, is a tech investor, is not directly affected by by New York City politics and could have stayed out of it entirely and instead was like proactively attacking.

• 55:52Jordi Hays?

  He's not known for staying out of it.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  No, no, the man loves the debate. He loves to fight. And so.

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think his position generally was you need to be vocal and loud about extremism.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:06Jordi Hays?

  And whether or not people believe that Zoh- Zoh- uh.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Zoran.

• 56:11Jordi Hays?

  Zoran.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Zoran.

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  Zohan, uh, Zoran.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Not Zohan. That's the Adam Sandler movie.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Um, whether or not people believe that Mom Donnie is an extremist personally, I've seen some of his old posts.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  It seems like it has some very extreme views at times.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Maybe he's changed, maybe he hasn't. He's kind of gone back and forth. He was saying defund the police. Now he's saying he doesn't want to do that.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  He did. He did. And Sean's, one of Sean's points was that, uh, Mom Donnie, uh, was sort of celebrating the third Antifaada. And I believe that Sean brought up that the last Antifaada, there was a bunch of suicide bombings. It's like kind of a crazy thing to promote.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  But the interesting point is that, is that Sean could have, if Sean hadn't posted, he, no one would be talking about Sean McGuire. Right? But Augustus didn't come out and comment on anything and everyone was asking him for comment. Like it hit the timeline from other people.

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  Sean's crisis started with a Sean post. So it's, it's a very different, like inciting, inciting element.

• 57:22Jordi Hays?

  Creation versus reaction.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, something like that. And so my, my question is like, does that necessitate a different calm strategy? Because they had very different calm strategies. So. What did Augustus do? He went direct, right? And was posting his side and his data and his opinions and engaging with everyone that was attacking him, quote tweeting them and doing it in a way that was like slightly funny, but also very serious, sharing as much data. And I think very do being very diligent about like speaking their own language.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. He sees if he sees a post pop up that's going viral.

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  He's jumping on it.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  He puts it in the comments and then he also quote tweets it.

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  And and then also he went direct to a lot of the big platforms.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  Yes, I have a list here.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  That the critiques were coming from.

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  So he came on our show Monday.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  We had a good conversation.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  He did like a an X space that day too.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep. And then he proceeded to go on CNN.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  Fox News, Pirate Wires, Infowars, Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck and Tim Poole, all within the span.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  And those are all conservative outlets, basically.

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  While working with a bunch of other legacy media outlets to provide more context.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  There's a Washington Post article here now.

• 58:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:38John Coogan?

  And so he's gone across the the spectrum. What's interesting is that Sean has not done any interviews, I believe. And he hasn't and he certainly hasn't like reached across the aisle to his attackers and said like, I'm going to engage with you. And maybe that's the right move. I don't know.

• 58:57Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I mean, I think he's been engaging over and over on the timeline.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  I don't think he commented on that Wall Street Journal article.

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm not saying he wasn't doing. He wasn't taking the the sort of traditional media approach, but he's been very active and engaging with people bringing up.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  On X.

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  Saying, hey, like, basically, the key point, the key issue was the definition of Islamist. Many people saw that and thought he was putting all Muslims in a bucket.

• 59:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  His his intention and approach was to point out extremism.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  Islamist extremism. And and I think that just got like oftentimes in a in a in a post, context is lost. And so he was basically like trying to set the record straight. Also did a 30 minute.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  Like a 30 minute video talking through kind of the original post and some of the reactions to it.

• 59:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, so for me, it highlights like the two different styles of going direct. There's going direct where you control 100% of the channel that your content is going out on. So it's your X account, it's a video that you create and you upload, it's a post that you write. And then there's going direct where you're not sending a liaison to CNN, but you are going on CNN. And that's, and so Augustus did this interesting thing where like, he definitely like went direct, but he also, he also did all of the legacy media stuff. Like Fox News is legacy media, CNN is like legacy media and not in the traditional going direct playbook,

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  but there's like this evolution. And, and I think it's risky, like it is risky to go into someone else's platform. You go on Infowars is going to have a certain aesthetic. You go on CNN, they might ask you some really hard question that you're not prepared for. They might try and make you look bad. Like this was the, this was the narrative around these, like around the whole move of like, just go direct. Don't talk to the press directly. Don't let them tell your story, tell your own story. Well, he's doing both and it's interesting because it feels like it's working for Augustus. Like it feels like he handled this pretty well. I would give him, I would give him a lot of credit. With Sean, it's interesting, he did send out, there have been a few surrogates. So Joe Longsdale went on TV and defended it and kind of explained it, but Sean didn't.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  And I think that, I think these both might be good strategies. I'm not really like, oh, you know, there's a one size fits all here. They're very different situations.

• 1:01:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bill Ackman came out in support of Sean. There was a great post from Pat Grady, Sequoia Partner. Pat said yesterday, "This tweet expresses a personal view. I'm not very vocal on Twitter and I'm sure this tweet will piss people off. If you're looking for drama, this is probably not it." This will be very disappointing to people with extreme views of any kind. And that's sort of the point. The purpose of this tweet is twofold, to express my support for the Muslim community and to express my support for my partner, Sean McGuire. Pat says, "Some of my best friends are Muslim. They are warm, kind, wonderful people. I love them like family. They are feeling fear right now, fear for the safety of their families. This is not hypothetical. These are real people, loving parents and their sweet children, who aren't sure if they can live here anymore." He goes on to say, "Some of my best friends are Jewish.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  They are warm, kind, wonderful people. I love them like family. They too have felt their fair share of fear over and over again for generations. This is not the experience any American of any background should have in this country. This is not what made America the greatest country on earth. Muslims are not the enemy. Jews are not the enemy. Extremists are the enemy. And when we let them sow the seeds of fear, fear of the other, we are letting them win." So basically goes on to say that this is really not about different cultures and peoples, more about kind of, yeah. Long story short, you don't want to let the extremists win.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, or like put you in the bucket of extremists.

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep. So anyways, interesting, interesting response. Both, both of them are not, you know, these will be ongoing.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder what the takeaway is for like with, with Rainmaker, like the core claim of the controversy was directly about Rainmaker's business. And essentially it was in so many ways existential to Rainmaker, because there's like proposed bans of the technology, right? And then there's also just the question of like, should cloud seeding be done at all or not, right? And that was like the vibe online was like, that was where the debate was. Whereas people are not debating like, should Sequoia invest in tech companies, right? It's like a completely separate thing.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  And so maybe it does merit like a different approach in terms of like PR management? I don't know. I think they both handled it well. I don't know that I would recommend anything differently. I'm just wondering if, I guess the big question is like, like, when should, when should you step outside your core competency?

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  I think it's interesting to think about reach with these two strategies. I would imagine that Sean has actually had more like reach, like actual eyeballs on his content.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:04:24Jordi Hays?

  Just kind of estimating based on how viral some of his posts have gone. I would assume he's gotten 50 million views on his posts this week.

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Jordi Hays?

  Like a really, really crazy number.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  And Augustus has gone on all these different platforms, but I imagine the actual reach is far lower when you add, you know, if you go on, if you go on Fox News on some random show, there might be 100,000 people that watch that segment.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, but maybe that's better because like the people like with, with Sean, like he's trying to, he's trying to fight back against something that's like a general vibe or a general accusation of a bad vibe, which is like Islamophobia, right? Whereas Augustus is trying to fight against like very precise, you know, pushback against his exact company and like the work that he's doing precisely. And so if I'm thinking about like, who is Sean talking to? He's talking to like the broad audience of like people that perceive him as a person in tech.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  And if I think about Augustus, he's thinking about like.

• 1:05:31Jordi Hays?

  How do I save weather modification as an industry in the country?

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  Totally, like specific regulators, specific politicians and specific like, and also like the local people in, who live down the street from the farmer who's going to pay for cloud seeding, who might go to their, you know, city council meeting and say, not in my backyard. So it's like, it's people that are, I, I feel like the, the pushback against Sean was very like broad and just like bad tech guy vibes, like, like just like negative broadly on the left and the folks that support Mumdani, they all like kind of just broadly don't like Sean right now because of what he said. With Augustus, it's like, there are a few people who were completely animated by the

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  theory that he was responsible for the floods. And so he had to address them really deeply.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's defending his business, his industry, his actions.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. The question for me is like, is like. There are times when someone who, when someone needs to like step up or stand up outside of their core business and this kind of bridges to the Brian Armstrong piece at Coinbase about being like mission driven, which was basically like, in that context, it was like Coinbase is not going to be commenting on all of the current things that are happening in the world. All the different politics, like we're going to be focused on stuff that's related to crypto. And, and that was really well received. Then the question is like, for venture capitalists, should they only step up and start talking about politics when it's like a ban on an important

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  technology or a change to the way, you know, carried interest is handled? Or should they go as far as to say, you know what, like I care about what's happening in New York City, even though I don't live there?

• 1:07:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think that's like, it's certainly like, it's certainly like the riskiest, like you're, you're, you're the furthest away from something where you'll immediately have everyone in your industry rally around you or everyone in your, because it's like, well, this is very core to their business. But at the same time, it's like, you know, there, there is some value to just being like, this, this is less of just like an investor. This is just like a person and they have opinions about everything. And so I'm interested to talk to them and work with them. Cause I, and it also, I mean, in the original post, like he, he did throw up a massive flag that was just like, I'm pro capitalist. That's pro America. Right? And so the question of like, does this hurt Sequoia? I think we were talking about this earlier. It's like, no, because the people that were really bothered by this or like, didn't get through this nuance

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  and understand the pack radio response and understand him unpacking it, like probably were not in, going to be in this Sequoia portfolio. Right? So, I don't know.

• 1:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:20John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Go to Linear.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Get your golden retriever set up on Linear. It's one of the greatest gifts that you can give them.

• 1:08:36John Coogan?

  What else is in the timeline we should go through? There's so many good stories. We should go through this story in the mansion section. Let's do that.

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Finally.

• 1:08:46John Coogan?

  There's a bunch of stuff.

• 1:08:48Jordi Hays?

  A California ranch is for sale for about 50 million.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  I really like this. There were two very interesting houses in the mansion section today, and they're both being sold by tech founders who I've never heard of. And some of them don't, one of them doesn't exist online. So this guy, Don, tech entrepreneur Don McKinney, found himself at a crossroads in 2014 after four consecutive startups. Crazy. Including one that sold to Lucen Technology for billions of dollars.

• 1:09:21Jordi Hays?

  I give him permission to call himself a serial entrepreneur.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  He's the Don.

• 1:09:25Jordi Hays?

  If you started four companies and you sold one for a billion, you can put serial entrepreneur in your bio.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  Billions.

• 1:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Billions.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. I need to figure out exactly the whole deal here. I think this is, yeah, they have it here. So he basically, instead of doing another business, he basically retired and started building a crazy house. He chose the latter. He purchased roughly 1,100 acres of ranch space in Sonoma, California for 12 million and painstakingly restored it, spending 33 million over the years. Now McKinney is looking to sell the ranch, which has multiple residences, two lakes, four greenhouses, and a custom wood shop for around 50 million, known as Sonoma Summit Ranch. The ranch is perched at the top of Sonoma Mountain, about an hour from San Francisco. That is prime.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Great, great option for a, you know, a GP at a platform fund that wants to maintain proximity.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  I was about to say, you know, is it really worth spending half of your bonus as an AI researcher on one house?

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  Or is that?

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, in many ways, your full bonus post-tax.

• 1:10:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That's a good point.

• 1:10:33Jordi Hays?

  That's some ordinary income, right?

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  That's really, really rough. Anyway.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  A Florida native, McKinney started his tech career in Silicon Valley in the 1980s as a founding vice president. Let's give it up for all the vice presidents out there. Of Sales at Silicon Graphics.

• 1:10:49John Coogan?

  That was a storied firm.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Which worked on 3D imaging.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  In 1991, he founded International Network Services. Fantastic name, which was acquired by Lucent in 1999 for 3.7 billion.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  1999 selling? What are you doing, buddy?

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think he timed it.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  Are you selling the top?

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  I think he timed it perfectly.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  You hold on to that stock for two more years.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  International Network Services. They don't make names.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  They don't name companies like this anymore.

• 1:11:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, actually, they do now. People are bringing it back.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:11:16Jordi Hays?

  What was the company we talked about earlier this week that was like?

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  It was Wisconsin or?

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that was just a fan writing in.

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, but it's just real company.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, real, real company, but not like hyped company.

• 1:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, soon to be hyped.

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  Soon to be hyped, yeah, maybe, maybe. Yeah, let's look at this.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  By the mid 2000s, McKinney, a conservation advocate, was looking for a ranch to preserve when he heard about an available 1,000-acre ranch that had been owned by a single family for years.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:11:41Jordi Hays?

  By sheer coincidence, McKinney, an avid fisherman, had caught a

• 1:11:44John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  1,119-pound marlin.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  A 1,000?

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so I have to actually, I have to correct this. So the ranch was 1,119 acres. And by coincidence, he had caught a 1,000

• 1:11:56John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:11:57Jordi Hays?

  119-pound marlin in a fishing tournament a few years earlier. He took the parallel as a sign and bought the property.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  I, I've never been big into that world.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  No?

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  I've nev-, I don't think I've actually ever.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  I've caught 150-pound halibut in Alaska.

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:12:14John Coogan?

  And I did it when I was a kid. It weighed more than me at the time.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  It was the biggest, like, boost to my ego of all time. I conquered an animal that was bigger than me.

• 1:12:23Jordi Hays?

  Every person, every person should do that at least once.

• 1:12:25John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  I gotta do that.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  1,000-pound marlin, that is a huge, huge fish. So the ranch hadn't been touched in years. McKinney said he relished the opportunity to dig in. After tackling the ranch infrastructure, he turned to the main house, originally built in the 1950s. Many windows didn't close. It was not clear where the front door was located. He took the roughly 4,240-foot square house down to the studs and rebuilt it. One by one, he rebuilt the other outbuildings, he said, including the circa 1930s cottage and a horse barn, which is now a party barn.

• 1:12:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  Let's go. A skilled woodworker. He also added a 5,200.

• 1:13:01Jordi Hays?

  He's a skilled woodworker?

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  He's just building his own. This is.

• 1:13:04Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:13:04John Coogan?

  This is like the dream, right?

• 1:13:06Jordi Hays?

  So the interesting thing here, the interesting thing here, he bought this property. Uh, when, so he.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  He bought it in 2014?

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  The mid 2000s. Was it 2014 or the mid 2000s?

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Oh, I guess he started working on the, on the.

• 1:13:22Jordi Hays?

  The remodel.

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  The remodel, yeah.

• 1:13:24Jordi Hays?

  So he's $45 million into this property, selling it for 50, but he bought it in the mid 2000s.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  So on paper.

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

  Probably did the best.

• 1:13:34Jordi Hays?

  Not the best return, but.

• 1:13:35John Coogan?

  But he probably had such a fantastic time with it.

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Returns on.

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  He also has a home in the Bahamas. Uh, and, uh, he is selling, so he and his partner have more time and resources to devote to philanthropy. We can't, uh, we wait until, uh, why wait until we kick off and then have our estate dole it out? He said, let's participate now. That's great.

• 1:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Chad.

• 1:13:57John Coogan?

  Uh, the market for prime ranches is strong, thanks to liquidity, among other high net worth buyers. Probably those AI researchers, unironically. Uh, there's a lot of people hedging in land. Yeah. You know, if you're worried about the top signals, buy some land.

• 1:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Buy a ranch.

• 1:14:11John Coogan?

  Anyway, um, get on numeral too, numeralhq.com, sales tax autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. So there's another, there's another story in the mansion.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  Platform of John Coogan.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  It is. I use it. Uh, there's another tech person who has a $50 million home or just slightly under 49, uh, 49.5 million. This is an 8,000 square foot, nine bedroom home with a tennis court and a pool. Uh, and you're gonna, you're gonna love this. I don't think you've read this yet.

• 1:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm gonna blow your mind. So, uh, a circa 1930s estate, just a few houses from the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles is coming on the market for 49.5 million. The roughly 8,000 square foot, nine bedroom estate was the longtime home of the late inventor Ronald Katz and his wife, Madeline Katz. Ronald was best known for a series of patents that revolutionized automated customer service and telephones. And for making breakthroughs in credit card technology.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so if I'm hearing this correctly, sort of like AI agents for CX?

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:15:15Jordi Hays?

  Sort of like, you know, a vintage version of Finn?

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I mean, I'm very excited to be hanging out with Owen in a few years. Hopefully he's patented Finn, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive backups, number one ranking on G2. But yes, so this guy has a whole Wikipedia page that we can pull up. We're looking for Ronald Katz. I think I have it in here somewhere. Let me see. They got so much stuff here.

• 1:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Ronald?

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  We're not getting through any of this. Where is it? Ronald Katz? Okay, Ronald Katz, yes. So his inventions are primarily in the field of automated call center technology. He has more than 50 patents covering his innovations. Patents, I know so many people who have like generational wealth from patents. It's crazy. And it just seems like it's something that just doesn't exist in our generation. It's a lost art. Toll-free numbers.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how to patent in this country anymore.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  We don't know how to patent. It's completely a lost art. Actually, the person who bought my first company was a patent guy. He went to college and studied like chemical engineering and built a bunch of patents for like lubricating petroleum as it flows through oil pipelines. And he came up with some chemistry, patented it. And then he was like, yeah, in college, I was getting like 100K a month from licensing my patents or something like that, like sick.

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was a time when it seemed like the play was to develop technology, patent it and license it out to companies. And then now if an entrepreneur comes to you with an idea.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  It's a bad signal.

• 1:16:56Jordi Hays?

  And they say, yeah, like I'm working on patents. It almost always is a huge bear signal. It's like.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  It is such a lost art. We don't.

• 1:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Develop something and then capitalize on it yourself.

• 1:17:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08Jordi Hays?

  Because it is like that you can, you can definitely, if you get it right, you can make a lot more money from delivering the technology or whatever it is via your own product and capturing that incremental margin.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  It's interesting because the you'd think that the passive income bros would be super into patents, right? They'd be like, just become the world expert in a certain field, get a PhD in it, spend 10 years researching the frontier, and then develop an innovation, patent it, and then just cash flow free, you know, lifestyle forever.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  I do have one, I do have one friend that had something like this, where he developed this supplement and effectively licensed it to a company and was, has just been getting millions of dollars a year for his, for coming up on like 15 years.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  Did I tell you I have a patent?

• 1:18:01Jordi Hays?

  Ah, big patent guy. Maybe it's not a lost art.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  I don't make any like cash flow off of it, though. But I have a patent for breakers. The capsule. I can hear that. I don't even have the I M. I can hear you. Yeah, I have a patent on the capsule pouch, the capsule nicotine pouch.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic innovation.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Invented. John Coogan, the inventor. I love it. Anyway.

• 1:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Marlboro.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  Not quite, not quite the portfolio of Ronald Katz. I'll take you through a little bit of his history. It's interesting. So born 1936. In 1961, he co-founded Telecredit with Robert Goldman. It was the first company to enable merchants to verify consumer checks over the phone using an automated system without the assistance of a live operator. So it's, this is 61, 61, like totally pre-internet. Someone says, I'm gonna write you a check. How do you verify that they, that they have it? You have to call the company and say, do they have money in their bank account?

• 1:19:02Jordi Hays?

  It's an agentic workflow.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  It's an agentic, it literally is, because it cut out the live operator. That was the telephone operator. It's actually an agentic workflow. You're 100% right. I know you're joking, but it's true. And so in 1988, he forms a partnership with Amex to provide call processing services. That partnership later became First Data Corporation. And so he founded Ronald Katz Technology Licensing. And I feel like First Data, isn't First Data huge? First Data is the, is the, is the layer below Stripe, right? I'm pretty sure.

• 1:19:36Jordi Hays?

  There's a layer below Stripe?

• 1:19:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure Stripe is, uses, uses First Data for acquisition of credit cards. I'm, I'm pretty sure it's the first processor of Visa and Mastercard. And so I don't know if they use, that might be misinformation. I don't know if Stripe uses First Data still, but I remember that like, there is a lower level below Stripe and, and First Data was like one of those. But Ronald Katz, where, where was this founded? Yeah, Nebraska. So he, so Katz gets in there. Anyway, he also had the patent portfolio that for companies using automated call centers, over 150 companies have taken a license to patents. The technology licensing company that he has earned approximately a billion dollars

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  in license fees, such as suing accused infringers who take a license. He also founded Telebuyer LLC, a privately held company that commercializes inventions he made relating to electronic commerce and network-based monitoring systems. In the early 90s Katz developed a computer-controlled video system for monitoring remote locations and an advanced scheduling and routing system for telephone and video communications. Katz leverages his knowledge and work in these areas to create an electronic commerce system to help businesses reach customers in remote locations.

• 1:20:53Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love all these words.

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  B2B SaaS founder, absolutely insane. It's wild. So anyway, his house is on the market. It was built around the same time as the Playboy mansion. It, the home resembles an English country house with tennis court and pool. It sits on roughly one and a half acres in Holby Hills overlooking the Los Angeles Country Club on Mapleton Drive, one of LA's most storied streets. It's also adjacent to Spelling Mansion. You know Spelling Manor? Spelling Manor? Have you ever heard of this? Aaron Spelling, he was a big TV guy. He made, and he built the largest home in Los Angeles, something like a hundred million dollars. It had a, it had a dedicated room for present wrapping.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  Because you're gonna wrap so many presents at that level. Like, there are levels to this, for sure. Like, oh, actually, when I moved into my, one of my first apartments, I got, like, when I started making money, young, I moved into, like, a, it was like a studio apartment. It was nice, but it was, it had no walls or anything, because it's like, open floor plan, because it's just studio, and I'm just one guy. And, and I had a, I had, there was room for, there was room for a washer dryer, but I didn't have a washer dryer, because we, like, send out the-

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  You made it a present room?

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  I made it a present wrapping station. And I put a little table there, and you could, like, work from it, but it was like, in the bathroom. And I was like, this is my version of a present wrapping room.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  Of a spelling.

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, I'm, I'm, I'm aesthetically, in, living in spelling manner.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  So the cats have spent years renovating the estate before moving.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Normal story here, the couple filled the home with art and collectibles from around the world. The game room includes antique billboards, billiards table, and vintage arcade games. Also on display was Madeline's collection of pigs, stuffed animals, ornaments, sculptures, and paintings. It became, it, it started with just a few pigs, and grew to become her thing. Two friends and family kept adding to the trope. The family plans to auction much of the home's contents. Have you heard about this? The, and what's it called? It's like, it's like the elephant problem, or the giraffe problem? There's a, there's a name for it, where, where you make golden retrievers your thing, and then everyone's like, oh, what should we get you? Oh, you like pigs. And then it snowballs, and then everyone gets you so many that over 20 or 30 years, you develop like this massive collection of trinkets.

• 1:23:12Jordi Hays?

  For you, it might be horse accessories. I got you those horse electrolytes. You can get just more and more supplements.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  You're not the first person to get me horse stuff. I told you, David used to get me mane and tail. The horse shampoo. Just as a joke, because I'm built like a horse, I guess. He thought it was very funny. I loved it.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  So, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe at the beginning of something.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  You didn't tell. By the way, great, great new cut.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Really into the horsepower metaphor. You know, he, he, he's obsessed with horses and stuff, you know? Everyone's got to have a brand. Anyway, what were you saying?

• 1:23:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I said, nice new haircut.

• 1:23:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, thank you.

• 1:23:46Jordi Hays?

  A horse could never.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  A horse could never. A horse could never. The horse hair is strong. It was breaking the scissors. We broke multiple pairs, but we did get it cut. It's thick, it's thick hair over here. But you know who else has like the, what's it called? It's like the grandma elephant problem or whatever. This, this woman who has this house has like an insane collection of pigs because she started collecting pigs. Everyone gave her pig stuff. Somebody said that Peter Thiel is the same thing with Tolkien.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  He named a few companies after Tolkien and now everyone's like, everything you do must be Tolkien referenced. Like if you are at all involved or whatever, like I'm getting you another copy of Tolkien. And, and like, you know, this person was kind of commenting like, you know, like, he might not watch the movie every night, you know? He might just be like generally a fan of that and then also a fan of other things.

• 1:24:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can be a fan of multiple things.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  But people tend to collapse the meme around you down to just like, oh, you're, you're not just, you're not just into Tolkien and other things. You're like the premier collector of Tolkien stuff. So, anyway.

• 1:24:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, in other news, we have a post from brother Reggie James, who's been on the show before. He says, I need TBPN to bring back Cougar Night at the Rosewood.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  Has it gone anywhere? Someone needs, if you're in Silicon Valley, go to the Rosewood and report.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  We gotta ask, we gotta ask Prank for exits.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  No, he might be aware.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  He gives some good coverage on Cougar Night. But we were, when we were at the Rosewood for staying there the night before YC Demo Day, you remember overhearing this like, the most, the most, there was, there was a, a, a man and a woman, like a table away from us, having the most deranged conversation, the most Rosewood-coded conversation of all time where I think she was divorced or going through divorce, talking about like breaking down, loudly breaking down their entire financial situation. And being like, basically like, I'm good because we have Carrie in this fund. That's, that's definitely going to hit in the next.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  Never have I wanted ClearView AI more. Are you familiar with ClearView AI?

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, like the software to identify.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, you take a picture of someone and it scans the internet and it tells you immediately who they are. And it's like very controversial and people are like, oh, this is like, you know, total like surveillance state stuff. But I would have loved to know who with one VC she was talking about. Because it was absolutely about that. There was other stuff.

• 1:26:14Jordi Hays?

  It was wildly appropriate.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I've been checking our credit card and we're just seeing like.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  He's hitting, he's hitting Nobu in every city. Absolutely wild. Well, Ryan has a good story here responding to Reggie's post. This is one time in 2012, my co-founder and I crashed and burned so hard in a pitch on Sand Hill. The partners wrapped with, look, it's Cougar Night. You guys would actually do pretty well there.

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  So that's the beauty of Sand Hill Road. You could crash and burn with a pitch.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  I don't even get this. I don't get this post. Like, why would they do well if they're?

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, like, maybe, maybe like they're just.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  Crashed and burned. Oh, oh, oh, oh, like the company has crashed and burned or something?

• 1:26:53Jordi Hays?

  They didn't do well on the pitch.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Okay, so he's like, maybe you can marry rich.

• 1:26:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  That's what he's saying. Okay, got it. That's hilarious.

• 1:27:01Jordi Hays?

  Couple of studs, head over to, head over to the Rosewood.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, underrated strategy. Go to the Rosewood. Talk to the Cougars. Sell them your product. If you're an SDR.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Just go and pull out Adio, custom relationship magic.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  Bringing Adio, having Adio on deck for Cougar Night is crazy.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Do you keep the Cougars in the CRM or? No.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  But, but they're potential like leads, right?

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  For sure. If you're selling to VC and there's a Cougar there who's, who's, maybe, maybe you could sell SaaS to that VC and it would re-inspire him to, to grind harder and save the relationship.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Save the relationship, yeah.

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  It's possible. Anything, anything can happen.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Anything can happen.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Nothing like, like the joy of implementing a new B2B SaaS product in your workflow, in your everyday workflow. If you do that, that could just reinvigorate your entire life.

• 1:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're just at Cougar Night.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Just can't stop talking to the Cougars about Agentic workflows.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  For saving your marriage.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  No, you're just like, why would I want to go on a bender and go to Nobu when I could be, you know, grinding? I've been reinvigorated.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Many people are saying that.

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Well, you know, we talked about the top signals, whether you're, whether you're long, whether you're short, you make your own decision, you make, you do your own research.

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Then do it on public.com.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Investing for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions.

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  And we had.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  Let's talk about the VW bus.

• 1:28:26Jordi Hays?

  We had Dylan Parker from Moment yesterday talking about his fix. He, he raised a series B for his fixed income.

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:34Jordi Hays?

  Platform. And he mentioned that they power Publix fixed income.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  So, very cool.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  Let's talk about the VW bus. So, the electric bus. The Wall Street Journal claims that it is a failure. We're going to figure it out. How Volkswagen's electric bus went from American flagship to flop. The German company's hyped reboot of its iconic vintage van has been stunted by a luxury price tag. Trump's trade war in an embarrassing recall. And so, this Wall Street Journal article goes through the, the, the kind of story of the ID Buzz, the new.

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Buzz.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Crazy name. We should talk about so much here. I mean, first off is like, I do not understand why a change in the powertrain requires a new brand name, a new sub brand name for a product. It should be like.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  I think it shows.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  In my opinion.

• 1:29:29Jordi Hays?

  It shows lack of conviction.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Like, I mean, BMW is doing this with like the I four instead of the, instead of the, the, the five, four, five, five thirty five I. The I five is going to be the electric one. And it just is.

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  We know somebody, we know somebody that if they, if BMW were to touch the M series, they would make Jan six look like a children's birthday party.

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  They'd be very upset about that. But, uh, so it was always confusing. Why didn't they just bring it back as like the bus? And now you can get it with an electric powertrain. But then also, it's like this fun. Kitchen nostalgic vehicle and what was the price tag on this thing? It was like 70,000 or something like that. So much money. Yeah. See, so even before the recall, the luxury sticker price of the ID Buzz, which starts at about $60,000, kept a break on sales as consumers pivoted to more affordable wheels in the U.S., where the vehicle became available toward the end of last year. Just over 3,000 had been shipped to dealers by the end of March. And then there was a slowdown in EV sales. The tax credits are going away and President Trump's tariffs

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  have caught automakers off guard. Very, very rough. Yeah. So in Dallas, European car enthusiast and parts supplier Autry McVickers said he was dead set on getting the Buzz until his dealer told him that the Palmello yellow and white version he had his eye on would cost around $72,000, far more than he expected. Yeah, this feels like, you know, premium SUV territory. So 45K, 50K, maybe 55K, 72 feels crazy for this. And, and it seemed like, I don't know why they couldn't get the price down. Do you think it's something to do with

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  just the actual manufacturing complexities of electric vehicles? Because Elon is able to sell a car that's similarly capable, although the Model Y has way more range and features. And so it's hard to go up against the, if you're, if you're comparing the Buzz to the Model Y on in a spreadsheet, you're going to get, okay, Buzz is like cool and different looking, but am I really willing to sacrifice so many features and pay twice as much?

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting. I'm seeing a original 1973 Volkswagen Buzz.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:56Jordi Hays?

  For sale for $65,000.

• 1:31:59Jordi Hays?

  It's got 85,000 miles on it.

• 1:32:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  It's seen a lot, but it's possible that, you know, who knows what went into kind of pricing it. But they might've said, hey, we're making this bus like for that category of that wants just kind of like a fun leisure vehicle.

• 1:32:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  It's not super functional. You're not going to drive it to the snow. You're not, you may be driving it around town, going to the beach, things like that. But it doesn't feel like a, it just doesn't look like a car that somebody's going to daily.

• 1:32:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Jordi Hays?

  And that feels like a huge problem. If it's 65K, the average American might, I don't know. I probably shouldn't say the average American, but, but middle-class family might say, hey, let's get the Volkswagen bus as our daily family car.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  But it doesn't, it just looks kind of funky and loud and I.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  It just sticks out. I mean, so, so in this article, they say that the ID Buzz in Germany, like the, the spokesman said that it was designed to be a halo car, like a halo product, which is, it sounds funny when you compare it to like the Audi R8, of course, but they said the goal is to bring drivers to showrooms and they're not really planning to sell in great numbers. So you're like, oh, that ID Buzz just does look different. When I go to get my next car, I should, I'm just sick of having like the same plain white SUV that looks like everything else. But then you go in and you're like, wait, how much is it? And, and is it really that much better than features against the VW Atlas, I guess is their, is their full-size SUV?

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  And so you walk out of there with an Atlas, which is probably around 55, 60, I guess. I actually don't know where that is.

• 1:33:37Jordi Hays?

  So you can get an Audi Q8, which is, feels much more like a premium product for the same price.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Jordi Hays?

  So, and it's, and it's just a lot more functional.

• 1:33:49John Coogan?

  How much did that, that Cullinan sell for on Cars and Bids that was like, it had like 200,000 miles?

• 1:33:54Jordi Hays?

  The one that I, the one that we were recommending people get is like a, a call booth for their office.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  We were recommending that? I don't remember that.

• 1:34:01Jordi Hays?

  Probably. I mean, we broadly were recommending, you know, picking up an old Continental GT instead of a, instead of a phone booth.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. So, so a Rolls-Royce Cullinan Black Badge, 2020, so it's only five years old. Sold for $170,000, just barely twice the price of the ID Buzz, but it has 114,000 miles on it.

• 1:34:24John Coogan?

  Can you imagine, can you imagine putting 114,000 miles on a Rolls Royce Cullinan in, in five years?

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  I can. I would love to.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  I would love to. I mean, that's, that's so, so many miles. But, but people were debating this, saying like, okay, yeah, if you're, if you're going, if you're putting that many miles, like it has to be highway miles. So they're not hard miles. Like it's probably fine. Like, uh, and, and Rolls Royce, you know, has a bad reputation as being like, you know, in the shop all the time. But if it made it this far, like maybe it'll make it another 100,000 miles and it like actually stays in good condition. So maybe it was the steal of a century at 170. Who knows? Could have been bombing around in a, in a Rolls Royce Cullinan. Um, anything else on the VW bus thing? I still think it's, I just think it's, it's, it is, it is hard that they priced it so

• 1:35:14John Coogan?

  high. Um, maybe, maybe the opportunity is more like, like, like Tesla just needs more different trim levels, but then needs to bring the manufacturing prowess to deliver things at more affordable prices. Because like, how different is the world if the Cybertruck is cheaper? Does it even need to be? Should it stay up there and be this halo car?

• 1:35:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing with a bus, I mean, as somebody who lives, I live in Malibu.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Jordi Hays?

  I bought a Mercedes Metris because I wanted like a, a family van, something I could drive around surfing with, et cetera. And I have zero interest in the Volkswagen electric bus. Uh, and that's, that's an issue. The other thing is if I was thinking about a car, if I wanted like, if, if I wanted a surf, like a, a car just to like trash and take to the beach and take surfing, you can get a Raptor for like 70.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  Raptors, such a funny.

• 1:36:11Jordi Hays?

  It's like, obviously very different, but if you're a dad that wants like a, a kind of a car you can like beat up and do a lot of things in and throw the kids in, do you want to drive this like novelty VW that's going to depreciate like 50% in a year or get a Raptor?

• 1:36:25John Coogan?

  I think it can be a very cute mom car and, and it can definitely, like if you look at Volkswagen's current SUV lineup.

• 1:36:33Jordi Hays?

  Does, do they really want the, the Buzz over like a Q7?

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  No, but isn't Audi a Volkswagen product too?

• 1:36:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  So there's totally a flow where you go in for the Buzz thinking like, maybe I'll get the quirky thing. And then you walk out with a Q7 or you walk out with an Atlas, which is basically a Q7 too. Or you upgrade, you get an Urus.

• 1:36:56Jordi Hays?

  Cayenne Turbo GT.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Is that a Volkswagen product too?

• 1:36:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Porsche is Volkswagen.

• 1:37:02John Coogan?

  At least the, at least the Cayenne GT looks different, you know? But part of the reason that the VW Buzz is, is like so legendary is like it was an icon and they spent a lot of time building that brand. They ran a lot of out of home advertising. They probably would have loved Adquick back in the sixties when they were pushing the buzz.

• 1:37:19Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they would have killed for Adquick.

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  Dot com, out of home advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And let me also tell you about Wander. If you're, if you're wandering around with your ID Buzz or your-

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  It's summer.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Far, summer.

• 1:37:40Jordi Hays?

  You can, it's 12:39 PM Pacific. You can book a Wander today.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Today.

• 1:37:45Jordi Hays?

  With inspiring views.

• 1:37:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Five star amenities and you can-

• 1:37:49John Coogan?

  Hotel graded amenities.

• 1:37:50Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  Dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home by better folks. Go, go, go get on a Wander. And we have our, we have our guest in the studio. What, what, what are we doing, Jordy? Deep Diving Tropics?

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, a bunch of things. So, uh, Farb, let's bring him in.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 1:38:10Jordi Hays?

  There he is. It's great to have you in the temple. What's going on?

• 1:38:15Speaker 03

  I hope you don't mind if I do a shot before we start.

• 1:38:18John Coogan?

  Do it. What are you drinking?

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  Brian Johnson olive oil.

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  Oh, Brian Johnson.

• 1:38:21Jordi Hays?

  Olive oil shots.

• 1:38:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:22Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  Is this a perform- that's insane. I love it. Uh, is that-

• 1:38:27Jordi Hays?

  How, how does it taste?

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give us a taste review.

• 1:38:30Speaker 03

  It's spicy as olive oils go. It's spicy, but it's super tasty.

• 1:38:33John Coogan?

  Spicy, okay.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36John Coogan?

  Is it, is this a short-term performance enhancer? Like you're, you're on the show for 20 minutes right now. Are you going to get a boost for the next 20 minutes? Or is this more like you do it daily and then it improves your performance like-

• 1:38:46Speaker 03

  It's, it's less of like a performance enhancer, more like a daily thing to do just to get really good fats in. But I also heard that you guys are really sweet guys. So I'm just going to pop on a glucose monitor here.

• 1:38:58John Coogan?

  Okay. You're really maxing the-

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  Just to find out if Kugan raises my blood sugar or not.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  Take us through the rest of the stats. What else are you doing?

• 1:39:08Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, some, some context on this. Um, Farb's a buddy. He's also here in LA with us, um, investor and, but the real reason, uh, I wanted to have you on is because I, I feel like you have consistently been- Maybe two years ahead of me on various different types of health biohacking experiments. And I've always felt like I was somewhat ahead, like in 2020, I had a

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  You're like 20 years ahead of normies still.

• 1:39:37Jordi Hays?

  I had a

• 1:39:38John Coogan?

  He's two years ahead of you.

• 1:39:39Jordi Hays?

  Farb, you would have loved this. I had a cold plunge just in my bedroom.

• 1:39:45John Coogan?

  In college?

• 1:39:46Jordi Hays?

  No, this is 2020.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:39:48Jordi Hays?

  A year and a half.

• 1:39:49John Coogan?

  Dorm room. Didn't you tell me the college, the dorms, it's like six dudes in one unit or something?

• 1:39:54Jordi Hays?

  UCSB will have like 15 guys in a house, not the ideal biohacking environment.

• 1:39:59John Coogan?

  Imagine you're just like

• 1:40:00Speaker 03

  Cold plunge stays on during sex, they say.

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, you've impressed me with how at the frontier you are. So I wanted to have you on to talk about everything. Get the update on how you're thinking about GLP-1s, peptides. We can talk about a bunch of other things, but why don't you give a quick intro yourself? And then we should start with like your stack, what you're running today, and then we can get into some subtopics.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:40:28Speaker 03

  Great, great. Farbood Nivi, sort of health nut, entrepreneur, investor. Have a new project that we're just getting off the ground right now. It's called Protocols. And hopefully we'll have some big news to share on that in a few weeks. So yeah, I guess that's my intro.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  What's the stack?

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's start with what you're running today.

• 1:40:51John Coogan?

  Or what do you think, what do you think you do that has like a power law outcome on your health? Cause like sleep, diet, exercise seem like the most important. And then you get down into like, I'm taking the seventh type of magnesium tonight. And it's like,

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Or Farb is doing like gene therapy and stuff like that.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  So walk me through, walk me through what's important and then what's more experimental?

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  I've done like tons of experimental stuff. I've been doing blood work for well over a decade. I got, you know, folistat and gene therapy. I have genetically modified plasmids in my shoulder here. They're probably getting near the end of their lives because they, you know, last a year or two. And I mean, the crazy thing is like, despite being a health nut, I kind of found myself at the end of last year, beginning of this year, sort of overweight, depressed and prediabetic. Um, and you know, I'm, I'm forty eight now, so these things creep up on you. Um, you can't do what you did twenty years ago, uh, and get the same thing twenty years later. Um, and so I kinda sat back to figure out like, what's wrong with my stack, right?

• 1:41:57Speaker 03

  What's, what's wrong with my routine? Um, and really what it came down to is that I don't really have a routine. Um, and I, I'm sort of making it up every day. Uh, Shane Parrish was on Chris Williamson, uh, and said, had this great point, like a person with a routine will outperform a person who is negotiating with themselves every day.

• 1:42:15Sean Frank?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:16Speaker 03

  Um, and I'm like, that hit me really hard. I'm like, oh, wow, we're doing self-negotiation every day. We're like reinventing what it is to be a human being on a daily basis. What do I eat? Should I exercise? And I'm like, I'm really bad at routines. So that was actually the problem that I set out to solve. And in doing that, I actually ended up stopping taking TRT. Uh, so I don't take testosterone anymore. Um, I stopped.

• 1:42:39Jordi Hays?

  I was coming, how was coming off that?

• 1:42:41John Coogan?

  That's super interesting because I feel like everyone, the narrative is like, once you're on it, you can never get off of it because your body stops producing it naturally. And you're like, you're either on it forever or, you know, you, you, you should never touch it. That, that, that's like the common narrative.

• 1:42:54Speaker 03

  This was like another problem with my routine. I would take TRT. I would do it for a month or two and then I'd stop. So if you do it super consistently, it takes a while for, you know, the boys downstairs to turn off.

• 1:43:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:05Speaker 03

  Um, you know, so like you can do it for a month or two and stop and they'll come back. And so, um, I did a ton of blood tests, actually, and, and my most recent one, which I just did with function, I did a huge function panel. Uh, and my T, my testosterone's like six hundred, seven hundred, my free testosterone's above a hundred. It's pretty good.

• 1:43:26John Coogan?

  That's great. Yeah.

• 1:43:27Jordi Hays?

  Impressive.

• 1:43:28Speaker 03

  Um. So yeah, I actually stopped doing peptides as well, and we can kinda get into a little bit of that. I've done peptides for probably seven, eight years. And so my stack rate now.

• 1:43:39Jordi Hays?

  And how are you getting, how are you getting them seven years ago? I'm curious.

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. Like it's up and down.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  And also, and also just like, I, I feel like the only peptide that people know broadly is like glucagon-like peptide, like GLP one. And that's generally not seen as a peptide for.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  Guys on TRT who are clearly going to the gym. It's more for like, you know, serious weight loss. And so I'm curious about like, what, what peptides even like drew your eye or were interesting or like, what was even the goal with those?

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I like to experiment some, you know, seven, eight years ago, I'm like, let's see what these peptides are about.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:16Speaker 03

  And peptides are just like short strings of amino acids, like a protein is a long string of amino acid, a peptide is a short string. And they're used a lot in signaling in your body. So you can take one peptide that tells your body to make more human growth hormone. And that's kind of interesting because it's

• 1:44:31Jordi Hays?

  Is that BPC? Is that BPC 157?

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, BP, BPC 157 is different. BPC 157 is like this sort of broad ranging peptide. You actually make it in your gut. And if you just give yourself a lot more, it seems to help with healing in general.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Speaker 03

  But other ones increase growth hormone, other ones improve deep sleep. And if you're on Twitter at all, you're seeing a massive proliferation of these sites selling it. And to your question about like, how was I getting it? In the years that I've done peptides, you could get it from a doctor, you couldn't get it from a doctor, you could get it from a doctor.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:11Speaker 03

  Kind of in limbo now. And all these sites, they sell it for research purposes. And

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  Which you were actually using for research purposes.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  I guess you were kind of researching.

• 1:45:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have anything for research purposes, yeah. But it's not for human consumption. The GLPs, which are another type of peptide are the ones that you get like Monjara, Ozempic. And that one's really getting crazy too, because we know the brand name Ozempic, but like Ozempic is old news. The, the current one is Tresepotide.

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:45:44Speaker 03

  And then Reda True Tide is coming next. And there's two or three more after that.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Do you think those will break into kind of like athletic men who are maybe sitting at like? 13% body fat, or is it

• 1:45:59Speaker 03

  Already did.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Like a microdose? Or do you think it will remain as just like a powerful tool for for weight loss?

• 1:46:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the thing that's been interesting is all the reporting around, you know, GLP-1s or trisepotide helping with like willpower broadly.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:46:15Jordi Hays?

  So imagine just having 20% extra willpower.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  But then there's the there's a counter example of like it makes you less risk on. And so like, uh, Wilmanitis has that post that's like, what is the effect of capital allocators broadly being on GLP-1s? Like, will we be a less risk on society?

• 1:46:32Jordi Hays?

  Not going turbo long, they're just

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  Like, will we have less volatility?

• 1:46:35Jordi Hays?

  That's how we save the the T bill, you know, is like people are just like, yeah, I'm fine to just earn 2%.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  There's a there's a bill in the house for testosterone? What are you talking about?

• 1:46:44Speaker 03

  I'd love to have one. Love to see it.

• 1:46:46Jordi Hays?

  We we should get one in there.

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  Hey, testosterone.

• 1:46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm investing in T bills. I'm taking the majority of my bills and paying T.

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  People microdose these things.

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:46:57Speaker 03

  They they seem to have like a lot more than just weight loss effect, blood sugar regulation. They seem to be reducing cancer in a bunch of studies. So there's even a, you know, some people just microdose them. Like sometimes, uh, when I was doing it, I was taking a really small dose. Uh, you know, one fifth to one tenth of what the even starting dose is.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  Do you feel like a plateau, though? Because it feels like, you know, I I remember the first day in college, I tried caffeine. I had coffee. I actually didn't have caffeine until college. Uh, and it was like amazing and I've had that experience a lot of things. And now it's like, okay, I kind of just need a bunch of caffeine to get back to baseline. Uh, and I imagine that you you maybe experienced that with your journey on peptides and testosterone. But then is it like, is it like, once you get to the plateau, you pull it out and then kind of reset the baseline? How do you think about that?

• 1:47:53Speaker 03

  I I I I used to think nonstop about that and do it all the time and I kinda don't anymore.

• 1:47:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  Now I have a routine that I stick to.

• 1:48:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  Uh, it's like light first thing in the morning, hugely important.

• 1:48:06Jordi Hays?

  Like on your phone, right? Just max the brightness out.

• 1:48:10Speaker 03

  Hold it there.

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  VR headset, AI slop in the morning.

• 1:48:16Speaker 03

  That's hugely important. It actually sets your bedtime when you get light in your eyes in the morning outside.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:23Speaker 03

  It sets your bedtime like sixteen hours later.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Wait, uh, and what what what counts for getting light? Like I walk to my car in the morning at five thirty. Does that count? I'm outside for a minute and then I'm getting light when I'm looking at the sunrise, I guess.

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  Yep, that's the light, but you know, maybe it gets three to five minutes.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Three to five minutes. So I should like kinda walk around the block or something a little bit.

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:48:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, this morning, this morning I got up like, uh, you got to my house, you were driving into the office and I I was running like five minutes behind. So you kinda had five minutes just putzing around out there.

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  I did.

• 1:48:56Jordi Hays?

  That was for your health, John.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  You did it. Whether or not you do it, that's helping you, that's helping your health.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  And then I usually, you know, do the morning stuff, uh, count a lot of water in the morning. I learned this from a buddy of mine, um, Jack Dreyfus, who, uh, has this sort of morning ritual about not using his phone and chugging water and those are actually sort of life changing. Um, you don't wanna blast social media into your eyes in the first hour. Um, it really changes your neurology if you don't. Um, then gym, uh, getting vitamin D walks outside, a whole list of supplements that I take.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  In terms of gym?

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  What do I do for gym? I do like fifteen minutes every other day.

• 1:49:34John Coogan?

  Okay. Wow, that seems like short. Uh.

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  I feel like.

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  I'm I'm recovery maxing.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  Okay, recovery maxing, interesting.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  I mean, all your gains come in recovery.

• 1:49:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so so how have you noticed since, I'm assuming you, yeah, I'm assuming you went through a period where you're just like bro split.

• 1:49:51John Coogan?

  You seem like you've done CrossFit. I don't know, I'm just throwing stuff out.

• 1:49:54Speaker 03

  No, I'm like the last guy you'll see doing CrossFit, yeah.

• 1:49:57John Coogan?

  Okay, but have you ever done it?

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  Never.

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  But, but were you ever running a bro split like, you know, chest, back, legs, chest, back, legs, rest on, you know, Sunday? Did you ever do that?

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  I'm kind of, I'm like light version of that now. Like, to me, the, the thing I learned is that like, a little bit of a bunch of things actually makes the biggest difference.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:50:19Speaker 03

  And so like, having a routine where you kind of do these things regularly, um, that actually makes a bigger difference than going like crazy on one thing, which kind of puts your health lopsided. And that's actually the, you know, I was mentioning protocols earlier. It's a little app we've been building, uh, that kind of makes all this easy. We call it a health maxing with friends. Um, so you can basically do these little routines. You can build a stack for yourself and then you kind of do it with friends. They do them too. You see their faces appear, um, as they get them done throughout the day. And that has honestly made the biggest literal difference in my health of anything I've ever done. Not even, not even close.

• 1:51:00Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Uh, talk about microplastics in glass. I know you've been diving into this. That study came out. Everybody, everybody was like, wait, this feels like, uh, some propaganda from big plastic that says, yeah, even your glass water has plastic.

• 1:51:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, plastic propaganda.

• 1:51:16John Coogan?

  There was a talk at Heretic on about that. Remember it was like, how would you get people to use more glass or something?

• 1:51:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was, that was more of an exercise.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  It was, yeah, it was, it was a mental exercise about how to get people to use more plastic. And it was like, one of the, one of the ideas that people threw out was like, make glass sound bad.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:34John Coogan?

  And like, here we are. Here we are. Somebody ran the.

• 1:51:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, here we are.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the actual data?

• 1:51:39Speaker 03

  Well, the study was done by like, I think a French organization. So we don't know if it's just EU propaganda or actual science. So, um, you know, we, we have to put it to the test. So basically they found there's more plastic in glass bottles than in.

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  Plastic bottles, uh, and the culprit is like the cap at the top of the bottles. They have like a little plastic inside the cap of the glass bottle. Uh, and it seems like that's the plastic that's getting into it. Uh, so I'm actually replicating the study. I, I, I found a, a local lab that will, um, do the analysis. I'm going to get a bunch of different waters and just send it in and see what the results are.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Do you know how big the study was in, in France? Cause I feel like.

• 1:52:22Speaker 03

  Size. I mean, it was like a pretty well done study.

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  I feel like the whole, the whole difficulty is like, do you test? Like, what's the variability? How do you get the actual size? Are you testing like hundreds of water bottles, thousands or like?

• 1:52:34Speaker 03

  And the other thing is like, the big thing with plastic and it's, people don't say it as much, but it's kind of started there. It's like, don't leave your plastic bottle in the car. Um, cause it, when it gets hot, it leaches.

• 1:52:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  So I don't know if they're comparing it, you know, to a leached plastic bottle versus a glass one that's not going to.

• 1:52:52Jordi Hays?

  Um, another one, how, uh, what are you doing around cholesterol right now? I know you were running an experiment there a while back.

• 1:53:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was actually kind of an accidental experiment. Uh, I, uh, I take most of Brian Johnson's stack just cause it's like everything I want and it's easy and I, and I, and I trust him. Um, so one of the things he has is his red yeast rice. So I'm like, whatever, I'm just taking the red yeast rice. Uh, and then I, I just sort of happened to do a blood panel before and after. And my cholesterol has always been pretty high, um, like including some like the bad ones as they say. Uh, and all of a sudden everything just went green and I have this like peak cholesterol panel. And so I had to kind of like look back through my app, um, and chat with our little AI, uh, and figure out what, what, what, what, what happened.

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  Uh, and basically it was just like immediately it was the red yeast rice because red yeast rice is basically a statin. Um, so monoclon K is one of the statins and that's what, what red yeast rice has in it. So I was kind of basically taking a low dose statin for a while. It was kind of crazy.

• 1:53:56Jordi Hays?

  So is that something you'll cycle going forward or just effectively do consistently?

• 1:54:01Speaker 03

  Probably take consistently. Some people, I, I pair it with like a good dose of CoQ10. Um, cause some people, um, statins or red yeast rice, they experience like some muscle soreness. Um, and it seems like, uh, taking a good amount of CoQ10 basically takes that away, which for me it does.

• 1:54:21Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. How are you, have you been playing around with hyperbaric oxygen chambers at all? I'm sort of anticipating that that is the next version of the home sauna or the home ice, you know, cold plunge. It feels like we're maybe a couple of years out from more commercial or more consumer-friendly versions of those products because they're showing tremendous benefits. But if you actually look at buying one, it's like this like $30,000 machine that looks like it's out of a hospital and it looks really kind of scary. But I want to be doing it consistently and I don't really have time to do it outside of.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  Very mixed branding, too. Like, the first time I heard about a hyperbaric, like, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber is Michael Jackson. And then.

• 1:55:06Speaker 03

  Oh, really? Wow.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure that's like the first time it entered my mind as like something that you could do. Although extremely valuable for scuba divers because, you know, if you get the bends, like, you need to be in a hyperbaric chamber to recompress. And so it's like a life-saving technology for, in the scuba diving world. But then it was like, used as like this odd, this odd crazy health hack. But then Brian Johnson's been talking about it a lot. So yeah, what's your take on the hyperbaric chambers?

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  I'm actually in the process of finding one to purchase and put here in the office. And it seems like it's basically one of the best things you can do for longevity and health. And the thing is, you need to get up to about two atmospheres. So they have, they have ones that are like 1.3 atmospheres of pressure, 1.4, somewhere above two. But it seems like two is the spot that kind of gives you the most benefits. It's sort of the sweet spot. I mean, literally improving your DNA, increasing your telomere length. I think Brian Johnson said it was the best skin treatment he's ever done. And the guy does a lot of skin treatments. So yeah, I think you're right. It's gonna get bigger and bigger. It's a little bit of a nuisance because you're in there for an hour to an hour and a half.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Doesn't he like work? I thought Brian Johnson was like doing emails in there or something.

• 1:56:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, he has one that you can kind of sit upright in and get stuff done.

• 1:56:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I like these, these more, you know, I think the reason that, that saunas are so great is that it's passive. It doesn't take a lot of, it doesn't take a lot of will paper to say, or sorry.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Willpower.

• 1:56:37Jordi Hays?

  Will, uh, willpower to say, oh, I'm gonna go in there.

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  Point's here on TVPN.

• 1:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It doesn't take a lot of willpower to go and say, I'm gonna go and, and sit in a sauna for 30 minutes and it has tremendous benefits. And I think the same thing for the hyperbaric chamber. You can go in there, get some work done, read a book, listen to TVPN, et cetera.

• 1:56:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's on 24 hours, yeah. It's, it's, it's a wild time. We've got some really crazy stuff coming down the pipeline. They, uh, uh, they think they have a shot that, you know, will lower your cholesterol for life in one shot.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  What? That's crazy.

• 1:57:09Speaker 03

  Another company, the company that did my gene therapy, um, is working on one that'll increase your IQ.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  That's insane. Wow.

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  How, what, what, what's the, how much data do you personally need to run an experiment on yourself? Like the IQ one is feels like, yeah, if you got 20 people that, that got some benefit.

• 1:57:28John Coogan?

  You might be Faust maxing. You know, you're just down for Faustian bargains.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, always.

• 1:57:33Speaker 03

  As long as it's not harmful, I'm generally okay with trying it, see what it does.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question, last question, I'm curious. Where's your, how, what's your thinking around, uh, I think I know the answer already, but the sort of like ancestral philosophy, you know, sort of like consume things that, uh, you know, existed hundreds of years ago versus, you know, uh, something being made in a lab is not necessarily bad and, and you should take advantage of, of science.

• 1:58:07Speaker 03

  I think, I think it's just not a great heuristic in general. It's like convenient and easy, uh, but I don't think it's a great heuristic, right? Everything should stand up to having a good explanation for it. Uh, and those, neither of those are great explanations is like, you know, uh, bowing to ancestral ways or to science. If you don't have a good explanation for why the thing works, uh, then you should be kind of suspicious of it. And I don't, I don't think either of those are, are, are great, uh, explanations, you know, you gotta. Take things on their face. Surtadian alignment is it. I mean, it turns out that the bro scientists were right on a million things. Um, we, we thought diabetes type two was literally incurable

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  before the 2010s. Um, bro scientists always thought you could, you could cure it with lifestyle and diet. Uh, finally in the 2010s, after a hundred years of thinking it was incurable, uh, we realized you can actually reverse type two diabetes. Um, so in a lot of cases, the bro scientists are right.

• 1:59:06Jordi Hays?

  Got to continue to bro down.

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  Trust the experts.

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Trust the experts.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  Bro scientists.

• 1:59:11Jordi Hays?

  Um, awesome. Well, uh, we'd love to have you back on, uh, again, when you have more news in a couple of weeks and, uh, yeah, let's, let's, uh,

• 1:59:19John Coogan?

  Let's hang soon.

• 1:59:19Jordi Hays?

  When you have more, when, when you're running your experiments, whether they're on yourself or water, hit us. We, we love, we love breaking news. So great to see you.

• 1:59:27Speaker 03

  Okay. Great. Happy to. See you guys.

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye.

• 1:59:29Jordi Hays?

  See you soon. Cheers.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  Uh, if you're looking to up your sleep game, head over to eat sleep.com.

• 1:59:35Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  Pod five ultra, the first fully immersive sleep system that works with any bed. Pod five actively adjusts your temperature, elevates your body and plays integrated soundscapes to improve your sleep. Head over to eat sleep.com. Uh, we got Sean Frank in the studio. The man who invented the wallet.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  Invented e-commerce.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Here. He invented e-commerce. He invented the wallet and now he invented podcasting with us. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 2:00:01Jordi Hays?

  It's been too long.

• 2:00:03Sean Frank?

  Guys, I'm doing great. I heard the eight sleep ad.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06Sean Frank?

  I got two perfect scores in a row.

• 2:00:08Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:00:09Sean Frank?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  That is so hard to do.

• 2:00:12Sean Frank?

  Yeah. Yeah. Last night I posted a hundred. I, I posted it on Twitter. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense that that was the intro that I got.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  How many, how many one year olds do you have at your house?

• 2:00:22Sean Frank?

  Uh, zero. I have zero kids.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm kinda playing with one hand or two hands tied behind my back here, but

• 2:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Kids are, I thought, I went through about a year period where my, my lovely children were just sleeping perfectly.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  I have an idea.

• 2:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Every night.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  Eight sleep should make a sleeping bag for a four year old that they can't get out of, kind of a straitjacket, a padded room that's temperature controlled with a lock on the door. So the kid can't get up.

• 2:00:49Jordi Hays?

  So dark, but.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  We're going to turn this, you know how there's like every show's like the manosphere content? We need to do the dadosphere content. Uh, you're, you're not a dad yet, so it won't really work. We'll need different guests for that, but. We need to get really hardcore in the dad content. Anyway, let's talk about TikTok. TikTok selling to a US owner to get ready. They're turning down the focus on shops and pushing the ad product again. Shops has always lost money. I didn't know that. And without the parent co-funding it, no one wants to eat that loss. TikTok will be an ad platform again, at least for the rest of the year. Break that down for us. What does that mean? What are the implications?

• 2:01:23Sean Frank?

  Yeah. Have you guys ever bought anything from TikTok shops?

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  No, I've never used TikTok.

• 2:01:28Sean Frank?

  Dude, I love that, John. You're a true patriot.

• 2:01:34Sean Frank?

  But yeah, so TikTok shops, I mean, if you talk to people inside of TikTok, like high up, they do not see Meta as a competitor. They don't want to compete with Meta. Like, it's obviously, like, they both have short form video now, but TikTok never really was a social app in the way that Instagram and Facebook really are.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  I heard this this morning. People, one of our younger friends was saying like, Gen Z, they don't DM each other on TikTok. They use Snapchat to talk and chat. And then they use TikTok as like a YouTube style content.

• 2:02:06Sean Frank?

  Yeah. So like, if you talk to people at TikTok, they really want to go after the Youtubes of the world. And they really want to go after Amazon, right? Because Amazon is this big pot of money. It's 600 billion a year in e-commerce revenue that, like, Amazon's given up trying to grow, right? So we have Prime Day going right now. It's four days of Prime Day. They doubled the length year over year. And they said that it'll grow 20%. So each day is down like 40%. When you add that up, you get 20% growth. It's just pure value extraction for Amazon at this point. There's going to be more ads, like, they've signed up 100 million Prime members. That business can't really grow anymore. So there's this big pot of money that Walmart tries to attack.

• 2:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Pro-natalism might change that. I expect Amazon to start lobbying for subsidies for young families. To just like, we just need to triple the population in the United States.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  We were laughing earlier about the fact that I believe Amazon makes more in net income than Tesla makes in revenue.

• 2:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Like, way more.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  Way more. It's crazy.

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  There's levels on the Mag7 chart.

• 2:03:09John Coogan?

  Anyway, yeah, so, but it sounds like with TikTok going to US owner, like, something's changing there. Break that down.

• 2:03:16Sean Frank?

  Yeah. So they spent probably.

• 2:03:20Sean Frank?

  24 months and easily $30 billion trying to get people to use TikTok shops, right? Right now, the estimate is that like it's a billion dollars a month in GMV. So a $12 billion GMV business, that could be high, it could be low, it changes. That's not very big. Like Shopify's GMV in a quarter is probably double that, right? So Shopify probably does a quarter billion in GMV. So they haven't been that successful getting people to actually shop repeatedly. And to get that billion dollars, they lit a bunch of money on fire with subsidies.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Wait, do you mean a quarter trillion?

• 2:03:53John Coogan?

  Quarter trillion in GMV for Shopify, probably?

• 2:03:55Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah, sorry, that's, that's what I meant. And you know, we have Amazon at 600 billion, right? So like TikTok is trying really hard. Their goal this year was to get to 20 billion in GMV, right? So to be like one tenth of what Shopify is at. And when they launched for the first 12 months, it was aggressive subsidies. So they would come to brands like mine and they'd be like, hey, sell on our platform and we will give customers 50% off. And then we're like, well, I don't want to sell 50% off. They're like, no, no, we will fund it. We'll fund discounts, we'll fund free shipping. They made this aggressive push to try to get people to shop there, right? So there was just screaming deals.

• 2:04:31Jordi Hays?

  And simultaneously, there was this other company, Flip, that was doing the same thing. Basically, is that the right name for it? They were just basically giving away products. It was, it was basically a, what was it? A wealth transfer from LPs to venture capitalists to the American consumer?

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  Selling dollars for 90 cents?

• 2:04:49Jordi Hays?

  For a lot less than that.

• 2:04:50John Coogan?

  For 50 cents, apparently.

• 2:04:52Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so and Flip was the same thing. All of them are, I mean, Timu, Shaun, everybody's coming after like this disposable income in America, right? So Flip's like, we're going to take a social, you know, commerce attack on it. TikTok was the same thing. You know, Timu is owned by a publicly traded company in China, right? It's worth like $200 billion and they were losing.

• 2:05:14Sean Frank?

  I mean, probably a hundred million dollars a month to try to get, you know, user acquisition. All of them are coming after Amazon. So that strategy would probably continue to play out if section 321 didn't close. I don't know if you guys covered that. You had Ryan Peterson on, but it used to be that you could ship, you know, goods via Timu from China to the US, totally taxing duty free, right? So why is Timu cheaper than Old Navy or H and M or whatever else? It's they're paying zero taxes. So we closed that. Now, Timu's revenue and their traffic has fallen 50% in like 60 days, right? They've taken their gas off of customer acquisition. Same thing's happening with TikTok. They have a really awesome app with a ton of users. And if they're forced to sell to the US, someone's just going to turn that into a cash cow, right?

• 2:05:59Sean Frank?

  It's going to get bought by, you know, it's probably going to be Walmart or, you know, Apple oven is making a bid. Like all of these ad platforms are making a bid because there's a bunch of users there. And if you have to use, you have attention, you could turn on the money printing machine, which is Google, which is Meta, right? So, you know, it will, it'll end up being more of a meta competitor. They're going to abandon the strategy of going after Amazon and they will just start printing money like every good app platform should. Like you guys do.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it was. I have a, I had a friend that at the time that the TikTok ban was being floated or the app was being removed from the App Store. I had a friend that was just absolutely printing on TikTok. He has, he has a, you know, nine-figure e-commerce brand. And he was like, I don't really want it to be banned because I'm making like, you know, $2 million a month right now. And it's pretty good, but it clearly was just like fake and, and, you know, heavily subsidized and totally unsustainable.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Explain, explain this interaction in the comments to that post. They barely, Ariel says they barely co-fund anything anymore. Hard disagree with this take. And you said, but that's why they stopped co-fund, co-funding things? Is that talking about TikTok's parent ByteDance paying this or TikTok co-funding promotions with brands?

• 2:07:20Sean Frank?

  Yeah. So they've been winding it down for probably the past three months, right? And I mean,

• 2:07:25John Coogan?

  This is, this is TikTok going to brands?

• 2:07:27Sean Frank?

  Yeah. So the, the co-funding is when you run. TikTok shops to try to get new brands in there to try to get your sales up. They are, they are going to cover discounts, fees, and they will give the brand that money so that the discount pass to the customer.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:41Sean Frank?

  So TikTok, you know, Amazon gets 15% of all transactions as fees. TikTok gets 6%, but they take that 6% and they give you 30% of your, of your transaction back. Right. That's that co-funding element. They started to slow that down drastically in January when they got banned. Right. The writing was on the wall that they're not going to do this anymore. And they've been slowly bringing down co-funding. And then if you go on TikTok, there's a term called ad load. It's how many ads you get per post.

• 2:08:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:09Sean Frank?

  Right. So, you know, on Instagram, it's like you have an ad load of 33%. One in, one in three posts are going to be ads. TikTok got to 50% of all ads were monetized through affiliate.

• 2:08:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it's, it's, it's natural post, ad, natural post, ad, post, ad, post, ad, post, ad.

• 2:08:28Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:29Sean Frank?

  And the ads are split between monetized via shops, which is, uh, you know, like affiliate posts and normal ads. They have turned that down drastically and made the ads way better. So traditional advertising where I spend money to get people to my website, right? Like what Meta does, it's been crushing on TikTok ever since they, they made this change like three months ago. So the writing's on the wall. TikTok shop will be drastically deprioritized and the ads are going to start being awesome again.

• 2:08:57Jordi Hays?

  What about the state of live shopping in the U.S. where you guys at Ridge? Like, did you have somebody that was live on TikTok all day long selling wallets? Did you ever, did you ever go live?

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  Why do you think Sean has that podcast mic?

• 2:09:10Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, uh, you know, we, we've tried it because Amazon pushed it pretty aggressively. Flip pushed it aggressively and then TikTok pushed it aggressively. We, we've tried all that. It doesn't really work in America without the subsidies. Right. Like there's this flywheel on TikTok where you get 50 people to go live. They all start selling stuff. They push your product to the top, then other affiliates want to come in and start selling it because it's a good selling product. But that only works when you heavily subsidize it and that hurts. Your Walmart business, or your Amazon business, your Whole Foods business, because nobody likes to be undercut. I've had a lot of friends who, you know, I have a friend who got to $10 million a month on TikTok shops.

• 2:09:51Sean Frank?

  But in the grand scheme of things, he has like a hundred million dollar a month wholesale business. So it's like, dude, it just, it was cool. It was exciting. It was fast growing and they made it profitable for brands. But it's all falling apart. I, I don't think Americans really want live shopping and I don't think it's ever going to catch on.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  What about, uh, so, so what do you think the future of platforms like whatnot is? Is it focusing on these sort of like niche collectibles and auctions and things like that? Like, could it work in subcategories?

• 2:10:22Sean Frank?

  Yeah, dude, and you know, to give TikTok credit, they brought affiliates back, right? Affiliate was a bad word in 2021, right? If you were, if you were doing affiliate marketing, you were selling like the scamiest product on earth, or like porn, or Viagra, or something, right? And they made more young kids more, uh, you know, be okay with selling stuff on the internet. So they, they made affiliate cool again. And I think we will see more of that, but it is going to be more, you know, niche. I think whatnot's a great platform if you like Pokemon cards, or if you like gaming. And you could see Twitch have more social comments built in, but it's not going to be the hundred billion dollar GMV business that TikTok's trying to build it to. And in e-commerce.

• 2:11:07Jordi Hays?

  And that it is in China, right? And, and Asia broadly.

• 2:11:10John Coogan?

  Why does it work there and not here?

• 2:11:12Sean Frank?

  I don't know, man. I mean, customers in America are used to like infinite choice, right? The, the other thing is we have just really low e-commerce penetration compared to China, right? China's at like 40% of all transactions are happening online and America struggles to crack 15, so.

• 2:11:29John Coogan?

  What, what's the downstream effect of like the, the ads getting better on TikToks? Does that mean like brands need to be investing more in like actually like, you know, Super Bowl ad level creative? Is it doing some sort of viral stunt like the Cluley thing? Like, is it just algorithm hacking, AI slop? Like, like what, what do you think the meta will be in terms of like actually having an ad really, really perform on TikTok? Post-sell, or post-sale to US owner?

• 2:11:57Sean Frank?

  Yeah. Well, I was sort of testing this right now, but what Meta has pushed, so Meta is like still the king of, you know, performance advertising, right? A hundred and thirty billion in ads run through that platform. And they spent the past year working on something called Andromeda, which is their new ad engine, right? And all it is, is they want high velocity of creative. They don't care if it looks awesome. They don't care if it's AI generated. They just want high variety, right? And they, they want you to feed the ad engine as much high variety content as possible. Really focus on short form videos still, but like high production, UGC, AI, whatever you want to put in there. And then Andromeda just finds the best thing for the best person at the right time.

• 2:12:38Sean Frank?

  Like they've really focused on making sure they can like their internal ad auction serves the best ad for the best person. Take whatever winners you have over there, because Meta is heavy lifting for you and just run them on TikTok.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, are we, are we completely past the era of like, was it the Harmon Brothers that were doing those like really catchy, really high production value videos? I remember like the Dollar Shave Club launch video was kind of like the case study in this where you could go get like a hundred million impressions on one really crazy ad and then do retargeting based on how long people watched. Like, is that, is that Meta just completely dead? Are we no longer going to see like iconic ads for particular brands?

• 2:13:19Sean Frank?

  Yeah. So Harmon Brothers did great. There's a company called Sandwich Video. They did.

• 2:13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, Sandwich was another one that was really big in that.

• 2:13:24Sean Frank?

  Yeah. Ray, Ray Drop is still doing it.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:27Sean Frank?

  The, the, the problem is, like, there's a percentage of creative cost to ad spend, right? So if you're going to spend a million dollars on a video, you have to spend at least twenty million dollars promoting it, right? And it used to be that like the ad cost could be a third, right? When you're running TV ads, you'd spend a lot of money to make a really memorable thing. And the delivery was only two thirds of the cost. The delivery now needs to be like at least ninety five percent of the cost. And that just drives everything, the investment in creative down. So I think.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But is there some sort of like? Like un- un- unquantifiable value or in the short term around like creating like what's called a shelling point. So like, we all know about like, you know, the era's tour for Taylor Swift. Like, it was such a big phenomenon that everyone's aware of that. Or like Barbenheimer, or like the Dollar Shave Club ad, like everyone has seen it. And so it has like enduring value for a really, really long time. And if you're creating like a bunch of like highly tailored, random ads that are just kind of like generally out there, you never create a brand that has like, yes, everyone remembers that particular Nike campaign.

• 2:14:43John Coogan?

  Everyone remembers like this thing that broke through and everyone was talking about that ad. Like the iPhone or the iPod like silhouette dancing campaign. Like everyone remembers that one. Like, are we just post that type of marketing? Or is there still potentially alpha if you could underwrite it across like two decades? And you're willing to take this like really big shot? Go make something great and then be like, yeah, we are going to spend 20 million against this $1 million ad that we shot. It might take us a couple of years to actually deliver to everyone, but we're going to do it and it's going to pay back over like 20 years.

• 2:15:15Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. My immediate thought is that it's not enough for people to just remember a moment of your brand or remember that your brand exists. It's not gonna, it doesn't guarantee to have value 10 years from today. Because like, when's the last time you bought a Dollar Shave Club product despite totally remembering the campaign?

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:15:37Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and as long as it's hitting that ratio where 95% of the dollars are going to creative. So if you have a massive fucking budget where you're going to spend a million bucks on a video and you can support it with 20 million, sure dude, if that's what you want to do, like it's, but we're like, when Dollar Shave Club made that video, they didn't have any money.

• 2:15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:53Sean Frank?

  So it was all organic exposure, right? They made a really good video that, you know, they really gambled on it where it was 100% of costs were going to ad creative. And as ad creative costs go down and as the internet gets messier and harder to stand out, like you just need to have that money spent on. You know, actually delivering ads.

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  Well, what do you think about the modern incarnation of the Dollar Shave Club? Like 100% of the the spend going towards the creative like Cluey just ran this playbook. What's your reaction to that? Like they like the reason people have seen the Cluey viral videos is not because of ad spend. They're probably it might be promoting it a little bit here and there, but mostly they're just really good at getting engagement and going viral. And so people are remembering that now maybe Dollar Shave Club is a cautionary tale for them, but is that even a tool in the tool chest that that founders should be reaching for?

• 2:16:48Sean Frank?

  Oh, yeah, dude, controversy and rage baiting, right? Like, we all know about Cluey, like, yeah, it was a good video, but like, it's because

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:55Sean Frank?

  they they're really good at rage baiting. The other thing is like Dr. Squatch did the Sydney Sweeney.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  The bass.

• 2:17:01Sean Frank?

  Right? Like, we're going to talk about that because of the controversy tied to it and like the outlandish nature. But if you want to make a really beautiful message, the iPod dancing video, nobody gives a fuck. You have to make somebody mad.

• 2:17:13John Coogan?

  The culture shifted. Yeah, it's rough. Yeah, explain to me, Dr. Squatch. I haven't used the products or I'm not really even familiar with it like, but there's news at the company too. Like, just tell me everything you know about it.

• 2:17:26Sean Frank?

  Well, dude, every Sunday, me and Josh, the the current CEO of Dr. Squatch play tennis. So you guys are in L.A. If you guys are big tennis guys, you should come, you should come play.

• 2:17:35John Coogan?

  That'd be awesome.

• 2:17:36Sean Frank?

  Dude, they're, dude, they're crushing it. It's a great story. So the guy who made it Jack, you know, in 2016, they were doing $3 million. He had some other partners and he had the foresight to understand that distribution was everything. He raised like 30 million bucks. He bought all his other partners out and with $27 million remaining, he's like, I'm just going to put everything into YouTube. He dumped all of that money into YouTube advertising and the flywheel just got started. Talk about the product portfolio first.

• 2:18:03Jordi Hays?

  Because every brand at the time said you can't get YouTube to work as a direct response channel, like programmatic YouTube.

• 2:18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:14Jordi Hays?

  Like creator driven YouTube was working, but but that wasn't like, that was a kind of novel insight that he had.

• 2:18:21Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and it was it was a beautiful raindrop video like like that video is still like it was funny. It was iconic and he's just like men's soap is a massive category. This should be bigger. I'm going to bet the farm on advertising. He dumped it into it. They ended up getting a huge secondary transaction. Molus is a great bank. They were in that deal for him. They ended up getting bought by Summit. This was like peak COVID 2021. So then Summit put in a great management team. Josh Josh was there, you know, working before there. And then they just scaled the thing. I mean, the numbers are like they'll do hundreds of millions of dollars this year. They just got bought by Unilever for 1.5 billion and it's a great outcome. Right? I mean, Summit's going to make a ton of money. So, you know, we're kind of at the end of the fund cycle for a lot of those D to C funds.

• 2:19:06Sean Frank?

  Right? If you raised money from a brand, it's a 10 year fund. Like we're getting towards the end where there's going to be a lot of consolidation. Dr. Squatch is a winner, made money all the way up. And now they're going to be owned by Unilever and they'll be the next, you know, generational men's personal care brand. They'll be the Axe or like a bod spray, whatever we had in middle school. That's Dr. Squatch.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  So, so seven years

• 2:19:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's funny, the reaction

• 2:19:26John Coogan?

  On this video, so seven years ago, they launched this video. Natural Soap for Men has 122 million views on YouTube. Was that the case of just amazing creative and it went viral naturally? Or did they spend money to get that 120 million views?

• 2:19:41Sean Frank?

  Oh, they dumped like 20 million bucks into that video.

• 2:19:43John Coogan?

  Okay, wow. I mean, it has 11,000 comments. So clearly like people, even if they saw it as a promoted post, like they wound up engaging with it because it was good creative as well. So, but wow, yeah, what a crazy art at the time. Sorry, Jordan.

• 2:19:57Jordi Hays?

  I guess, speaking of coming to the end of fund cycles, what is the state? Earlier this year, we were covering kind of the state of rollups. It wasn't looking that good. I still think it's not looking great.

• 2:20:11Jordi Hays?

  Will there be any real bright spots in that sort of category of investment?

• 2:20:16Sean Frank?

  Right, right. And I think I said this before we got started. You guys had like the last guy on here was curing diabetes, right? Like, okay, if that works, hundred billion dollar company, you know what I mean? Like, we talk about Nvidia crossing four trillion dollars. It's just a whole different game when you come to consumer, right? Doctor Squatch at 1.5 billion, massive win. It's like, everyone in that group will end up being LPs in new funds, right? But like, they're not going to be Mark Zuckerberg, they're not going to be, you know, a hundred billion dollar outcomes, right? So them, there's a company called We Are Wild, I'm friends with that team, they're in the UK, they got bought by Unilever as well. So, I mean, multi hundred million dollar deal. You know, if you raise at a five or 10 million dollar valuation and you exit for 200 million,

• 2:21:02Sean Frank?

  that's like what venture returns used to be in 2011 or whatever. It's a massive fucking win, right? That's just the world consumers still in. So there are a lot of winners, right? Poppy getting bought, you know, there's every, every like two or three weeks right now, there's a new either CPG brand or haircare brand getting bought in like this, you know, 100 million to 500 million dollar range. That's happening a lot right now with that consolidation.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  What's the postmortem on the build versus buy?

• 2:21:27Jordi Hays?

  But the actual, but the actual like roll up, like roll ups where I'm going to raise a bunch of money and buy a bunch of brands. And, you know, the hope would have been to IPO. Turns out it's very hard to make money owning a bunch, owning a bunch of Amazon brands or a bunch of random Shopify brands.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  This is like the Thrasio thing, right?

• 2:21:46Jordi Hays?

  Thrasio, and then there was the open store, but-

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  A few others were trying that.

• 2:21:50Jordi Hays?

  But it's been rough.

• 2:21:51John Coogan?

  I used to get emails for that all the time when I was running ecommerce brand. Like, hey, do you want to sell? And I'm like, no, like, did you look at Crunchbase? Like, it's not like that type of business.

• 2:22:01Sean Frank?

  No, sorry, Joy, I misunderstood the question. Yeah, all of those are fucked. I think, I got a DM, I don't know if this is true or not, that open source bankrupt? So I don't know if that's been announced yet, but like, they're all like, Thrasio went bankrupt, open source is going to go bankrupt. There's- Like, we thought there'd be synergies and like running all of these like small independent islands, but like now, people still want large brands who can perform revenue, right? Doctor Squatch is that. And like, if you can get to $500 million in revenue in consumer, it's typically one brand. There's typically a lot of profit tied to it, like Hexclad.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  Openstore, open.store, which was the URL, now reroutes to jackarcher.com, which looks like a men's

• 2:22:42Jordi Hays?

  Which was one of their brands.

• 2:22:43John Coogan?

  leisure wear brand.

• 2:22:44Jordi Hays?

  One of their brands.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  It's a dude, it's a Jack dude in a polo with some socks and some pants.

• 2:22:48Jordi Hays?

  Which we love.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Looks pretty cool, actually.

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  How are you? So earlier on the show, we ran through a list. Trump calling for lower rates while the markets are ripping. Robinhood CEO raising for a math AI company at $900 million valuation. Andrew Wilkinson's giving out stock tips. Harry Stebbings calling for $8 trillion Nvidia. Circle at 2,000 times price to earnings.

• 2:23:13John Coogan?

  It's 2,000 times?

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  2,000 times.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  200 times.

• 2:23:16Jordi Hays?

  No, it's 2,000. Satya's being smart, doing some layoffs. Then you have Soham Perik, Masa's top blasting. Your favorite FinTwit influencers launching SPACs. Zuck's making offers. Are you feeling the top? Are you worried right now? Or do you think we got some room to run?

• 2:23:37Sean Frank?

  That's a great question. We probably got room to run, right? I mean, so.

• 2:23:46John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:23:47Jordi Hays?

  It's a gong.

• 2:23:48Sean Frank?

  We heard it.

• 2:23:49John Coogan?

  Wait, wait. So we have an update on the gong. A good friend of the show told us that we have not been properly warming up our gong before we hit it.

• 2:23:57Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, there's a risk of breaking it.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  Of breaking it or just making it sound poorly. So you have to just give it a couple taps to get it warmed up.

• 2:24:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go.

• 2:24:11Jordi Hays?

  They'll correct us in the comments.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  If we did it poorly, but we're learning our gong.

• 2:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, you said we have some room to run.

• 2:24:18John Coogan?

  You said, go ultra long, sell your house, sell your car.

• 2:24:21Jordi Hays?

  Can we expect an NFT profile picture for Ridge is like really kind of the

• 2:24:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:27Jordi Hays?

  What the kind of question.

• 2:24:28John Coogan?

  Well, no, no, it would be, it would be an AI agent for Ridge.

• 2:24:31Jordi Hays?

  For wallets.

• 2:24:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:33Sean Frank?

  No, dude, uh, wallet coin. So I think it's full circle. It's back to ICOs, guys, official coin offerings.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, well.

• 2:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you, how do you, I mean, I think like Ridge has just navigated someone through so many different crazy cycles that it's probably business as usual, maintain a strong balance sheet, you know, just stay profitable, grow, you know, all the things that a, that a business should do. But how, how do you plan around, uh, how, like, do you update your kind of thinking or strategy at all around cycles? We were asking Ryan Peterson earlier this week how he was, you know, if he thinks that, you know, if rates do come down as a little treat for having a strong economy, uh, you know, there's certain brands that are going to benefit from that retailers. Um, but I'm curious how you think about it.

• 2:25:26Sean Frank?

  Yeah, you know, rates coming down just open up financial markets again, right? So like, it looks like the IPO windows open, everybody's fucking, you know, rushing to the market. Bitcoin all time highs, fantastic. But, you know, we're getting a lot of inbound interest from PE groups and banks because they think interest rates will come down. That makes leveraged buyouts work again, right?

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, so it's LBOs.

• 2:25:47Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah. So like private credit has dominated, uh, the private equity market for the past like three years because it's too expensive to buy stuff. You can lend out money, right? You have this big balance sheet. They want to go back into buying assets and restarting that clock. So that'll probably happen on if the economy can rip. Financial markets look tasty. You know what I mean? There's a lot of really cool things, uh, going on, but job data still like, you know, ADP put out their June numbers and like, it doesn't look good, right? So I think we do end up getting rate cuts just because. Like the financial markets are like, you know, removed away from what's happening, you know, in a lot of businesses, right? So I think we'll get bad jobs reports.

• 2:26:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about rates on like buy now, pay later and just like the general consumer ability to like click the checkout button on an e-commerce site like is our like in theory, I would imagine buy now, pay later products being highly sensitive to interest rates. And yet it's always felt like, don't think about the interest rate when you click this button.

• 2:26:51Sean Frank?

  Right. Because the whole thing was that the interest rate was obscured.

• 2:26:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:54Sean Frank?

  Like for a customer on Klarna, they pay a 0% interest rate. And it's built into this payment processing rate that we pay, right? So like the whole idea is that if I charge a brand 6%, I think Shop Pay is like 6%. Shop Pay has pay in four, right? These, these people pay me in four months. I have a 6% interest rate, you know, it works out to being 20, you know, because they're paying back early. Maybe it's 20, maybe it's 25%, who really knows? So there's like built in interest rates that like the, the, the brand's really paying.

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  So if interest rates come down, you, you might expect those rates to come down and then, uh, and then, uh, companies are pushing that harder?

• 2:27:30Sean Frank?

  Dude, if interest rates come down, buy now, pay later becomes a, a good business. Right now, it's probably not that good of a business because the payment contracts are locked in, right? Like Shopify for the next four years, I have to give them 6% or whatever it is of whatever the buy now, pay later is. And if interest rates come down, they're just fucking, I mean, I can't renegotiate that. So they'll just be printing money on that thing. But look, never bet against the American consumer. We love buying shit. Prime days, four days this year, baby.

• 2:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Four days, four days. Last, last question, need to get the update on what percent, like how much value Ridge is getting from AI, like Gen AI right now. Uh, there were some big promises earlier this year from a variety of companies. But I'm curious, like what the actual, yeah, what, what is the core value that you're getting today? Is it just more diversity of creative, being able to test more, or is it kind of business as usual?

• 2:28:26Sean Frank?

  Yeah. So, I mean, two buckets, like data analysis, it's fantastic, right? I'm running all of my data through. Like a bunch of AI tools. It makes reporting way easier. It makes getting like, what's gonna sell inventory buying, all that stuff is way easier with AI, right? I can just upload, hey, here's the 12 months of sales data. What should I buy? And it can actually start doing that for me. And it's replaced inventory managers. I've removed inventory managers from my team. I have, you know, one person director in charge of all that stuff now, but it has replaced people. On the creative side, VO3 is fantastic. So like, we're doing hooks on VO3. You know, it's really good at like, if you have still, still photography and you want to add a little bit of motion, GIFs, whatever, like, it's great at doing that. And, you know, like I said, hooks are really fantastic.

• 2:29:11Sean Frank?

  Static images, it just makes you, we can output way more static images than ever before. But we're still not at the place where like, I mean, I spent $150,000 on photo shoots last month, right? Like, in the desert-

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  How much did you spend on AI tooling? Probably in the thousands or something?

• 2:29:28Sean Frank?

  Yeah, hundreds, right?

• 2:29:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, hundreds.

• 2:29:29Sean Frank?

  But like, we, we have cars in the desert, off-roading, like, AI is not doing those videos yet. I don't know if they ever will.

• 2:29:37Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, we, we made that video for Wander and a large amount of people thought that it was AI-generated. And I'm like, if you find me the person that is making that one-shotting any of those scenes and doing it at that-

• 2:29:51John Coogan?

  At that level.

• 2:29:52Jordi Hays?

  Level of consistency, we will invest our entire balance sheet into your company.

• 2:29:59Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, that, that's good to hear. The, the data analysis side is interesting. That makes, I mean, that, that's historically just been like, one of the hardest problems. Like, the number one thing that will hold a lot of brands back this year is just not having the right inventory so that there's like, demand, there's general demand for what they make and sell. They just don't have enough of the right things. So just getting better there will, will make a huge impact.

• 2:30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, all, all, all the tools are getting better. Whether it's like Excel or your analytics tool or your creative tool, your Photoshop's getting better. Content aware fill's been around for a long time. Now you have it on, you know, steroids. But, um, yeah, still a lot of work to actually get results from, from that. And so you still have people in the loop.

• 2:30:39Sean Frank?

  Yeah, dude, and I think AI like editing is gonna be huge, right? Like, you know, you shoot a lot of content. You guys shot that commercial, right? You probably shot hours, right? To get to get a one minute clip. AI is gonna make editing way easier. So productivity gains are here and they're coming. We're probably another another two years before humans are not actually pulling out cameras.

• 2:31:02John Coogan?

  Two years, that's pretty fast.

• 2:31:05Sean Frank?

  Dude, I mean, if you ask fucking Sam Altman, I mean, we'll see if OpenAI is gonna be around in two years, dude. There might not be any left.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  There might not be anybody left, that's true.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think people will probably be still be doing photos in a few years. I'd probably take the over on that one. But certainly, there will need to be more of a story behind why there's a photo taken. Is it of someone that you know exists? But if it's for something generic, like the stock photography will truly go away.

• 2:31:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're moving from the, you know, you can't trust images online because of filters and just like Photoshop to you can't trust a photo because it's may or may not be real entirely. Like, it could have just been a hallucination from a machine.

• 2:31:53John Coogan?

  But it doesn't matter if you just wanna see a picture of a forest, generic trees in the background to, you know, tell you to give you a vibe of what this Dr. Squatch smells like, you know? It's fresh forest.

• 2:32:05Sean Frank?

  I'm gonna make a plug. There's an AI artist on Twitter. It's a, I think the handle's like, this photo does not exist.

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:12Sean Frank?

  They've produced some amazing photography, right? Like, that actually, it's art. It makes you feel something. A lot of it's soulless, but these guys do a great job. So check that out. This photo does not exist.

• 2:32:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's definitely like the pitch in Mid Journey is like giving people like the tool to create something completely new and like leaving that inspiration that the like the human brings to the tool to create something new. But it's very hard for someone to just go and say, make me a viral video. Make me a beautiful image. Like, that's not the prompt yet. At least not yet, but we'll see.

• 2:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, it's great to see you, Wallet Man. Let's hang in person very soon.

• 2:32:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's hang out soon.

• 2:32:51Sean Frank?

  Henness, guys.

• 2:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Henness, time. Great to see you. Have a great Friday.

• 2:32:56John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:32:56Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:32:57John Coogan?

  On the AI note, we should, we should cover some of the back and forth around Grok 4 versus O3. Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, says Grok 4 feels like artificial intelligence to me. It's clearly not just constructing statistically likely connections, but it's drawing fairly deep insights on problems I hadn't seen before in ways I haven't seen elsewhere. Here's an example, and it's a very detailed example. The biggest shortcoming I see is the adoption of confused musings from online forums as facts, coupled with the inability to derive deep insights from intermingled prose and graphics and sources. It needs contextual skepticism and more multimodal visual learning. Also, I bet there are hundreds of thousands of topics where a human professional could write a definitive guidebook on topics that online forum posters frequently confuse,

• 2:33:42John Coogan?

  and that could be used to fine tune a lot of the low quality user content driven nonsense out of AI models, out of current AI models. So bullish on the, on the fine tuning labs that are generating data. What's interesting is Tyler Cowen says O3 is still better, so he's still in the O3 camp.

• 2:34:00Jordi Hays?

  And more XAI news. This is breaking as of 10 minutes ago. Elon Musk's XAI seeks up to $200 billion valuation in next fundraising.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Wow, okay.

• 2:34:12Jordi Hays?

  Early talks, early talks to boost its value from as much as 10 times from last year.

• 2:34:18John Coogan?

  They're on the frontier. Let's see how much money they can make from this.

• 2:34:21Jordi Hays?

  This is the most, the highest value that's ever been applied to X, Twitter, the everything app.

• 2:34:27John Coogan?

  Well, it's not, it's not pre-revenue now. They're making money.

• 2:34:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:32John Coogan?

  There was more back and forth between two former guests of the show. Amjad says, I suspect it's part of the reason they crush benchmarks. Truth seeking is all, is an all or nothing proposition, and it's crucial for general intelligence. Will Brown says, I think it's probably more the 200,000 H100s for RL and inference than the don't be, than the don't be woke system prompt. I do think this is some pretty marketing, pretty clever marketing sleight of hand by XAI. Grok has been in the news lately for being edgy. Grok is also now in the news for being incredibly smart. They would like you to think that these things are deeply related. That they figured out how to scale RL like this in such a short amount of time is in fact, an impressive feat of research and engineering. There is no reason to think that it's that it's related to the willingness to say controversial thing, things other

• 2:35:14John Coogan?

  than via the absence of efforts typically spent on guardrails. So yeah, maybe they just sent it fully into just, just, you know, training RL, let's hit this as hard as possible. And we covered this, that the RL spend was apparently the same as the inference spend for this training run. So kind of new, new attempt and obviously a great model, but maybe not really tied to the fact that they were trying to make like a, an anti-woke model, specifically just the fact that it's, it's a lot of great math going on.

• 2:35:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, more breaking news. The US, Geiger Capital is reporting on X. The US just posted a surprise surplus of 27 billion for the month of June. Total receipts were 526 billion. Total outlays were 499 billion. That's a free cash flow for the United States of America.

• 2:36:02John Coogan?

  No way. That's wild.

• 2:36:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, absolutely wild.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  Well, more breaking news. You can go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 2:36:14Jordi Hays?

  This is the time to develop a strategic reserve of Daytonas.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:36:20Jordi Hays?

  The Daytona Reserve.

• 2:36:21John Coogan?

  And I mean, we shouldn't, we shouldn't break this, but a good friend of the show is becoming a watch guy. And we're very excited to break the news when it goes live.

• 2:36:27Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to have him on.

• 2:36:28John Coogan?

  We'll have to have him on to talk about it with the hitter. Mark Gurman is talking about Tim Cook. The rhetoric that Tim Cook should be replaced is just nonsensical. Replace him with who? Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs sadly isn't walking through that door. I thought this was a good take that I've agreed with for a while is that, you know, Tim Cook is, it is such a large organization, so deeply entrenched in their massive supply chain. He is the one who built that supply chain. He is, you know, maybe missing the mark on AI, might have to partner with some folks, might have to spend a bunch of money, but fundamentally, he's running the core business very well. And that relates to the new plans for 2026. The first half, they're going to release a flurry of new products. Mark Gurman

• 2:37:09John Coogan?

  has a story in Bloomberg. He says, Apple plans an M5 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, A19 iPhone 17E, new, new Mac external monitor. That'll be interesting. I wonder if they're going to refresh that crazy display. The what's it called? The not the Apple Pro, the Apple Pro Display XDR.

• 2:37:27Jordi Hays?

  Make a television.

• 2:37:28John Coogan?

  Five K. Yeah. If they make just a 55 inch version of that, it's game over. Like, people would definitely mount that on the wall. But right now, it's like, I think it's like 32 inches. Pretty big. Great for like, you know, working. And then we have the studio displays over there that are also very good. But they haven't refreshed the the Pro Display XDR in a long time. People still love it. They're also launching new low end iPads and M4, M4 iPad Airs as part of the flurry of new products. I think this is all kind of expected, but interesting. What else?

• 2:37:57Jordi Hays?

  Michael Laframboys is doing some market research. He says, would you pay for a mini Archimedes? That's plugged into a wall and kill mosquitoes. Cool concept.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  I didn't know what an Archimedes was.

• 2:38:09Jordi Hays?

  This must, he must be.

• 2:38:10John Coogan?

  Missile battery.

• 2:38:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it must be, but.

• 2:38:13John Coogan?

  Lasers or something.

• 2:38:14Jordi Hays?

  I think something like that. I mean, this is, this is the future that we want. This is, this is, you know, making.

• 2:38:20John Coogan?

  Also, slightly.

• 2:38:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we had, so we had Michael. We had, so Aurelius Systems, we had him on the show a long time ago. And, uh, yeah, this is, we need to take the best defense tech and, and use it to, uh, for, for.

• 2:38:34John Coogan?

  This is like Matt Friedman coded meets Palmer Lucky coded.

• 2:38:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:38John Coogan?

  It's like melding the two things together. Just like tiny robotics for like specific use cases, but defense coded. Very cool. Anyway, uh, we should debate this question from Ben South or this, the, this historical anecdote. If distribution were really the only moat, we'd all be using apps from celebrities. He, he calls out Bizzle, which was apparently Justin Bieber's product.

• 2:39:00Jordi Hays?

  Bizzle.

• 2:39:01John Coogan?

  And then, uh.

• 2:39:02Jordi Hays?

  It's not clocking to you, John.

• 2:39:04John Coogan?

  Not clocking to me? What does that mean?

• 2:39:06Jordi Hays?

  You're so offline. So Justin Bieber launched a new album today and he leveraged the, the kind of crash out that he had in front of nobody. When he said, it's not clocking to you that I'm standing on business.

• 2:39:15John Coogan?

  Standing on business. Yeah. Okay.

• 2:39:16Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, we got to bring Bizzle back.

• 2:39:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:19Jordi Hays?

  I, it might still be in the App Store, probably not.

• 2:39:22John Coogan?

  And then there was, uh, uh, the camera app.

• 2:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what was it actually called?

• 2:39:27John Coogan?

  I forget what it's called, but

• 2:39:30Jordi Hays?

  Dispo.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, was it just Dispo eventually? Because it was originally launched as like David's disposables. It's interesting, it's like, yes, you can get the initial onboarding, but if the flywheel isn't there for the true social growth, like the true, what's it called? The R naught, the viral coefficient. If the viral coefficient isn't actually greater than one, you'll just need to continually be refilling the top of funnel and it just will never grow. Underrated, there's like, there's like many more celebrity apps. The Jeremy Renner app, are you familiar with that? It was like, it was like a clone of Instagram, but it was just Jeremy Renner content. It's pretty sick.

• 2:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:40:08John Coogan?

  It was just for like Jeremy Renner fans that could just see his private Instagram like feed, basically. Pretty funny, but yeah, it's interesting. It's like, begs the question, like, what is the ideal celebrity? The, the ideal celebrity app or way to get into technology? I'm still very bullish on Saquon Barkley's strategy of just like

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Invest in the power law nerds.

• 2:40:29John Coogan?

  Companies that are already like, kind of deemed successful and like ordained by the, by the tech in industry and the tech complex and just get in, as opposed to like trying to all of a sudden become a tech CEO or like a co-founder of something that you're just kind of taking weight on, that you're just kind of dead weight on the cap table and you're not really driving it. It's like, if you're, if you're good at being a celebrity, just, just focus on that and then, you know, invest separately. Anyway, interesting. What else?

• 2:40:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, I wanted to highlight a market. There's a market up now of the next C, a poly market of the next CEO of X.

• 2:41:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:41:05Jordi Hays?

  It only has, X would be like the social app.

• 2:41:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Unclear if there would be, if Elon just becomes the, the CEO broadly. There's no new CEO because, you know, you know, for whatever reason, they just don't backfill.

• 2:41:23Jordi Hays?

  Linda, but then Sri Ram Krishnan, sitting at 17%.

• 2:41:27John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a very, very, very low volume. Nikita's up there too at 10%. But I think the company, I think the social app of X, now that it's a combined entity, it still needs a figurehead. It needs a core champion. So I'm hoping they find somebody new there.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  There are some contenders that were highlighted by the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if they're on this market particularly. Contenders could include members of Yaccarino's leadership team such as John Nitti, Global Head of Revenue Operations and Ad Innovation at X, Angela Zapata, X's Global Head of Marketing, or Monique Pintirelli, Head of Americas at X, Industry Insider set. So those are kind of the rumors that the Wall Street Journal is talking about. But it'd be way more fun to get a poster in there.

• 2:42:19Jordi Hays?

  Definitely.

• 2:42:20John Coogan?

  Potential guest.

• 2:42:21Jordi Hays?

  Poster's in control.

• 2:42:22John Coogan?

  Not one of these business people. Although, we forgot to highlight this, but Linda Yaccarino, during her 12 years at NBC Universal, she had the nickname "The Velvet Hammer", which I think is amazing. She earned a reputation as a hard-charging executive with networking and negotiating chops. "The Velvet Hammer" because she would always dress in velvet, I guess, which is so sad.

• 2:42:44Jordi Hays?

  Velvet Hammer.

• 2:42:45John Coogan?

  You gotta always have attire that's so iconic that it works its way into a nickname. We were talking about nicknames this morning, and they need to come from specific stories. You can't just like, you know, pull them out of a hat. They need to really be evocative. And "The Velvet Hammer" tells me exactly what she's up to.

• 2:43:04Jordi Hays?

  Definitely.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  Dress to the nines, gonna get the ad deal done.

• 2:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is a good post to end on from San Calp. You are terminally online if you know more than five of these. TBPN, Hi Agency, Hegelian E-Girl, Claude Code, La Boo Boo. I still don't know how to pronounce that. I just see it written everywhere. Grok4, Prime Intellect, Calamaze, that guy who claims to have implemented autofills and OTPs. Somebody, a friend of the show, sent us that guy's making that claim. And then I noticed that it was getting community noted because the guy was just like lying. Because that's like, I mean, it's great.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  I think it was hotly debated whether or not he was lying. Like, obviously at Apple, like, multiple people work on every project. So people were like, yes, well, technically someone else has a claim. But also this person might have a claim and there's no evidence that this guy doesn't have the right to claim it. Anyway, we are clearly terminally online because we know everything about this.

• 2:44:01Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  Just diving into a conversation about it.

• 2:44:04Jordi Hays?

  Of course. Well, it's Friday. It's Friday afternoon or evening, depending where you are in the world. And try terminally touching grass this weekend.

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:44:14Jordi Hays?

  Go outside.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  Log off.

• 2:44:15Jordi Hays?

  Get some sunlight.

• 2:44:16John Coogan?

  Get some sunlight in the morning. Five minutes.

• 2:44:18Jordi Hays?

  Five minutes.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  Three to five minutes.

• 2:44:19Jordi Hays?

  That's enough. Don't do more than that.

• 2:44:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Get back inside. Dooms girl.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend, everyone. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Excited for Monday.

• 2:44:27John Coogan?

  And we will see you on Monday.

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you then.

• 2:44:29John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:44:29Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.