Ms. Information Herself, Acquiring Mountains, Jonathan Moneymaker, Start A Tradition Today

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we have some breaking news in the media free agency, brothers. We got a blockbuster trade coming out of the journalistic trenches. Taylor Lorenz, yes, misinformation herself is officially making the move from the Washington Posters to the San Francisco Information. This is a huge pickup for them, absolutely game changing. Jordy, what you got for me?

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about Lorenz's game. This is a multimedia star who has posted and reported across every single platform you can think of, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, podcasting, Twitter, X, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Threads, you name it, she's dominated it. She's not just covering culture, people, she is shaping it.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Of course, her, her career hit a bit of turbulence after some head-to-head contact with none other than, with none other than Marc Andreessen. Let me do that again. Of course, her career hit a bit of turbulence after some head-to-head contact with none other than Marc Andreessen. That little dust-up in the clubhouse caused her career trajectory to be slowed, hindered, impeded, delayed, there are other words for it, but you get the idea.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  She hits free agency after parting ways with the New York Times, but instead of hanging up her cleats, she deletes all her tweets and goes back to the grind and gets immediately signed with none other than the Washington Posters. And let's not forget, she thrived there, continuing her gumshoe reporting, taking on billionaires, and making life miserable for anyone daring to build a network state.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  And talk about a dream gig, working for one of the greatest technology brothers in history.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Jeff Bezos. She worked hard to make the richest man in the world even richer, one of the most noble things a technology journalist can do.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  And yes, people call her a champagne socialist, they call her a limousine liberal. But look, as someone who loves drinking champagne in the back of limousines, I feel like we're kindred spirits.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Look, this is a reporter who doesn't just show up. She gets in people's heads. She understands the game like no one else, whether it's hard hitting investigations or defining internet culture for the masses. Her articles have been must reads for years. If you're building a network state, a new social app, or just trying to live your life in Silicon Valley, Taylor is coming for you and you better watch out. Phenomenal pickup by the San Francisco misinformation. They just landed an absolute franchise player. Can't wait to see the headline she's about to write. John, do you have any details on the contract?

• 2:30John Coogan?

  We don't at this time. I think it is just a contract. I don't think she's full time yet. Still testing out the waters, settling in through the team. But, very interesting. She hit me up a couple of weeks ago. We chatted about the rise of the Brocaster and I chimed in as a male podcast expert on the record. Talked to her for about 30 minutes. It was a fantastic conversation and she's still got it. She's in the arena, she's making plays, and this article is fantastic. We're going to break it down. But first, we're going to go to a profile of Taylor Lorenz in none other than The Information. They wrote about her, now they're writing with her. It's almost like, you can't write this

• 3:11John Coogan?

  storyline at home, folks. So, let's go to Annie Goldsmith at The Information who writes, "All rippers, no skippers. How Taylor Lorenz Became Part of the Story." On May 18th, The Washington Post published a breaking news story about the Biden administration's newly-created and promptly-attacked disinformation governments board. The board was able to be led by researcher and author Nina Jankowicz, who, The Post reported, has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral. The Post revealed that Jankowicz was resigning from her barely-three-week-old post and the board, which had been charged with countering misinformation related to Homeland Security, was being disbanded. And this was a different...

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Arc in Taylor's career. She'd been on the tech beat and always, she always got a lot of, a lot of criticism because she was a technology journalist, but she wrote a lot about social media. She wrote a lot about culture and people were, oh, she should be in the style section. Completely disagree with that characteristic. I think that what she wrote about was extremely important to the technology world.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  No, and what I, I mean, in many ways, she was the center of the entire creator economy trend.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Which was huge.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Which was huge, but in many ways, she, she contributed, she, she implanted so many ideas in venture capital's head.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  That it, it led to a sort of capital incineration where VCs invested billions of dollars into the creator economy and we haven't had much to show for it.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  And she was so pissed about VCs coining the, the whole creator economy thing and really running with it with, with, as their own because she'd been reporting on it for years and was like, this is not news.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was, that was the, that was actually the.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Piece of her book.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that was somewhat of the, the, the thing I always found, you know, having my first, you know, real company is a YouTube ad network that I started.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  While in college. And when I saw the creator economy trend happening in tech, I was like, this is kind of interesting because the entire movement was basically kicked off because somebody did an analysis. Somebody did an analysis of the fastest growing small business categories in the U S and influencers were the fastest growing category. And so people were like, we need to give them SaaS, right?

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  And so they just dumped literally billions into, and the information, the San Francisco information was that at the forefront of kind of covering that they've had probably hundreds of articles at this point that have referenced the creator economy.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  And tracking like deal volume and velocity, which has slowed down dramatically. And I think one of the issues where, why that trend didn't necessarily play out is the trends that were driving the creator economy had really started at the creation of YouTube and some of these sort of foundational social media platforms.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:59Jordi Hays?

  That had already been in the like, very like scaled for a while. That said, I do think Taylor did a good job of making the creator economy about herself.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  And she's built a fantastic career on it.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was an interesting dynamic where the thesis of her book was that, look, you might see Mr. Beast or Logan Paul, like kind of the shining stars of the creator economy now, or Kai Sinad, or I Show Speed, all these bros, Rogan, but really, if you go back in her telling of the history, it was the mommy bloggers who really were on the forefront of the creator economy, which I think is right, and that's accurate. But it doesn't go back far enough, in my opinion, because if you go back even further, there's a group of bros that start the platforms, and that's guys like Chad Hurley at YouTube.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Chad himself.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  And so there's this question of like, her whole point was like, VCs are just jumping on to this creator economy bandwagon right now, they're not authentic. And like, while that was true, if you go back to Sequoia writing the investment memo for YouTube in 2003 or something like that, like clearly they saw what the creator economy was going to become, and they actually made a very strong bet, if you're a venture capitalist and you're looking for outsized returns, you don't necessarily want to rip a check into someone with a Canon 5D who's going to go make vlogs, and who knows if it's going to hit, and if it does, it's going to look like a lifestyle business most likely. You want to be in the platforms, and that's why the VCs were correct, to put money into Twitter.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny that in many ways, the creator economy investment trend was like the trend of capital incineration, but if you go back and you combine Shopify and YouTube into that.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  And Instagram and Facebook.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  It was an amazing category to invest in.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So you need to, you need to really understand the definition of like, like, does creator economy include the platforms? Like, it should, right? And so obviously, there's a lot of beneficiaries there, but.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  And there's been, there's been, you know, for, for platforms like Substack that have gotten, you know, that have been at the center of controversy, they've continued to be a place where you can build a great creator business on, right?

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yep, and so she gets a lot of love for breaking this story. It was a huge story at the time. The scoop was, for a news cycle at least, the talk of the town, just the latest in a series of stories that has made Lorenz the most scrutinized, recognized, and controversial journalist in the tech beat. She just keeps putting out bangers, says NBC News reporter Ben Collins, who I believe like runs the Onion now. Did you see this?

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  I think I'm thinking of the right person. Her former editor at The Daily Beast, she's all rippers and no skippers, and that is true. She's on the power law. She is a phenomenal player and everything that she touches turns to gold.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  She's a scoop machine because she lives and breathes the heavily online lifestyle that her subject.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Her book, Extremely Online. She is extremely online.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  The subject, she's living the same experience as many of the people that she covers.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  So obviously she's going to have better scoops and have a very unique lens on it all.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it goes back to her early career. In the three months since she left The New York Times to join The Post, Lorenz has been breaking, has broken high impact stories about Facebook smear campaign against TikTok, the woman behind the right wing libs of TikTok's social media account, and the White House's Ukraine war briefings for TikTok stars. She's a scoop machine, said her Post editor, David Mallett. It's so true. Her beat was initially dubbed internet culture, though Lorenz now rejects that moniker. I hate that phrase. She said, attention stemming from her belief that all culture is internet culture. This is so true. She's dead on. Like, the internet, online is real life. Twitter is real life. And that's why she is, she's really good and she runs this like, she runs her own Instagram

• 9:56John Coogan?

  account, but then she also runs a non-Instagram account that's been banned so many times. It's now on like Taylor Lorenz alt number 717.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  No way. I don't even know about this.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Oh, it's really, really good.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm missing out.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  I forget what it's called, but it's really funny. And she posts great stuff. She like is very, very in tune with the culture and she doesn't get enough credit from the tech elite, in my opinion. A number of Lorenz's friends and colleagues use the same phrase to describe her, extremely online. And that's the title of her forthcoming book. There's no distinction between online and life and offline life. Couldn't agree more, Taylor.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Truth.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Now, for the first time, Lorenz has found herself the subject of media attention in February when she announced she was leaving her job at the Times to become a columnist at the rival Post. Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and The Hill all covered her departure with Lorenz lobbying some lightweight grenades of the gray lady out of the, on her way out the door. She told Vanity Fair that she kind of hit a ceiling at the Times and hoped the paper would hopefully, you know, involve in their ways. Completely agree. I mean, she left shortly after the dust-up with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. They were in this clubhouse chat. Ben Horowitz used the R-word, but he used it, he was quoting members of the Wall Street Bets community who used the R-word to refer to themselves in endearing

• 11:13John Coogan?

  ways, and he was being positive and they were being positive. So, it was, it was kind of a hall monitor situation. She took to Twitter immediately, posted about it, but, most importantly, she got the name wrong. She attributed the quote to Marc Andreessen instead of Ben Horowitz, and shortly after, she was out at the New York Times. And I think, huge mistake by the New York Times.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Clearly, they just don't get the modern way.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  Lost a lot of cultural relevancy.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  For the Times.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly. But fortunately-

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Which is why it's such a big pickup for the information.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Jeff Bezos understood, hey, if you're gonna be talking trash about, you know, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, get on my team. I love, I love riffing with these guys.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  And so, she goes over to the Times, and she says, "A few weeks ago, she found herself in mid, in the midst of another journalism brouhaha after she referenced her personal brand in an insider interview. I will not make that mistake again," she told me. Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted, "Is there something going on in the world other than the desire of some folks to get more attention?" Ridiculous. Maggie, no one's gonna be talking about you in a couple of years. You need to be building a brand.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Like, you're going to be irrelevant. Taylor is clearly a glimpse into the future here, and the old guard just doesn't get it. And so, it must be extremely frustrating for her, for Taylor, because in any other community of tech people, everyone would be like, yes, like, you are doing everything perfectly. And you can tell because the, the, the tech folks are like- Fuck, this is the one thing that works against us. Like, we don't care what Maggie Haberman says about us, but we do care what Taylor Lorenz says about us because she speaks our language and she's online.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you know, we've, we've talked about this before. We don't understand the frustration with Taylor. She is a, finally, a worthy competitor for the technology industry and a sparring partner, right? Somebody that you can bounce ideas off of and have sort of this sort of somewhat charged, but very meaningful debates on the most important topics of our time, like how much time you should spend scrolling on any of it.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Yes, but it's kind of like getting in the gladiatorial pit with like a wild bear or tiger.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  It's gonna lead to a lot of glory, but you could get malt. And so you talk to her on the record, could come out fine, as we saw with this next piece that we're gonna cover, but you could get, you could get destroyed and your whole life could be up in, up in flames. And so there was a big controversy after she doxed the libs of TikTok. The Daily Wire leased a Times Square billboard which blared in all caps, Taylor Lorenz doxed libs of TikTok. I wish I could get my, my rivals to buy Times Square billboards about me. Man, what an impact. You know you got under someone's skin when they're buying billboards about you.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. In Lorenz's view, "It's not just the politically flammable stories that elicit such incendiary reactions, but the tenacity with which she reports them. I think you have to really nail them," she said, "and when you really twist the knife in a good way, in an accountability story, people are going to freak out." Taylor Lorenz joined The Washington Post at a delicate moment for the newsroom. Like the Times, The Post was working to formalize a policy surrounding its reporters' use of social media. The paper had been rocked by a discrimination lawsuit filed last July by reporter Felicia Sommez, a sexual assault survivor who was suspended in January 2020 by former Post editor Marty Baron. The suspension came after Sommez tweeted about rape allegations against Kobe Bryant shortly after his death.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  Though the paper is now under the leadership of its first female executive editor, Sally Busby, the episode was still fresh in the minds of some staffers when Taylor Lorenz joined in March. Enter Taylor Lorenz into this powder keg situation. Here is somebody who is employed to use their voice on Twitter in a way that no one else has been empowered to do. And so the feeling from the top brass is mutual. There's a lot of excitement in the room about working with her. Part of what it means to practice journalism today is there are going to be staffers that have really large followings, and this is true. This is the modern era, and so you have to be online.

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  In many ways, in our corner of the internet, Lorenz is going to be bigger than any publication that she works with, right?

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  She actually genuinely has more reach than The Post within our section of the internet.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  She is the one technology journalist who truly lives rent-free in the minds of the tech elite.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  In a very meaningful way, and that, you can't put a price on that. It can't be quantified in like, distribution numbers, or circulation numbers. Though Taylor Lorenz is now the poster child for being very online, growing up in old Greenwich, Connecticut, she remained fairly unplugged. In the late 90s, I felt like the internet was for nerds, and I wanted to be cool, so I didn't really spend a lot of time online, aside from AIM, she told me. In 1998, I just didn't get the hype at all. She declined to answer additional questions about her family life, upbringing, or even her exact age, itself the subject of wild speculation on the right. Yeah, people are obsessed with her age. It's very funny, on her Wikipedia page, it says that she was born between 1984 and 1988, or something like that.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's her gift, is being able to swing through. Is she Gen Z, one story? Is she millennial, another? Is she a boomer, another?

• 16:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  She really can sort of bend with whatever the subject that she's writing about, and really feel as though it's coming from the source, right?

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But that bit, it just keeps on giving. Like, just this week, it went viral again, because someone was talking about her age, and she replied like, "Look, I'm 50." And it's like, obviously, she's not 50, but no one gets the joke, and so everyone's like, "She's actually 50," and they like, you know, start dunking on that, and like...

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  No, she's got a real, she's got a real sense of humor, right?

• 17:05John Coogan?

  She's got a real sense of humor.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  She knows how to get the people riled up.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  She does it intentionally, strategically.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  She did this, you remember when she went out and said, you know, "I need to have my..." You know, apartment.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  She heats her apartment to like eighty degrees.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Eighty-five degrees or something.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Her baseline.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  Temperature and and that sparked a lot of speculation that maybe she was, you know, a lizard person.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  And needed to be in sort of a warm environment.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  Because of that.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  The war on air conditioning, she's been waging it for years. Um, but yeah, I mean, what what a career. In twenty seventeen, Lorenz came face to face with the dangers of her new job when she was assaulted at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, getting punched in the face while delivering a live stream report. I peer pressured the Daily Beast into hiring me for little, literally nothing. I took a seventy percent pay cut. I sold every belonging I had and moved in with a bunch of roommates.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  Conviction.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  From heights, conviction.

• 17:58Jordi Hays?

  Conviction.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Grinding. And, uh, yeah, what what a crazy thing. I remember she was at that live stream. That was so crazy. What a crazy time. She was an instant hit at the Daily Beast. She was like a rocket ship.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  Uh, she was a pioneer in what was then a criminally undercover industry. Lorenz stayed at the Daily Beast for a few months before getting recruited away. Within six months, I had four job offers from all these other outlets. I took the Atlantic where I was there for a year and a half, and then the New York Times was aggressively recruiting me. Yeah, I mean, this is what happens to star players.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  They get recruited.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  And, uh, now now she's fully in the free agency. She's writing, she has a a fantastic Substack. I I subscribe to her newsletter. She's always unearthing stories that I would not have found otherwise. She's not writing about like the mainstream tech news, um, but it's very important if you're a if you're a tech, if you're a tech person.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  She's done this perfect creator dance, which is benefiting from these legacy media brands in order to establish herself while still sort of building up her own audience so that she can maintain this sort of, uh, you know, this sort of like fuck you attitude of I don't need you, you need me, right?

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  Given that that she could. In theory, be completely independent at any point and and probably make just as much money doing that than she could at any one of these publications.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. But it's obviously come with major setbacks. She's been doxxed multiple times. She's been swatted multiple times with police forces wrongly called to her home and that of her parents. She's philosophical about what her parents faced. She calls them generic suburban white people who can comfortably reason with law enforcement when 15 police show up at the door, but she worries about other reporters who are victims of such harassment. Think if they're in a different neighborhood or of a different background or of a different race. Those are the stakes other journalists are trying to cover. The abuse has been so constant, it's become almost routine. It's the same. Doxed on Kiwi Farms and 4chan, Reddit thread about your family and friends and get swatted. You get swatted, they leak your phone number. I feel like I'm on the merry-go-round for the 20th time. I feel

• 20:04John Coogan?

  like there's, there's gotta be some way to harden her, her security because she's gotta keep posting. But swatting people's just playing dirty, folks. Don't do it. It's, that's not the point. The whole thing is like, you have to understand what's going on in the tech press versus the tech community is like, it's, it's WWE. It's wrestling. Like, what happens on the court is left, is left in the ring and, and, and, you know, you can't be the fan that thinks it's real. That's just embarrassing.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but here's, here's the thing. The, the pressure on her and the scrutiny has made her a better journalist, right? And she admits this. She says, she's keenly aware of any mistakes that she makes, no matter how trivial, will be trotted out in front of a national audience. I can't get a correction ever. Like, I would be dead. I can't fuck up ever. Any tiny thing is gonna be blown out of proportion. So the margin for error because of that attention is just very high. That's that Mamba mentality, right? Where she's, she understands in the spotlight, she's gonna perform, right? And it's pushing her to be a better journalist.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  Yep. And, and this came back to, to, to her recently when she was at a press briefing for Joe Biden. I believe she called him a war criminal. On her close friends feed on Instagram, one of her close friends, turns out not that much of a close friends, leaked it, screenshotted it, leaked it. And there was massive blowback, but you know what? Free speech, I thought we were the, the, the party of free speech. We're supposed to be supporting people saying unhinged things about our enemies.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  That said, so, but recently she's sort of come around to feeling like deplatforming is actually wrong.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  She said on a recent podcast that, you know, while she historically was in favor of silencing the manosphere. So if you had male opinions, she wanted to generally sort of shut you up, deplatform you. What she's sort of found in her research is that that tends to have blowback that comes with it. Where if you end up in this game of whack a mole where you deplatform somebody, they pop up on another platform. And she's been very critical of the right leaning platforms that have been in favor of free speech.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  And has spoken out very strongly against many of those platforms, but at the same time recognizing that the, there, there are so many potential platforms to, to post on today. That deplatforming is, is potentially, um, you know, very ineffective.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it gave us the birth of Parler and Gab and Truth Social and, you know, all these different platforms.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  I, I think that the natural next move for her is potentially like a board level role at Truth Social. Cause like where, where does she really go from here? She's been at the Atlantic, the Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Information. She's been around, you know, she's been at every top newsroom.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  In the country, the only, the natural next step is to join the board of something like Truth Social and help. You know, Truth Social, while they have a fantastic valuation, they only did about a million in revenue.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Last year. So if Tay, if Taylor went, went on there and said she was rolling out a private feed and subscription, she could probably two, three X their revenue overnight.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, it goes back to the concept of like the horseshoe theory, right? Like she's been clocked as like left wing, but as we've seen with her calling Biden a war criminal, she's not riding with Biden. She's not in the democratic establishment. She's further left that she's very skeptical of government because of how they handled COVID. A lot of people on the right are skeptical of the government because they handled COVID, because of how they handled COVID. And so you could see her following around, going to national Bolshevism or far right extremism. And, and just kind of coming to the other side at a certain point. We've seen this a lot.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  I like to, I, I like it when she runs into the fire, right?

• 23:48John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  So with, with her going to the information, it's, it's literally saying, hey, All my, you know, all her top enemies are avid, you know, readers of the information, these sort of tech elites.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  She's in the mouth of the wolf now.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  She's going and running at them.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, screaming at them.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  Chasing them around the internet.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  But the next move could be to the Daily Wire.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  The Daily Wire or Truth Social, right?

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Yep, or Truth Social.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  Like going into the fire, she's not afraid to do that.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  But there's one, uh, there's one journalist who will not be working with her in the future, and that's Nate Silver. They got a little spat on X. Taylor wrote, "Hi Nate, I don't disclose any personal details like my birthdate, home address, family info, etc. because my family members are harassed and swatted at their homes thanks to reactionary people like you, misrepresenting my work and inciting outrage. Why are you so obsessed with my age?" It's a good point, good point. Who cares if she's writing bangers? I don't care if it's a 13-year-old in Czechoslovakia.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  I will retweet it. Uh, but Nate replies and says, "Taylor, normal people publish their date of birth. Mine is 1/13/78. I know you're probably older than the image you want to cultivate online, but you just own it. Not much you can really do to make yourself younger." And Nate had to delete it. He said, " deleting this because it's mean. I don't think highly of this person, but I also don't know this person."

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  I was a little unclear what he meant by deleting it, by screenshotting it and reposting it.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Screenshooting and getting 5,000 likes.

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so I was a bit confused on that, but I think it's important. So we don't, we don't talk about social.

• 25:21John Coogan?

  This is a, this is a growth hack. Uh, we need to post some really incendiary stuff, then delete it and then post the screenshot. I'm deleting, I, just so you know, I'm deleting, uh, the, this picture of my watch collection and my rare car collection because it's in, it's gauche, it's in bad taste. Uh, I, I apologize and please don't repost and like this.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I, and I think it's important to say, so we don't talk about politics or social issues on this podcast.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I have to, you know.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, restate that.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Remind people of that.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  I do think it's important for us as a technology and a business podcast to stand up against this journalist on journalist violence.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Technology brothers, you know, we have our differences at times, but overall, we have this sort of shared, common mission to advance the world through enterprise SaaS and rockets and everything in between. Journalists have the same sort of desire to find and share the truth, and I don't want to see Nate Silver and Taylor Lorenz fighting. I want to see them uniting. I want to see them going over to Truth Social, going over to Blue Sky together, being everywhere at once, posting more, and, you know, constantly in pursuit of the truth and not letting personal differences or getting into arguments about birthdays.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this goes back to when Elon bought AskX. Taylor was banned for a little bit for some reason. It was a very dark time. I want her on the platform. I want her in the ring. I want the surprise.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, she still, she posts with comments off now.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, she's back on, but we need to get her, her account fully back up and supported. We need all of her crew on to really create some tension on the timeline. This was like the beauty of Twitter was like, if you were posting about capitalism or technology, it could go either way.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  You could get dunked on.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  You could get dunked on.

• 27:04Jordi Hays?

  Now, when you go out and post.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Now, there's no, there's no stakes.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  Capitalism, good.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, cool. Old, old news.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  Thumbs up.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  There's no stakes, and so stakes and drama, that's what makes for entertainment, and so we need more of that, so we need to support Taylor Lorenz on the timeline.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  And honestly, if, if Taylor was taking X seriously, I'm, I'm assuming she'd be pulling in at least 50, 60K a month.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  I would hope so.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Just off of the, the ad sharing revenue.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  I would hope so. So go and, go and subscribe to the information, subscribe to her podcast, Power User Pod on YouTube.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  AWS is a sponsor, so we wanted to just say, do, we like to do sponsor acknowledgements.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  She's still, she's still working with Bezos. That's great. I was worried that they had a rift after leaving the post, but it's good to see that Bezos is still supporting her.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  I think it's good to do sponsor acknowledgements. Thank you to AWS for sponsoring Taylor.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Power User Pod.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  I think it's an amazing way to get in front of, you know, the next generation of, of engineers and entrepreneurs that are going to be building on top of AWS.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  I agree, I agree. So let's go to the rise of the brocasters. This is the article that Taylor called me about, and I spoke to her on the record. She writes about a year ago, Sean Kelly, then 26, decided to launch yet another business. Previously, he'd fooled around running a small drop shipping company as a Rutgers University undergrad. Later, he sold face masks and other personal protective equipment during the pandemic's early days. Clearly, very hustle, very entrepreneurial oriented guy. Neither enterprise had really gone anywhere. So after years of binging the Joe Rogan experience, he settled on his next venture, his own podcast. He billed his show Digital Social Hour as in-depth conversations with entrepreneurs, thought leaders and high achievers, attracting guests like Brian Johnson, Tulsi Gabbard.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  He uploaded YouTube, he uploaded episodes relentlessly, both audio and YouTube videos, and amassed a dedicated male following. In swift order, he shot to number one on Apple Podcasts, self improvement category. Congrats. Probably lots of Dom Perignon along the way. And he's accumulated 11 million Instagram followers and more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube. He's leaned hard into video and employs up to eight freelance video editors at a time, six for his longer stuff and two for short, social media friendly clips. What's interesting is that she then later clocks his revenue or his profit.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  Why wouldn't she not, so she went and she said she talked to industry experts about it. Why would she just not ask for a picture of his watch or car collection?

• 29:31John Coogan?

  That would be good.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  Be a much easier way to clock his revenue.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  He won't comment on his annual revenue, but based on conversations with industry experts, it could plausibly be around a half million dollars. I feel like that's really low.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Super low.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Really low for.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  Kelly, if that's what you're doing, if that's what you're doing, talk to us.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we'll get you set up with some real, real profit. Maybe he's not doing enough ads. But I mean, 11 million Instagram followers, 1 million subscribers, like.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be able to pull in a lot more than.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  I mean, the rule of thumb generally, I mean, this isn't even for business content or long form, but the rule of thumb is usually a dollar per subscriber on YouTube is like reasonable, reasonable monetization. So you look at Mr. Beast, over 100 million subscribers. His business does over 100 million dollars. You look at a lot of the finance channels that have a couple million views, a couple million subscribers, a couple million bucks in revenue.

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  And then, of course, there's costs below the line, but.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  He, uh, Taylor is, uh, opining on the end of an era. The era of journalistic podcasts like Serial and Slow Burn is fading away. And even the schlocky true crime and horror standbys like My Favorite Murder and Last Podcast on the Left no longer hold as much cultural sway and brand power as they did a few years ago. Instead, the new podcast stars are young men like Kelly. They're part of the manosphere that's been talked about a lot in politics lately. Ever since Donald Trump made their shows, he campaign stops.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and, and Taylor's last podcast episode was with your, your friend, a researcher.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Joshua Cinderella.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  Joshua, who is an expert on the manosphere.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  And it was a great episode where Josh, Joshua basically mansplained the manosphere to Taylor and the audience. So it was, uh, very insightful for me, uh, considering, you know, I've, I've, I've listened to some of these podcasts before, um, but I'd never heard the manosphere described so perfectly.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's, uh, it's fascinating. It's all this question, there's been a big question in the media about like, should, should the Democrats build a, a Democrat version of Joe Rogan? And there's a bunch of reasons why that may or may not work. They kind of, if you look at the top technology or the top podcasts, there are already plenty of left-wing shows with huge reaches. The Harris campaign just didn't do them. Like, there's The Daily Show, there's the Ezra Klein Show, the NYT Daily, there's Last Podcast on the Left, and, uh, there's that one with those comedians called, uh, uh, I'm blanking on it, but it's, it, it, it's also really, Smartless is really big. And then there's the one with the Obama writer, uh, called, uh, Pod Save America.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  So there's just like so many, like, the views are clearly there. It's not like, you know, oh, there's 100 million Americans who just aren't listening to podcasts, they're just listening to different podcasts, but they just weren't prioritized. So I kind of rejected the whole premise when I was talking to her. But there is an interesting question about why, uh, why male podcasts have become so big, how this happened. My thesis for her was that a big part of it is that Apple has less algorithmic control over what people look at and listen to in the podcast player. So they are much less likely to deplatform people. They did deplatform Infowars, but they never deplatformed the Daily Wire in the same way

• 32:50John Coogan?

  that YouTube can just adjust the algorithm to promote a little bit less because they're, Kevin Ruze did this whole deep dive on, I think it was called Rabbit Hole, he did a whole podcast and series about young men who go on YouTube and look for, you know, self-improvement content essentially. And then they wind up in a conservative rabbit hole of content that gets more and more right wing as they go down it. And the recommendation algorithm was, it wasn't tuned to deal with politics at all. It was completely neutral about it. It was like, if you, if you search for a video about a, you know, 911 Turbo S, well, you're gonna, you're gonna see a video about a more niche Porsche. And you're gonna see a, an ST video and then a GT3 RS and then some retro Porsche because it knows.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  You might end up on Cars and Bids buying.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So it's kind of like a funnel for anything. And of course, it worked the same way for conservative content and liberal content, too.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and she, and this, this piece calls it out, but YouTube is, I, I do think it's starting to change, but forever, because YouTube originated with a lot of gaming content, that was like over, I think it was like over 50% of all content uploaded to YouTube for a while. I think it may still be that way, was just gaming content. And that attracted a lot of men. And then that has still snowballed where I see this have, you know, running a YouTube ad network, you know, I don't run it, I haven't run it in years, but starting one in college, it was always, it used to be a real challenge to help a female-oriented consumer brand actually scale up on YouTube because there just wasn't that many channels.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  That's changed a lot as YouTube has become, but I think, I think one of the, the, I don't think this is like specifically called out, but some, something that people miss with YouTube is. There is, it has complete, so much of YouTube content today is watched on TVs, right? And so what that means is that the influence that TV used to hold is now held by the, the male podcast experts, right? The Hubermans, Alex Freedmans.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  And a lot of them have deals where they can still post the full show on YouTube. This is the thing with the, the Harris going on Call Her Daddy and Trump going on Rogan. Rogan is now a couple of years out from his Spotify deal. He's allowed to post the full episode on YouTube as well as on Spotify. Call Her Daddy is still in that tweener phase where they have to gate it. And so what went out on YouTube from Call Her Daddy was just a clip. It wasn't the full thing and it was a lot shorter. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that goes into the dynamics there. They had a good quote from Samir Chowdhury. Do you know this guy?

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  Host of the Colin and Samir Show. It's a great, it's a great show. They break down the, they break down everything in the YouTube world and they really break down like the business of YouTube. Really great interviews with Mr. Beast and a lot of other folks.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Samir says YouTube is a largely male audience and male loneliness is a factor. You have a lot of young men looking for community and friendship and they've been able to find that through podcasting.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've talked about the cure, cure to male loneliness being just calling up your ramp. You know, sales rep, right? Your SDR over at Ramp, they'll talk to you for hours.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  Or going on Tegus.

• 36:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, going on Tegus.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  Taking expert network calls.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. But I, I resonate with this when I discovered podcasts while I was a young man. I was 18 and it felt like having a mentor in my pocket. Where I could listen to hundreds of hours of people that had gone and done the things that I wanted to do. And I, I learned the language of the industries that I was interested. I learned different health practices that, you know, many of which I still do today. So it, podcasts have served as basically an older brother to me that I didn't have in terms of teaching me about the world and it's. Influenced many of my beliefs, right?

• 36:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. My question here is, he says YouTube is a largely male audience. And so I wonder how, what the actual gender breakdown is. Is it sixty forty? Is it seventy thirty? And then, and then if you zoom out-

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  Can you look that up?

• 36:58John Coogan?

  And then if you zoom out, I wonder if, if, i- is it that women are just listening to less content or consuming less content? Or are they on, is Instagram more female? Is TikTok more female? Or are, are, is YouTube and podcasting really just skews male? Like, like are AirPods sold more to men than women? Like, I wonder about that, or just like headphones, like listening to things? Like the thing that is upstream of the individual platform? Because I, I would believe that there are some platforms that lean male, some platforms that lean female. But I would be very surprised if we learned that just content consumption is a male phenomenon.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. So as of now, this site is reporting that only fifty-four percent of YouTube users eighteen and above are male.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  That sounds right to me. That sounds right to me. Because, but, but it is in different niches, obviously. If you look at like the business niche or the manosphere, obviously that's going to skew male. But there are going to be plenty of sub niches that skew female. Fifty fifty, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so I, I kind of, I kind of disagree with that characterization of YouTube. And I don't think the data backs that up. But it is interesting that, that just the, the accessible product on, on social media, in, on new media, was accessible to the conservatives this time around. Where next year, or, or in, in twenty twenty-four, I guess twenty twenty-eight, we could be looking at, oh, it's the TikTok election or the Instagram Reels election.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  And the Democrats are crushing because they have more, much more viral potential on there. And it's a little bit of a more, like for JD, he seems to do really well in a three hour show. Same with Trump. But maybe the Democrats, whoever they put up next, whether it's Buttigieg or AOC, they'll do well, better on a streaming platform, or they'll do better on a short form platform. And so I'm, I'm, I'm wondering if this, if this holds forever, or if this will be, if this will be, you know, disrupted. And so let's go to my quote in here.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  The other commonality, many of these podcasters eventually feel the pull towards political coverage, which is something I've talked about, which has been an even wider appeal than topics like artificial intelligence and crypto. John Coogan, an entrepreneur in residence at Founder's Fund and host of the podcast Technology Brothers, said he experienced this pressure firsthand when trying to grow his YouTube channel, which is now has nearly a half a million subscribers. You want your business to grow, you have employees, he said, but as you grow, you need the numbers to go up. The algorithm is addictive. You realize that there are only 100,000 people interested in tech or AI. At a certain point, you max out the technology or business market size. And so this is very natural. We've seen this with All In going political and everyone

• 39:47John Coogan?

  getting really up in a tizzy about that, but it makes sense. They're growing their business and what they're doing is impactful to the tech community. I was just talking to somebody at the gym.

• 39:57Jordi Hays?

  And let's not, let's not take, take away their, their desire to go political. They enjoy the culture war, right? Like those guys like duking it out on the timeline with the Taylor Lorenz's of the world and they just enjoy it. It's like a sport to them.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  And it helps them get bigger and bigger and bigger. Like when J Cal's posting, like we're the number one podcast, he's not even talking about like the number one podcast in technology anymore. Like he will have episodes, like the All In show will have episodes that are like the number one podcast in all the categories. And it's because it appeals to everyone. If they were just sticking to deep dives on, oh, what AI agent is the best or what startup got funded, like they're not going to, they're not going to go broad and they want to go bigger and bigger and bigger. And this is very natural and it creates an opening for new shows to come in. This is what happened with Lex Friedman. He used to be the artificial intelligence podcast. It was all AI researchers. Then eventually he broadened out, started having political people on, started having, you know, Jaco

• 40:53John Coogan?

  Willink on and Rogan and all sorts of different people on, health stuff. And that created the opportunity for Dorkesh, who's doing fantastically. And now Dorkesh is doing Tony Blair and eventually Dorkesh will broaden out to all sorts of different topics that he's interested in. He won't just be the AI researcher show. And then there'll be a new Dorkesh and that's great. And it's this virtuous cycle that should not be, it shouldn't be criticized. It's a positive thing.

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  The only thing I want to see out of Taylor is if she wants to really fight back against the manosphere, she's got to get bigger. She's got to monetize more. I want her, you know, there's this talk within the tech world of what's going to be the first $1 billion one-person company?

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  Could easily be Taylor Lorenz. The Taylor Lorenz Media Super Corp, Inc.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that could be the world's first, you know, and that would be, I would love to see her as a beaner. I'd love to see her, you know, potentially gunning for that first, you know, podcast IPO, right?

• 41:48John Coogan?

  You're gonna have to go up against newcomer for that.

• 41:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, total SPAC candidate if she would really start to focus on monetization. So my biggest criticism of Taylor is focus on monetization. If you really wanna, yeah, if you wanna understand the creator economy more, more promoted posts. I like that she's working with AWS and encouraging young technologists to build on AWS through that partnership. But ramp it up, right?

• 42:10John Coogan?

  Yep, I like it.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Ramp it up. More ads and um, we're, you know, I feel like we're lucky to have her as a, as a sparring partner. You know, the pressure makes her a better journalist.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  And um,

• 42:22John Coogan?

  And so if you're listening to this, you're a founder, you're in technology. Give it on the record interview to Taylor. Most of the time it'll come out great like this, but every once in a while you'll slip up, admit that you read one unqualified reservations post and she'll destroy your entire life, but that's the way it goes, folks.

• 42:38Jordi Hays?

  That's the game.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  That's the game.

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  And it's a good game.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, so she's actually retooling her podcast right now. We saw this. She's, she's shifting from a interview show um, to a dual host conversational show. And so hopefully that leads to breakout success. I, whenever I see somebody with an interview show, I'm always uh, you know, cautiously optimistic that they'll play the game correctly. Like, like if she wants to be this technology political show, like she should have gotten Kamala Harris on the show.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  And it's like, what was her plan to get to that size, to that, that scale? And you can't, I mean, I love Josh, but uh, he is very much a micro internet celebrity. He's small and so he's not gonna bring a huge audience to that.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  But it's, and it's also a question of, of Taylor Lorenz is such an alpha. Could she and Kamala, who's also an alpha, even exist in the same room together?

• 43:29John Coogan?

  You gotta figure it out. I mean, Rogan, Rogan figured it out with Trump.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  They, they, they got in the, they created some great content. Content together and so I I think that's that's the big problem with with the the Democrat version of Rogan is that no one is really grinding out like, okay, how do I make sure that I have to be the stop. It almost felt like colored daddy was like lucked into it and was like, okay, I guess we'll do this, but this wasn't our plan. Whereas if you're really trying to build the Rogan of the left, like you gotta be getting all these people on.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. Thanks for listening to that deep dive. Didn't even have to put her in the truth zone because it was a truthful article. The information. Everyone is calling it the misinformation is misinformed. It's not the misinformation. Stop calling it the misinformation. It's the information. It's not the misinformation.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  The San Francisco information.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  It's the San Francisco information. So go easy on them. They're great. And they just they just picked up an all time player. So we love them.

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, before. Okay. Yeah, we gotta do.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  We have a fantastic promoted post by Tyler. He says that inspired by Friday's episode of Technology Brothers, I created a marketplace for sales reps to rent. Dot edu email addresses from female college students to increase their response rate to cold emails. If you're a sales rep or sales leader looking to crush your Q4 goals, try leveraging a dot edu email today. Check it out at edumart.io or at the edu mart. And he's created this fantastic marketplace where you can go on. If you are selling enterprise SaaS, go on there, get a dot edu email address from a, you know, female college student.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  And if you're in college, go on there and rent out your.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  Rent out your edu address. It's probably massively against the terms, but so is Airbnb in many ways in the early days.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  Move fast and break things. This is all inspired by Morgan, right?

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  Inspired by Morgan Barrett, who said, with a girl's name and a dot edu email address, I have almost 100% response rate to cold emails. True banger here. One and a half million views, almost 4,000 likes. Oh, sorry. Forty thousand likes.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Forty K likes.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  Almost forty thousand bookmarks. So people really resonated with this.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  And this is why we got to call out Tyler, because forty thousand people like this. Only one guy actually went and built it. And so the next time you see some crazy banger and you think, oh, somebody already built it. There's probably ten, there's probably ten Y C companies that are doing this already. They aren't. Just go and build it.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  This, yeah, Morgan covered it on the nineteenth. We talked about it at the end of last week.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  Fantastic execution.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  Tyler built it over the weekend and shipped it this morning.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  Does he deserve brother of the week?

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  I think this is, I think this has to be the brother of the week.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  This is brother of the week.

• 46:09Jordi Hays?

  This is brother of the week.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Congratulations to Tyler.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations, Tyler.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  You are the technology brother of the week. This is exactly what we look for in the technology brothers. Building.

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  Shipping.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  Shipping, shitposting.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  And even running after controversy. There's going to be a lot of people, a lot of colleges that are against this. There's going to be a lot of people in general that say this is, you know, misleading or whatever. But as long as you're selling a product that people need and want, I think that it's fair game.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, and.

• 46:39John Coogan?

  And he's good at promoting it. He got us to talk about it.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  And it'll be good for the, it'll be good for the shareholders.

• 46:43John Coogan?

  Call up Business Insider. You got to get them to write about it. Call up Taylor Lorenz. Tell her what you're doing. Maybe she hates it. Maybe she writes a hit piece. It's going to be good for you.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Tyler.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  Thank you to Tyler. Congratulations on your brother of the week. Uh, Andrew D'Souza says, "The startup industrial complex created by Paul Graham and Y Combinator is rotting the creativity and ambition of a generation of founders with a paint by numbers approach to entrepreneurship. Founders, go off script, have an original idea, stop building for a niche, build for humanity." And this is so funny because I saw someone subtweeting this and it was just like someone complaining about Y C and then it was just Paul, Paul Graham, Coinbase, Airbnb, Stripe.

• 47:26Jordi Hays?

  Zapier.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  It's a good rebuttal.

• 47:30John Coogan?

  It's like, well, yeah, of course we're not focused on the off-script. Companies in this batch, the ones that people are focused on right now are the AI rappers that are like running the right playbook.

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but Coinbase was contrarian. Wasn't it you could get a Bitcoin for just like?

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Summer 12.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  You got, when you were in the batch, you could get a Bitcoin just for signing up?

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yes, one Bitcoin was the signup reward for Coinbase. And then for years, no, everyone was like, oh yeah, Coinbase, like that weird company. Like, okay, I guess they raised some money. Like, they were slow to raise money. It took them a while. There were much hotter companies coming out of YC. And also, they were, they were not flagged as like a top startup.

• 48:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, and I, I would say, uh, the YC framework and basically religion around company building that they've created objectively for most entrepreneurs is like a fantastic set of guardrails to just like run it, you know, build, have the best possible chances at building a business. When I look back at the companies that I've built, you know, if I, if I'm taking sort of a rear view look, I'm like, I wish I was sort of following more of YC's dogma.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  Around certain things.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing is, yes, YC is a great place to go if you're, if you don't have some super inspiring idea or vision and you just want to build some software.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:43Jordi Hays?

  And have like a good framework to do that.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Maybe join another company.

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  But you can still, they're still happy to take these weird outlier ideas.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  A lot of ideas.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  There's just not gonna be.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  They founded a nicotine pouch, funded a nicotine pouch company in 2018.

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they're not gonna.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Zen didn't even exist.

• 48:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you're not gonna have a hundred visionary companies in every batch.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  But that's okay, because there's gonna be some non-visionary, you know, plays that end up pivoting into weird stuff.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  Also, like, like, there is a massive piece dividend of this startup industrial complex. Like, you look at the Ramp guys, they took their first company through YC, Paribus, wound up selling it, and then they wound up doing an even bigger company Ramp after. And when I think of their creativity and ambition, like, it's not rot, it's not rotten, not, not by any stretch of the imagination. And, and them, setting them up with the YC framework to build, execute, sell that business, like, it made them who they are today.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 49:39John Coogan?

  And so, uh, you know, it's like, there, there are so many ways to be successful and we're, you know, very thankful to, to YC. So, a big wag of the finger to Andrew De Souza. We disagree. But let us know what you think in the comments. Christina Farhat says, "Your Honor, it was my AI agent." And Veronica says, "This will be a real argument." And I think that's real. Yeah. Where does the liability fall? We're already seeing this a little bit with, uh,

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  If you go on agent.ai and you, the professional network for AI agents, and you, you know, hire some digital employee that just goes absolutely rogue.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Well, this is already happening with, uh, those, those customer support agents where you can basically get the customer support agent to like, give you a full refund or something for, if you like, game it out properly.

• 50:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  And then the company has somebody, "Whoa, that was not our policy." Like, it hallucinated. Like, who, who's responsible for that? The LLM, the company that created the wrapper?

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  You gotta side with the customer on that side.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, the customer.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  If they're smart enough to convince your...

• 50:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, but what happens when it's a hundred million dollar deal? Or something that's going to court and someone is gonna say, "It's my AI agent." And so that liability should fall not on the company, but on the, the, the, the company that made the AI agent or the LLM. It's gonna be a mess.

• 50:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  But fortunately, full employer for lawyers.

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  The lawyers will win in the end.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  And then they will be using AI agents and they'll be like, "Oh, we hallucinated, uh, uh, we pled guilty." We didn't mean to.

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  No, there's, there's gonna be value in being a human at the end that says like, you know, just taking responsibility for the...

• 51:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, human in the loop for a very long time, obviously. Because of the responsibility. Uh, do we have a promoted post?

• 51:20Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post, uh, from our friends over at Fiorentino Label. Uh, Fiorentino Label, bespoke suiting designed in America and handcrafted in Italy. So, Fiorentino Label, uh, is run by John Fiorentino. His family made his money, made their money in hospitality. John has been running Fiorentino Label, fantastic, uh, suits and tuxedos. And, uh, there's many heads of states and, uh, you know, very, uh, the tech elite that wear these suits. We can't, you know, discuss specifics because it's... Very private, but anyways, fantastic suits. I wore one at Heretic on. I got a lot of compliments on it.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  And we've had a number of our listeners actually go to Fear and Team No Label after hearing about them here on the show and get suited up. So we ask everybody, anybody that's recording a podcast.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  Yep, especially if you're a capital allocator.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  If you're a capital allocator, would it kill you to put on a suit?

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:16Jordi Hays?

  Answer is usually no, so you should put one on. You are a capital allocator or an executive, not an HVAC repairman. So dress like it.

• 52:25John Coogan?

  Dress accordingly. Alexa Z says, wow, I'm definitely bullish on this app. At Get Hype, Get Hype HQ and in the setting slash account, it says, call the founder.

• 52:38Jordi Hays?

  I think this is great. I think this is great.

• 52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think this is actually like the kind of thing that Y C basically recommends, which is like make. Yeah, just make yourself extremely available to users.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  And once your phone is breaking, then get the second line of defense. But don't be like, oh, I'm starting this brand new company. We don't have product market fit. We have three customers and I need some sort of like, you know, like help desk scenario. And so a bunch of people and a bunch of stuff. It's like, no, just let people help you. Uh, some of the greatest tech support I get from early stage companies, always from the founder.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the best, the best founder mode CEOs, they see somebody post on X like, hey, I'm having this issue and they're just there.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Right there. Yep.

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  Stripe CEO still, still does this.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. Let's go to Guillermo Roche over at Versel. He says, the American dream for real. And it's McDonald's is hiring a web developer to use NextJS.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  So I think historically, this would have been a great opportunity for crypto investors after the bull cycle ends. You know, go, you know, maybe you're not going to just put the fries in the bag, but you could get a, you know, NextJS development role.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  This was such a banger. 12K likes.

• 53:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is a fantastic job. I can't, what's more American than working for the golden arches?

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's remote and it pays 130 to 180K. Not going to be a, not going to be an angel investor with that salary, but you know, get this job, ask for a raise.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  Hey, with your bonus, you might be able to get up into that 200K range and get accredited and see you go super long on all your absolute boys.

• 54:10John Coogan?

  Exactly. Employees can work remotely. So yeah, and McDonald's is back. It's having a moment. It's very popular. So, you know, go work at McDonald's if you are a next JS developer. Josh Wolfe says, "The new Lux quarterly letter to LPs. Our theme: Tech Venture Global Markets Told in Four Parables of Four Brothers." I like this. One, Prometheus. Two, Mennoisus. Three, Prometheus. And four, Atlas. And they have these like GigaChad cartoons of these bros.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  I like somebody else like quote tweeted this or just tweeted and they were like, well, every time the Lux, they put out their quarterly letter, I just put it into Claude and say like rewrite this in a way that I can understand and then it just pops it out.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Just take out the parables and.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  No, but this is one of those like the fact that they're taking this information, like think about how much like great, how many great takes were locked up in like LP updates for the last like literally decades? And now this is, you know, we're very against building in public on this podcast.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  Are they leaking their alpha though?

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think they're leaking last quarter's alpha.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess it's, uh, it's marketing at the end of the day. But I, I do like that, that there's a, there's a twist here in the writing language to use these parables. I think that that's.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  It makes it way more interesting.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  It's just more interesting, more stimulating than, I mean, it's very anti Paul Graham who wants to just write plainly, directly. But I think there's something about creating a little bit of a barrier to get into the, the, the LP letter and enjoy it. And then you're also learning something about Atlas or Prometheus. And maybe you don't know that much about them. So you're also getting educated. Maybe you wind up pulling up the Wiki, reading a book, learning a little bit more. It's a good way.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  And I, any, anytime I'm talking with a friend with a fund who's saying like, oh, I know I need to do content, but I don't know what to do. It's like, find your brand of content for Josh. It is, it is, hey, I'm going to write this sort of esoteric, broad ideas about markets and technology and like put it out there. There's a lot of big ideas and it's up to you to kind of sort through it.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Slow, it's the screenshot essays. Clearly those start as like Slack conversations or something like that.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  Andreessen, the big, big idea that they're branding something that's already happening and just like owning.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Great acquaintances.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  Coogan's Law.

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And Founder's Fund is shitposting.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Viral. Viral videos and vibreals, I guess, and shitposting. And apparently breaking stories about polymarket and their competitors. Bennett Siegel says flavor of the month, technical teams raising seed capital to buy business and transform it with AI. Sounds like a nightmare scenario for the founders, the company being bought and the VCs funding it.

• 56:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this is referencing all the new teams that have come out and doing these like AI oriented rollups saying, hey, I'm going to buy a bunch of accounting firms and automate everything. And it's hard enough to just buy a business and make it grow. It's comparably, if you're trying to buy a business, make it grow and completely change how the service is delivered and not lose all of your customers and alienate like the existing teams and clients and everything like that. Like it just sounds like one of those things. Like I think people, when they think about what attracts, Silicon Valley got very obsessed with rollups and just general M and A because they're like, wait, I could go work at Meta and like, you know, have to work 10 years to eventually get to the point where I'm making

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  a million dollars a year. I could just buy a business that does a million dollars EBITDA and like, you know, use some conservative amount of leverage and, you know, eventually I just own this great asset. But everything is just much, much, much harder than it, than it seems. And rollups are obviously that. It's like, not only are you competing with other groups that are participating in rollups so that the price of assets end up going up and spiking and being very competitive, you're competing against other owner operators that are just coming onto the scene and they're like, I don't need a.

• 58:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, we saw that with Rasio.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't need.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  To roll up all the Amazon brands.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And in their situation, they're beholden to the, to the platform. And as Amazon fees went up, they just didn't really have a business anymore. But, um, but yeah.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  Think about examples where buying a business at seed stage made sense. I know, didn't Warby Parker buy, no, it was Harry's. They bought a razor factory. I don't know if that was fantastic, but it was certainly differentiated at the time. I know some, there's been some companies that have bought banking licenses.

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Where it's been some sort of asset that that they needed and they couldn't get any other way.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Plaid founder did that.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  But it's rare to go and buy an existing business and transform it because usually you could just start from scratch, greenfield.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:55John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, there's a bunch of people attacking the whole services economy, which is trillions and trillions of dollars of saying like, hey, if we can go just provide the service of AI, we can turn this from like a relatively low margin services business to a high margin software business. And I just think it's going to be much harder. There's a company I invested in, Nick Abu Zeid, who is at Product Hunt Main Street and then Ramp. He's now building Rivet, which is like a ground up attempt to leverage basically AI for accounting.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  Is he buying CPA firms?

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  He's taking the opposite approach. He's just building from scratch and saying like, you know, there's, I don't know what you're buying if if potentially all the customers leave in the first year.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Be tricky. I don't know.

• 59:40Jordi Hays?

  Not easy.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  There usually needs to be some sort of, there was another generation of companies. Will Manaus was really obsessed with this. The there were companies that would buy like dental practices and then flip the CapEx to OpEx by essentially like renting the medical equipment to the.

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  And that was like really, really alluring to like CFOs of these of these like, you know, hospital networks or something because they don't have this big CapEx expense anymore. And I think they grew pretty quickly, but then I don't think it really panned out in the way that people hoped.

• 1:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  There'd be dragons for sure.

• 1:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  Dangerous. Let's go to Connor McDonald. He's been on the show before. Here's my take on AppLovin and he stars out LO so that they can't search for it.

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  Says, "Reaching an older audience with disposable income with high quality ad space for the very first time is often good. That's not rocket science and worth trying, especially with ad credit. But long term, sustainable results are still very much TBD." What do you think about this? Have you used that?

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so AppLovin is an ad network that's focused on mobile games.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:45Jordi Hays?

  And so their audience.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  They're very big, right?

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, tons of, you know, very scaled ad network. And anytime you're a consumer brand that you're able to get in front of a totally new audience, you can usually drive some pretty interesting results. One, because CPMs just are going to be a lot less than Meta because Meta is like the premier place to advertise, right? It can be the most. Hyper-targeted and so CPMs are just higher, but yeah, there's been a lot of talk about AppLovin'. I think AppLovin' was able to create this mania within the X marketing community of saying, "Hey, if you're spending like 20K a day on Meta, we'll bring you over to AppLovin'."

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Jordi Hays?

  And people have been seeing some great results. But yeah, I was able to get, you know, just by being friends with Connor and doing some work with Ridge and Sean in the past, I was able to get a front row seat into like viewing of like how they tested a new ad networks. And they've always, Meta's always been the backbone of their business and they've focused on Meta excellency. I think what Connor's alluding to is it's a trap to think, "Oh, I'm just going to find this new ad network." And like suddenly my business is going to be fantastic.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  It's going to be very temporary.

• 1:01:50Jordi Hays?

  It's like, no, if you're not making Meta work well, you're not, AppLovin's not just going to like solve all your issues.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  It's a, it's a marketing excellence. It's a skill issue, basically. So you're not just going to like suddenly transform your business by going over to a new network.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Let's go to the P God. He says, "Anyone have $105 million for me to borrow?" And he screenshots the buyout LBO opportunity for the Arapahoe Basin ski area. The company, a subsidiary of Dream Unlimited, was acquired by Altera Mountain via its financial sponsors, Triton Funds and KSL Capital Partners through an estimated $105 million LBO on November 19th, 2024. So this is not available. He's like joking clearly because the deal already happened. But I do know a beaner who bought a mountain, like a ski resort. And I think he enjoys it.

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Was that the Summit Series crew?

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  That was different. They also bought it.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  But it's.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'd just like to encourage more listeners to just go buy ski resorts.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  You know, all of the great mountains, for the most part, have been getting acquired by these big conglomerates.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:55Jordi Hays?

  And I'd like to see more independently operated ski resorts.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  We're working on an event with Bryce over at Indy to do a Technology Brothers gathering in Park City.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Stay tuned for that.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Stay tuned for that. But yeah, just if you're thinking about it, the answer is yes, just go buy a ski resort.

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it is tricky. It depends on the CapEx that's already gone into the ski resort. Like the one that I know doesn't actually have chairlifts, but it's so it's for like a more prestigious type of skier. They do cat skiing. Are you familiar with this? It was like heli skiing. Cat skiing, you ride on a big like caterpillar.

• 1:03:32Jordi Hays?

  On a cat.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Truck, basically on a cat. You bring all your ski gear, they just drive you up to the top of the mountain. And then you ski down in completely fresh powder. And it's just pure powder.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  And for the real, real ski heads, uh, powder's where it's at.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  My, uh, my great grandfather ran the gondola at Mammoth.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:48Jordi Hays?

  For like forty years.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:49Jordi Hays?

  Basically like post-World War II.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  So it's ski-y.

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Happened to be like best friends with, with, um, Dave McCoy, the founder.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  And because of that, my uncle used to massively take advantage of the relationship to the mountain.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Fresh tracks.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  So he would just go off, off terrain.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  And like duck under the rope and then he'd have, this was like pre-cell phone, but he'd be like radioing like, hey, like I ended up going over the other side. Could you send a cat? And they had some crazy.

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:04:15Jordi Hays?

  Crazy stories. Uh, but I, i- i- it, the fact that like anybody who was building these ski resorts in the sixties.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Is so insane. Thinking about the machinery and the amount of risk and like, the like, amount of human life that's at risk on a mountain at any, any, any given point. If the machinery malfunctions or you're not smart about avalanche control.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Like it's, it's one of the craziest environments to build a business. We could probably do a whole deep dive on.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  Some of, some of the ski resorts have howitzers where for avalanche control, there's a few versions. One is just you have the ski patrol go up there with sticks of dynamite and they just throw the dynamite.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  And it just shocks all of the avalanche potential down and just creates an avalanche. But then, uh, at some ski resorts, they have, they have howitzers where they just literally fire a cannon into the mountain. And it just causes all the avalanches to come down.

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  I love, nothing like being at a, at a, at a, at a.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Ski resort with your absolute boys firing the, firing the cannon.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  You're in the hot tub after skiing after a long day and you get to hear the cannon going off, you know, showing that, you know, there's gonna, the next day is gonna be, it's like signaling that the next day is gonna be fantastic.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, bluebird. Uh, do we have a promoted post?

• 1:05:24Jordi Hays?

  We certainly do. We always do. This one is from Aman Resorts. The architecture of Aman Keela is a celebration of Bali's natural beauty. Cascading down the hillside to the sea, stone buildings, walkways, and pools are woven among the palms, framing views of the ocean and the resplendent greenery. So this property is fantastic. I haven't been yet. I've been to Bali a couple of times on surf trips, but it was before my Aman arc. I want to go here. Aman is kind of where, sorry, Bali is where Aman really got started. You know, their first property, I don't even believe they were able to get a commercial loan to do it. They had to just like personally acquire this property.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Turned into the, you know, what is today the greatest hotel brand in the world, in my opinion, at this specific moment in time, if you're, you know, evaluating it for reach and quality of experience. So go check out the Aman Keela.

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  Highly recommend booking a trip to Aman and book it far in the future. Book it, get online, look a year out, book something that you can look forward to for a full year. So then you're just kind of planning and thinking, oh, this is almost going to, I'm almost going to forget about this. And then it's just going to sneak up on me.

• 1:06:39Jordi Hays?

  And then.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  And I'm not even going to think about the expense because I paid for it a year ago. That's the way to do it.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Plan, plan next summer.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  That's my headspace right now. In about a month, I'll be at an Aman property.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  Yep. But you got to book the next one. So you have something to look forward to.

• 1:06:53Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  Exactly. So you're never like, oh, wow. Like, when am I going to get around to getting back there? No. It's like you already have it booked. Exactly. You always want to have one or two bookings, like just rolling.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Perpetual.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Let's go to Jim Sailbike Wright. He quote tweets us and says, "Technology Brothers is the best personification of the vibe shift. Their aesthetic and approach to discussion are the antithesis of Brooks' bourgeois bohemian archetype that so accurately described elite culture for the past 20 or so years." Very insightful, very insightful post. That is exactly what we were going for with this. And I do think we want to push back against the bourgeois bohemian trend that's been really

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, Bobos.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  in tech, unfortunately, and celebrate the capitalist bourgeoisie.

• 1:07:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  The, not the limousine liberals and not the champagne socialists, but the capitalists who enjoy drinking champagne in the back of a limousine.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep, and sparring with Taylor Lorenz.

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so, thanks for writing in, Jim. I'm glad you, you really hit the nail on the head with this. And good to have you, first time on the show, but I'm sure you'll be back soon.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely. Thank you, Jim.

• 1:08:03John Coogan?

  Thank you. Let's go to Dirt Man. Dirt Man says, Dirt Man BSAC says, Elon should buy MSNBC and just have Tech Bros Pod reading bangers from the timeline 24/7 streaming into boomers' living rooms across the country. We gotta put the CNBC banner on this one.

• 1:08:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  For sure. Elon says the most entertaining outcome, especially if ironic, is the most likely, and everyone's joking about Elon buying MSNBC. And I think we could crush on MSNBC.

• 1:08:34Jordi Hays?

  I agree, and honestly, we should stop right there because there's stuff in the works that we, you know, can't necessarily talk about today.

• 1:08:41John Coogan?

  But I think we have the production value, we have the banter, we have the content. Give us a slot, Elon, pick it up.

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  And I love sparring with boomers. Normally, I spar with boomers in my HOA board meetings, but I, I'd like to do it on the airwaves, right?

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  I'd like it to be more like a megaphone approach, like sort of they can't talk back, but you're just sort of...

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  I mean, if Twitter is real life, imagine how much more it will be real life if we're broadcasting it into the MSNBC.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  And, I mean, talk about making your family proud. All of your distant relatives will be, "Oh, I saw you on MSNBC. I love your new show."

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  And think about what we could do for the broader economy if we were able to encourage all the boomers to lever up.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  True.

• 1:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Go long, risk assets. A lot of them at this point are, are sort of, they talk down to Gen Z and the millennials, saying, "You're, you're too risk on, you know, you're, all you care about is, is, you know, the next crypto coin."

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, you watch, you watch MSNBC, and they do a little segment, and then they take an ad break. The ads aren't integrated properly, and there aren't nearly as many of them. And on that note, let's go to a promoted post.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  Promoted posts from Tiffany and Co. Celebrate meaningful beginnings this holiday with tea by Tiffany, an homage to an iconic motif from 1975. These designs feature handset pave diamonds for extraordinary shine. Discover more at Tiffany.com/gifts/shop/holiday. #TiffanyandCo, #ATiffanyHoliday. Anyways, this looks like an absolute, absolutely fantastic gift.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Highly recommend everyone in the audience.

• 1:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Our audience is very oriented around...

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  Put your AirPods in, go to Tiffany right now.

• 1:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, our audience is very oriented around crushing their Q4 revenue goals, but Christmas is, as of today, a month away. Get those gifts in now. Go to your local Tiffany's and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Thank you. Let's go to Bev Jezos. He says reel and posts a photo of his phone and Vittorio's phone next to themselves, next to each other. They met up in real life and he was very blackpilled because Vittorio uses light mode on X instead of dark mode. And I like this. I think this is so funny, like showing someone your X account profile thing is very much like, it's like, you know, in old, you know how knights, you know where we got the salute from? So we got the salute, you would salute someone with your hand because you were raising your knight's helmet, like the shield here, you would raise this to show

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  my eyes and show that I'm not a threat.

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  The brother in me sees the brother in you.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  It's the same thing as, why do we shake hands? We shake hands to show that I don't have a weapon in my hand, in my right hand. And so this is like showing a little bit of vulnerability. I'm showing you inside my life, inside my X account. And it's almost like two of the greatest posters meeting.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  Proof of post.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  And showing each other, you know, a little bit how the sausage is made. And it's fascinating seeing the difference in numbers. I mean, they follow almost exactly the same amount of people, almost 2,000.

• 1:11:47Jordi Hays?

  Smart.

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  Bev has 140K followers. Fantastic. Vittorio, a little bit smaller, 40K.

• 1:11:53Jordi Hays?

  But Vittorio is on an incredible trajectory right now. I mean, he's really like ascendant.

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Ascendant. But what's interesting here... Beth has 136 subscribers. It's like a decent amount. I think they're all on five bucks a month. That's like not bad. Making almost a thousand bucks there. Vittorio only seven subscriptions. But this was what I found funny. Beth is subscribed to four people. Vittorio is subscribed to 47 people.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  So Vittorio is shelling out like what almost $300 a month towards his absolute boys?

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  Respect.

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Respect.

• 1:12:27Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. It really is a sign of respect.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  This is the creator economy.

• 1:12:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  He gets the check from X, the creator payout. I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's heavy as a stone.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Recycling it.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  And then he puts it right in with his other boys. And so I'm going to go check out who he subscribes to if that's public. But great to see two posters, meeting IRL. Love to see it.

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  Recreating the timeline in real life.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. That conversation, you could probably just steal tons and tons of bangers from that.

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Let's go to Din. He says, the Harry Stebbings effect. I believe he just went on the show. Says 200 plus applicants, every tier one investor in my DMs. Four million euros of potential revenue in my DMs. Okay, that's a little weird.

• 1:13:13Jordi Hays?

  What are?

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  3,000 LinkedIn requests. Wow. And 300 Twitter followers. That's actual tangible value added.

• 1:13:23Jordi Hays?

  So the crazy thing is I don't know.

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  Harry has a $400 million fund, baby.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:13:27John Coogan?

  Size gong.

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  Size gong.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Boom.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't know if he was on the show or Harry just tweeted. Harry tweeted.

• 1:13:34John Coogan?

  First time. Oh, oh, oh, you think he just tweeted?

• 1:13:37Jordi Hays?

  He just tweeted and he said that, that Buena, this, this guy's company is adding a million of ARR every 12 days.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:13:44Jordi Hays?

  And he just was like, just threw it out there.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  That's it. He didn't even have him on the show.

• 1:13:46Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 1:13:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Um, I only listen to Founders Podcast and this podcast.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Well, congrats to Din. Fantastic growth. Good luck with the next phase. Convert all of that.

• 1:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Good luck. You're going to need to go to agent.ai to get a agent to help you process his LinkedIn requests. Find the alpha.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  That's a lot.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  But good luck out there.

• 1:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Do you have a promoted post?

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from Blackstone. Think investing equals the stock market, think again. There's an ocean of opportunity in hashtag private equity. If you're a hashtag financial advisor curious about tapping PE for your clients, check out hashtag Blackstone University. And then they throw a bitly link up here. So they've dropped a whole, they've dropped a whole course for financial advisors to learn about private equity. If you're a financial advisor and you don't know about private equity, it's an awesome asset class, some fantastic returns. You can, you can go really risk on with some great managers and you know, Blackstone hidden card.

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  Where better to learn it than Blackstone?

• 1:14:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  We love Blackstone here.

• 1:14:54Jordi Hays?

  They created a popular festival.

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  No, that's BlackRock.

• 1:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  Blackstone, different organization.

• 1:15:01Jordi Hays?

  Right, right. BlackRock created the BlackRock City, Blackstone, just a fantastic asset manager.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  And love their use of, aggressive use of hashtags here. You know, they clearly know their way around this platform, leveraging all the features. So, thank you to Blackstone.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  To Blackstone. Let's go to the Wall Street Journal and we gotta, we gotta put this in the truth zone. This is a rough article. I read it over the weekend and I was pounding my fist on the table. I was so mad. They said, "The ultimate trading for flex, a Snoopy Swatch or a Casio Calculator? Why lots of money men still favor novelty watches. The anti-status watch, why men in finance love cheap cheesy watches?" Terrible trend. I hope it ends immediately.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  They do give a shout out to some strongholds in the finance community that have stuck with the classics, the Audemars Piguet's, the, the Richard Mills, the Pateks, but they call out these joke watches. Yeah. And this is, this is the Bobo. This is, this is the, this is the bohemian bourgeoisie that we are fighting against here. So if you see someone with a Casio Calculator, Snoopy Swatch on the trading floor, tell them, "Put that watch down."

• 1:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Pick a new career.

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  Pick a new career, buddy. Take a hike.

• 1:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Uh, I was very upset about this.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Enough. Um, shout out to the journos at, uh,

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  This is the ultimate hit piece on finance. This is trying to collapse our, our global economy.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Cause if enough people find out about this, then, then the-

• 1:16:39Jordi Hays?

  How will they trust their-

• 1:16:41John Coogan?

  Their, their, their, their asset manager, I agree. Um, and, and this is what could really make the common person hate Wall Street.

• 1:16:49Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  If they find out that they're wearing just trashy-

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Ironic.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Ironic watches.

• 1:16:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Um, but if you see someone with a, with, with a, uh, with a gold Cartier Santos, you have to respect that.

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  So, um, this is, this is just a very depressing trend. So, uh, it starts here, folks. If you see someone with some ironic, uh, watch, tell them, clean up their act, put on something classic, put on something timeless, uh, head to bezel.

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  You are a capital allocator and asset manager, not an HVAC technician.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  I couldn't have said it better myself. So, thanks everyone for helping fight the good fight.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Let's go to Guy, he's been on the show before. Says, by the way, just FYI, this emoji, prayer hands, is not praying, it's high fiving, lol.

• 1:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Did, did you know that? I saw that and I was, cause it's-

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it, it's, it's, it's the prayer hands emoji, it's the two hands together. It can be praying or high fiving, but I, I guess you went into the unicode-

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  I definitely don't use it on the-

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  On the high five?

• 1:17:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, I, I'm gonna start using it now, but I just use that a lot because I, I, you know, pray for bubbles and, and, uh, and other things.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  I think it's whatever you want it to be. I mean, people have long changed the definition or the, or the connotation of emojis, the peach emoji, the butt, and, uh, the gun emoji has been through multiple cycles. Um, I think that it all depends on the context. And if you see someone using this in a context where it clearly means prayer hands, it's prayer hands.

• 1:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and emojis are-

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  Clearly high fiving, they're high fiving.

• 1:18:23Jordi Hays?

  Emojis are tools for communication and, you know, we shape our tools and from there, our tools shape us. So, we need to constantly be reevaluating our use of emojis and, um, rethinking them, redesigning them. Um, you know, stick to the classics when you can, but don't be afraid to mix some new hitters in.

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  Do we have another promoted post or should we do this first? Air Environment says AV has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Blue Halo. Together, we'll create a more diversified global leader in all domain defense technologies capable of addressing the full spectrum of modern defense. Huge deal in the public markets. Air Environment has acquired Blue Halo and we wanted to cover it on the show because it's one of the most fascinating examples we've seen in recent history of nominative determinism. The CEO of Blue Halo, his name, Jonathan Moneymaker.

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  Great name.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  And of course, he made the money. He made the money, baby.

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  You don't bet against Jonathan Moneymaker.

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Never.

• 1:19:22Jordi Hays?

  That's all I would say.

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  Never, never. And so fantastic outcome for all the investors. I think this was a private equity roll up. They built a bunch, they put together a bunch of small companies and wound up selling it to Air Environment and congrats to them. We don't know the full terms of the deal here, but it feels like a size gong moment to me.

• 1:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to Jonathan Moneymaker and we would like to back whatever he does next.

• 1:19:44John Coogan?

  Yes, 100%.

• 1:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Quick promoted post from Zegna. We are only a month out from Christmas and there are many other holidays coming up, but we wanted to celebrate a Zegna holiday from our home to yours. Wrap your loved ones in timeless Owasi cashmere?

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, Owasi cashmere.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Cashmere scarves that will be cherished for years to come. We're committed to certifying our cashmere fibers as 100% traceable from 2024. I don't know if this is a, is an ESG thing. I prefer their commitment to quality over traceability, but I certainly appreciate the traceability as well. Thank you to Zegna for making-

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  I think it just speaks to the, this idea that like, you know, you're going to be in fancy holiday parties, maybe you're going on some ski trips, ski season's coming up and you want to look good. You don't want to be stumbling around in athleisure or looking like you just got off a bus in Sand Hill.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  You want to be dressed to the nines and so Zegna is a great way to go get a nice jacket or a nice coat.

• 1:20:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't see enough, you don't see enough technology brothers wearing scarves broadly.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:20:54Jordi Hays?

  It's a great, it's a great accent piece. It's a great way to, to kind of-

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Jordi Hays?

  Communicate what you stand for.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's clearly a step up from Patagonia.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  And so we highly recommend you go check them out and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Let's go to Abril Zucci. She says, "I can't stop thinking about this Nietzsche quote. The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster. In the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others in effort, their delight is in self mastery. In them, asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege. It is to them a recreation to play with the burdens that would crush all others." Couldn't agree more.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when you're in that zone, you have to find what your why is. And that why can be anything. For us, it's, you know, doing it for the money, being willing to push through. When, you know, when you're in, in this case, we're in hour four of podcasting.

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:57Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, you have that, that, that weakness inside of you that Jaco would kind of reference saying, quit, turn off, turn off the mics, walk out of the room, take the suit off. And being willing to just like push through and continuing to create content is, is, you know, you have to have that.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  So raison d'etre.

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  Dylan Field, he's been on the show before. He says, "If this were where, if this is where we're starting, I'm worried what the actual top signals will be this cycle. How it started versus how it's going, how it started is Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper. And how it's going is dollar sign dog cage. And there's a live streamer doing some extremely depressing things that we're not even really going to talk about.

• 1:22:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we don't want to talk about it, but hopefully Pumped Up Fun gets their act together and ends this live streaming feature.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  Sometimes moderation is good.

• 1:22:49Jordi Hays?

  Content moderation.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  That's good. Good to hear. It's over. Hopefully no more of that.

• 1:22:55Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I think that there's a lot of alpha right now and just tweeting top every single day. Because eventually you're going to be right.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:02Jordi Hays?

  And you'll be able to go delete all the other ones and go back and quote tweet the top and say like, look, I called it.

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Called the local top.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Jordi Hays?

  And there's, you could raise, you know, a billion dollar fund off of calling the top, so.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  There is something about like, like the good meme coins and the ones that last are fun. Like Doge is about this dog. It's very funny and Elon's run with it and it's become, and it's like even popular today because it was always filled with like some sort of comedy or funness. And the dark stuff never.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Even Solana with like the GM culture.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was always like inspiring to some degree, even when it was frothy.

• 1:23:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40John Coogan?

  So stay positive out there, folks.

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  No revenge hate hate meme coins.

• 1:23:45John Coogan?

  Bruno says regarding the hot topic of stable coins, if you strip out USDT, which is primarily used for trading and laundering, transaction volume since 2022 is flat and supply is meaningfully down with no merchant adoption. Not really getting the hype, but let's see how this plays out. Interesting.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the merchant adoption stuff's interesting. I mean, I, I do think you have to imagine that, you know, strong like infrastructure platforms like Bridge and especially the amount of investment that I imagine Stripe will put behind Bridge going forward. Like merchant adoption will go up.

• 1:24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20Jordi Hays?

  Coinbase, you know, recently, you know, last week ran that ad, you know, showing a guy buying, you know, selling a car, a truck with stable coins. And I think that that stuff is going to really, you know, meaningfully catch on.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Also a big assumption here that 99% of USDT is trading and laundering. Like that just might not be true.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Certainly a lot of it is, a lot of it is, is trading.

• 1:24:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:43Jordi Hays?

  The laundering stuff, who knows? It seems much harder to prove.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  But even trading is, is valuable in the sense that like, you could say a lot of the US dollar is, is tied up in trading activity, right?

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54John Coogan?

  Like how much is on Citadel's balance sheet right now? A lot. Does that make it like less real? I don't know. I don't think so. So I don't know. I'm still, I'm still positive on, on.

• 1:25:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. At the end of the day, the technology is very meaningful of being able to send money 24/7 in a trustless way.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13Jordi Hays?

  It's awesome.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Exactly. Let's go to Prang for accents. He's been on the show before. Uh, he says, designers, Dolly too, I stole your pictures and used them to generate art. And the designers say, no, this is illegal. And the programmers are talking to ChatGPT and ChatGPT says, I scanned your GitHub account and stole your code. And the chat programmers say, cool. Did you get it to work?

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is interesting, uh, interesting reaction. It does seem like, um,

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  It wasn't really designers, it was more like the art community.

• 1:25:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I haven't, yeah, it was, it was the people, it was the, it was the designers that, the creatives that weren't monetizing.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:49Jordi Hays?

  The creative, the non-monetizing creators that are, that are struggling artists, like having them figure it out in a commercial application.

• 1:25:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI monetizing their work, sort of indirectly, really piss them off. The designers that I know that have built great careers are all excited about AI.

• 1:26:07John Coogan?

  Or even the artists like Beeple, you know, he uses Cinema 4D. I'm sure he's able to use generative AI either in the post-processing or in the texture generation. But he's coined this own style that even if it could be copied, he has the proof of work.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I do feel like, I do feel like the Gen AI stuff did take a little bit of wind out of his sails because Beeple was going through the painstaking effort to make these absurd images and now anybody can make the same absurd image.

• 1:26:36John Coogan?

  But I haven't seen anyone replace him.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm not saying he's been replaced. I'm just saying more like it's less jarring. It's, it doesn't have the same effect for me to see a Beeple image now.

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  To see like Elon riding a bull or whatever during crypto.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because anybody can, yeah, yeah, because you can just generate that now.

• 1:26:50John Coogan?

  Anyone can make that. I guess, I guess. I think he still has some sort of like interesting carved out.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  He still has a.

• 1:26:56John Coogan?

  It, it, it's going to be the same thing where, you know, Beeple's artwork, people always said this about like the Mark Rothko, like, oh, my kid could make that or, or some artist where it's just like paint splatter.

• 1:27:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  And, and you'd, you'd say, yeah, my kid could make that, but the point was that you didn't. And then the point was, well, if, even if your kid did, everyone would just be like, well, that's a Mark Rothko ripoff.

• 1:27:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Um, and now it's like, yeah, your kid could prompt that, but it would just feel like a Beeple rip.

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  In my opinion. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, he's already made generational wealth, so I don't even know if he needs to make any more anymore.

• 1:27:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, host economic.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  Let's go to Delian. He's been on the show before. He says, uh, so Waymo is changing to a Chinese auto manufacturer? Yeah, F that. My autonomous ride about to accidentally drive off a cliff.

• 1:27:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Waymo's been running on.

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  Too many Winnie the Pooh jokes. Hard pass.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  So, so, so I really don't get it. So, th- this is funny timing because Waymo is like the only time you see a Jaguar today.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, they could just buy Jaguar.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  And Jaguar is just like floundering.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Floundering.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, the Ray Dong something or whatever, the president over there is just like floundering, making cars nobody cares about.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  But like clearly they have manufacturing lines that can produce reasonable cars.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jaguar had stopped making cars prob- presumably except for Waymo.

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  And why did that deal not happen?

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  It's honestly, uh, it makes me even shorter Jaguar feeling that

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  Waymo was already running on their basically infrastructure and decided not to move forward with that.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Jordi Hays?

  But very, uh, very bad. I don't want, I don't want, uh...

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  It's so funny, he throws in another Winnie the Pooh joke here.

• 1:28:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't want, I don't want the CCP to control, uh, our drones, our, you know, one of our biggest social media platforms and now our autonomous cars.

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  Very rough.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  I just don't want that to happen. So, uh, Delian, why don't you, you know?

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  Buy Jaguar.

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Put a billion dollars into a Jaguar buyout and, you know, reshore it to America.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  Something. I mean, we already have the answer. It's Tesla, right?

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Tesla is, is the American competitor to everything that, uh, Waymo will be doing and, uh, it will become a culture issue. I, I, I tweeted this post of like, look at the way the Waymo car looks and then look at the aesthetics of the Tesla self-driving car and like both political sides like hate the opposite one.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14John Coogan?

  And, and it's weird to think that something as utilitarian as, as just getting a ride from one place to another can become like a political statement, but it, it has. People like, like many Democrats would say like, I will not buy a, a Cybertruck because of the statement that it makes.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  And the same thing for a Republican driving a Prius, which is the same thing.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  I'm gonna be rolling coal in a Raptor R. Uh, let's go to Luke Metro. He's been on the show before. He says, how do you not own a suit for the office Christmas party? You're an L6. And it's a photo of wife Jack. Have you been following the wife Jack thing?

• 1:29:46Jordi Hays?

  I think these are great. Every time I see him, I'm like, oh.

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  At first I thought it was like kind of negative, but I realized that... It was actually very positive and very pronatalist campaign and there's been a little self policing within the wife Jack community around like, don't make it negative, don't make it overbearing. It's, it's like, the wife is saying these things because she loves you, not because she's actually upset with you.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  I like the positive spin.

• 1:30:10John Coogan?

  And so, yes, also, if you're an L6, get a suit. If you're an intern, get a suit. Everyone needs a suit. It's ridiculous.

• 1:30:16Jordi Hays?

  It's ridiculous.

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  Get a suit. Call your tailor.

• 1:30:19Jordi Hays?

  Call Fiorentino label.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  Call Fiorentino. Uh, Daniel, he's been on the show earlier, uh, and he's been on the show many times. Former brother of the week, he says, "The walls close in as you age. The path of, for responsible change to oneself grows more narrow. You have commitments in your work, a career that makes sense, given your current mental arrangements. You have a spouse and a child who won't count on you to exist in a certain way, who count on you to exist in a certain way." Very doomerish post. This is kind of the opposite of that other post that we, that we said that was like, you can just change your career at 45, remember?

• 1:30:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you can, but the thing is, is your life very quickly adapts to your identity.

• 1:30:57John Coogan?

  True, true, true.

• 1:30:57Jordi Hays?

  And so if you want to change who you are and what you do, uh, once you have a wife and children.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:04Jordi Hays?

  And I even noticed this of like, uh, I've, I've, I've appreciated like, having a kid in school now and being like, okay, I can't just move across the country.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:31:12Jordi Hays?

  So that makes me like more oriented around

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  investing in my local community or whatever. Podcasting, pos- podcasting locally.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Um, but yeah, I just thought that that was relevant because I think if you're, if you, uh, you know, aren't married or don't have kids yet, like, you need to be taking on like, at least five times as much risk as you are right now. Because the, the more that other people are dependent on you in many ways, the less risk you can take on.

• 1:31:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Uh, this is a great one by Zane. Uh, he's a little skeptical, but we're going to debate this. He says, "Some idiot took regular old sour candy and put it in a bag with some generic branding and sold it for a hundred million dollars and you're still waiting for someone at HR to approve your PTO on Thursday so you can spend a couple days with your family. Denied."

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  And he's quote tweeting a CPG Wire article that says, "The Hershey Company is acquiring Sour Strips, a fast-growing sour candy brand for an undisclosed sum." So I don't know where he got the 100 million, but maybe he dug into it. Sour Strips was founded by internet personality Max Chuning in 2019. And Max Chuning was like a huge YouTuber, all in the fitness space. I mean, great nominative determinism there, like chewing to the max. He's chewing the sour candy. He always liked sour candy. And so he starts this branch, but the fascinating thing is that, yeah, the name is just Sour Strips. That's the, that's the name of the category. That's a descriptor. Yeah, I don't think you can trademark that. And so someone else could start a Sour Strips company. Maybe you couldn't use the exact same logo and stuff, but you could make it pretty close

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  because Sour Strips is, is not trademarkable. But he still grew it really well and he started advertising it on his podcast, advertising it on his YouTube channel and then used that to get into retail, I'm sure. And eventually grew it to, I think, 100 million dollars of revenue, something like that. And fantastic outcome for Max. Love his podcast. Love him.

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is so funny because if you, if I think back to being a child and going to a candy store or a place that sold candy, there was always a like Sour Strips kind of bucket or dispenser type thing that were just called Sour Strips, right?

• 1:33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:22Jordi Hays?

  And so if, if there was truly no other brands in that category and he's just like, "I'm going to take this and like, brand it and really focus on selling it well and marketing it and growing it," then yeah, he deserves the nine-figure.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  There's also a big, there's also a big piece here where if you go through, if you're starting a CPG company and you walk through the aisles, you can see that some are incredibly competitive. Some sections of the grocery store are like, it's half Unilever, half Hershey, and you're just screwed because they both have major competitors there. They're going to outspend you and they'll never acquire you. And then some categories are completely run by, you know, 200-year-old companies. I know a guy who started a... A popcorn spray company that he got to like a million dollars in revenue very quickly.

• 1:34:06Jordi Hays?

  Like you make popcorn and then season it.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  And you spray, you see, you season it on top of it.

• 1:34:10Jordi Hays?

  Graffiti.

• 1:34:10John Coogan?

  And and it and it gives it like the movie theater popcorn smell and there's a bunch of different scents.

• 1:34:15Jordi Hays?

  The PFO, the extra PFOS and.

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  I I asked him about that and he and he had a bunch of claims that it like wasn't bad, but it does feel weird. But but what he realized was that the main competitor in that in that entire section of the store was just Orville Redenbacher. And it's a very old company. They're not really innovating. They're not going to fast follow. And so it was very easy to get in there and it might have been the same thing with Sour Strips where Hershey didn't have any play in that category. And so he basically built the perfect company.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, because everybody oftentimes the best ideas are just like obvious but overlooked.

• 1:34:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  Let's go to Greg Yang at XAI, first time on the show. He says, if you haven't had more than one career, have you truly lived? I like that.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you had your career and and Wall Street.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Blue and Wall Street.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Short career.

• 1:35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like this. I think this is a very millennial millennial post, like jumping from job to job. Being a founder, being an investor, being a content creator, moving back and forth between things.

• 1:35:17Jordi Hays?

  But I feel like it's widely accepted now. The millennials are the first generation where it was it it almost. Yeah, it was just normal to be like, I'm going to do this one thing. I might get decent at it and then I'm going to jump over here and do this other thing. I'm going to do this, that, kind of like snake your way through life. I I I think it's generally good. I. I have a lot of, you know, people that I went to college with that have only done one thing out of school, like real estate. Like investing and then they get to like, you know, 28, 29, 30, and they're like, well, I guess I could still do other stuff. But then they feel still kind of trapped. And I try to talk to them and be like, no, you can literally do whatever you want. Like you can completely.

• 1:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Reinvent your career, jump into a different industry or category, or go from an investing role into an operating role or vice versa.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  There is an interesting thing like PG often says that like the best founders have like, they're experts at like two or three different disciplines, or maybe if there's a co-founding team, they have like five or six disciplines mastered between them. And maybe you get that from working in different careers and then you can put them together. Like you've worked in finance, but then you've also worked in consumer packaged goods. And so you're able to operate your business very effectively. It's, yeah.

• 1:36:34Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe, I don't know what Greg did before this, but maybe he was, you know, at a woke language model. And now he's like, I'm reinventing myself by being at a base language model.

• 1:36:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:44Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, reinvent yourself.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like it. Klaus, Inspector Clouseau Investments says, average US bank. We regret overcharging customers. We are hiring additional staff to investigate and we should have it settled by 2027. Average Japanese bank pledge, anyone employed by this bank who has stolen money or caused others to steal from the bank will pay for it with his or her own property and then commit suicide.

• 1:37:15Jordi Hays?

  Very on brand for Japan.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  I can't believe they're still doing seppuku over there. That's so crazy.

• 1:37:21Jordi Hays?

  It's a samurai.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  I was watching this show called like Samurai or something on Netflix and, uh, and like the show got boring because it was like every episode, someone's committing seppuku. It was just constant. It was like, oh, okay. Like, oh, guy stubbed his toe, gonna commit seppuku. But I guess that's really what they do over there.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  I think the, the, the meaning, the takeaway from this is that financiers are the modern samurais, right? And you need to act with honor.

• 1:37:47John Coogan?

  You do.

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  And if you betray your own honor, then there's only one route.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:54Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, if you, if you as a listener ever catch us doing an episode without any ads, hold us accountable.

• 1:38:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  Demand that we commit seppuku.

• 1:38:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Because that would be a violation of our sacred bond with the listener.

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:38:07John Coogan?

  To advertise.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  And people are going turbo long that company. Oh, here's a good one. People are saying that Ben Hilek is the next Ligma, zero interest rates, and it's Ben Hilek. I think we mispronounced his name.

• 1:38:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a thing that we do.

• 1:38:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:38:26Jordi Hays?

  At least I do.

• 1:38:27John Coogan?

  We do our best over here. And so he printed out a transcript of our podcast and we say, I don't know the guy, but I think he's got a cool startup, great designer, great taste, fantastic. This is a future Rahul Ligma bit. This is fantastic. He really is the next Ligma.

• 1:38:45Jordi Hays?

  He really is the next Ligma.

• 1:38:47John Coogan?

  So stay tuned for the next Ligma award.

• 1:38:49Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he had some, he had another post that was great. I don't think we covered it, but as the bit was going on, he posted, he was like, hi, everyone. In our defense, when we did the Jaguar rebrand, we really thought Kamala was going to be elected. And that got picked up too, and it got a bunch of.

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  I told a friend that like jokingly and he like didn't get the joke and was like, wait, really? Like they thought that she was going to win? I was like, no, dude.

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  They went Jaguar went turbo long.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Turbo long Harris. But I mean legitimately, like they did go turbo long, like, like the, the, the, the, the rise of wokeness, which probably has, was steadily literally happening from what? 2010 to 2020, even beyond 2022 was probably the peak. Then Elon buys X and then the culture starts shifting. And if you were long wokeness, like your company did very well throughout that entire phase. You got ESG customers, you got DEI investors, you got all sorts of benefits. And that only stopped, that gravy train only stopped like last year. And so if you kicked off a rebrand for your company, like Jaguar didn't make cars this year. They like took the entire year off.

• 1:39:57Jordi Hays?

  Rough, rough year.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  And so the whole plan for like the rebrand, the reset, going full electric, this is like years in the making. And like, I'm sure they did like some multi-year McKinsey project and like had all these different things. Like it was a big deal for them. They didn't just like do this overnight.

• 1:40:10Jordi Hays?

  It stinks of McKinsey. We love management consulting. We love McKinsey, but it, it kind of reeks of, of McKinsey.

• 1:40:18John Coogan?

  Well, you get in what you put out.

• 1:40:19Jordi Hays?

  VP gone rogue.

• 1:40:20John Coogan?

  It's garbage in, garbage out with McKinsey. If you show up with a good plan, they're going to deliver some good plans for you, but the inspiration has to come from the founder.

• 1:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Take some responsibility.

• 1:40:29John Coogan?

  Uh, Siri says VC went from being a relationships business to a sales job. When did the dynamic shift? I have a, I have a idea of exactly when the dynamic shift, but what do you think?

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Go, go.

• 1:40:40John Coogan?

  So, so I think the dynamic shifted after post.com around 2010. When the industry realized that B2B SaaS was not going to be a winner take all market.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  And you could underwrite two and 20 against $10 billion outcomes reliably.

• 1:41:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  And so if, if the market had.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, the $10 billion outcome thing was, was new. That was more of like.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:41:07Jordi Hays?

  That was the Decacorn thing was like.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  Yes, it wasn't, it wasn't real in 20, in, in, in the dot com boom.

• 1:41:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  All those VCs got rugged, uh, and they didn't do that well. And a lot of them went out of business, but in, in 2008, 2009, coming out of the financial crisis.

• 1:41:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  It started to be clear that while there were major, major power law winners in social media.

• 1:41:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Um, and you couldn't just build a whole fund around social media investing because if you missed Facebook, you were done. But you could build a fund around B2B SaaS, like base hits that were essentially Decacorns. And, and if you can build a business to $10 billion in under 10 years, you can easily charge two and 20 and beat the market. And as long as you can beat the market, you can charge those high fees. And as long as you can hard, charge those high fees, you look like a venture capital firm. As opposed to if, if, if you're underwriting to 10 years and it's a hundred million dollar outcome, you just won't look like a VC. Like you just won't have the management fees. You won't have the returns, like it just, it'll look like a bank.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  And, and, and if you're building a business where your target is a hundred million dollars, you know, high capex, less R and D. You just go to the bank.

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  Or you fund it off your credit card or cash flow. There's a bunch of different ways to build these businesses and there are different pockets of financial capital out there for different business strategies. Kind of everything became, looked like VC, including like consumer and D to C and all these things. And a lot of those didn't pan out.

• 1:42:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:31John Coogan?

  Creator economy is a good example, but it was, it was when, it was when it was, it was clear that it wasn't going to be Salesforce or Oracle. Building every vertical SaaS tool that at that point it became, okay. Any fund could hit the next Databricks, or the next Rippling, or the next Gusto, or Deal. Like, there's just so much opportunity to exit with a billion dollars, return a fund. And as soon as you can say, hey, we're going to own 10% of this Decacorn, and we're going to return a billion dollar fund, it's game on. And that's when it became, and that's when it became a sales job, because you scale up and you need to be in every firm that's going to be a Decacorn, and you need to write checks in. And also, the IPO window shifted out during the dot com boom. Companies were going public at 300 mil.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  And then mooning. So it, so it was a sales job, but it became, the sales that was being done was the stuff you saw in Wolf of Wall Street. It was the Wall Street guys cold calling, hey, I got a stock for you. This company just went public. The ticker is, you know, whatever, MP3.com. You should get in right now. And it mooned in retail. That shifted when companies started staying private longer.

• 1:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Yeah, well said. I mean, I think any VC that doesn't understand, I'm like short any VC that doesn't understand that they're in the likability game. Because if you're not one of the Holy Trinity or a top five firm, you have this sort of adverse selection problem, where all the best founders want to work with a select group of firms. They go out and they're going to meet a lot of investors, but they want to work with Founders Fund. They want to work with Sequoia. And so if you're not one of those funds, then you need to realize, like, you better, the founder must genuinely feel something about the partner who wants to do that deal. Otherwise, why are you going to have any right to win that deal?

• 1:44:23Jordi Hays?

  Even get a slice of it, right?

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  And so it is still a relationships business for the power law VCs. The next generation of power law winners in venture capital are doing the relationship business. And that's the Lucky Grooms, the Nat Friedmans, these new generation of capital allocators that are doing very well, versus the droves of Stanford grads who are just associates at large firms that are just churning through cold calls. They're in the sales role, because they are not out on the extreme end of performance. And they're not, and they're deriving their, their growth from fees, not carry.

• 1:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  Um, so it's, it's all a rational move because the, the funds have gotten so large that you can sit in what is essentially a sales role, collect management fees and not need to play the relationship game to get some unfair advantage into an early deal that would never happen if it was a free market. Um, but, uh, you can still make a ton of money.

• 1:45:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think it, I, I, I think at the end of the day, it, um, it's such a, the reason that I, the reason that the asset class is so addicting as an investor and why you still get, you know, firms that, that, that trade in public equities that end up trying to come down and, and play in the private markets is that every single company is a one of one asset. There's no other, you know, shares like it. It's literally like there's a sort of a finite number of shares and, and, uh, you can, you know, you have to earn the right to buy into the company. You can't just market buy Stripe, right? You have to get the Colson brothers to sign off and say, we'll take your money, right? And that's a, that's, that's, that creates a lot of good behavior overall, right? Because you

• 1:46:07Jordi Hays?

  need to be a good actor. Otherwise founders are eventually going to be like, no, we don't want, or CFOs at a certain point will be like, no, we just don't want your money.

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's go to USSR pictures. We don't usually agree with communists on this show, but this might be the one exception. Uh, it's a picture from 1947 and it shows a committee to approve fashionable clothing suitable for sale to Soviet women in Moscow. Now I'm against this for women, but I would love something like this for capital allocators.

• 1:46:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:37John Coogan?

  We've seen this time and time again of, of VCs going on podcasts in T-shirts.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  Dressed like HVAC.

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  There is just, it's sloppy and it would be great if we, the technology brothers could be approved as a committee to review all fashion choices by capital allocators. We could say, hey, look, you have a billion dollars under management. What are you doing in that T-shirt?

• 1:46:58Jordi Hays?

  What are you driving?

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  What are you driving? What's on your wrist? Um, we need to hold our capital allocators to a higher standard. And so we got to agree with the communists on this. They were doing one thing right.

• 1:47:10Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  They were approving fashion.

• 1:47:12Jordi Hays?

  Top-down management of, of, um,

• 1:47:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Jordi Hays?

  of fashion decisions.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  Throw on some suits. Throw on some suits. The, uh, the, the tailors are awaiting your phone call.

• 1:47:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:47:23John Coogan?

  Fiorentino suits. It's easy.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Ryan Peterson. He's been on the show before, founder Flexport. He says, "Robo taxis that pick you up at your house and then take you to the nearest boring company tunnel so they can zip you at 100 plus miles an hour, straight to your destination with no stops, will be on par with rockets that land themselves."

• 1:47:42Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  I want it so badly. And people are sleeping on the boring company. They hate it. They don't think it's possible, but wait until it happens. It's free real estate under.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  We will be at the Vegas tunnel opening. We'll be there. We'll be in the first, we'll be in the first pod.

• 1:47:58John Coogan?

  First pod.

• 1:47:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:59John Coogan?

  Put me in the pod. I will live in the pod. I will eat the bugs if I can get to my destination. If I can cut LA traffic, I will do anything.

• 1:48:06Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have the guys in tuxedos.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. We need one from Malibu to Pasadena. That'd be fantastic.

• 1:48:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, you know, the boring company, I think will, will, you know, every Musk company goes through, oscillates in terms of attention, but the boring company will be at the forefront of the conversation.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Well, it's even harder because it's all local regulation, whereas with the rockets, it's like, he doesn't need to get every single jurisdiction that he flies over to approve it. It's like, if Florida says it's cool, it's cool.

• 1:48:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Or if the FAA says it's cool, it's cool.

• 1:48:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:35John Coogan?

  Um, and same thing for the Starlink satellites. Like, how crazy would it be if you had to get everyone to agree that those were okay? It's like, no.

• 1:48:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I'd like to see a boring, uh, company tunnel to Hawaii. Imagine if you could, imagine if you could drive a GT3 RS to Hawaii.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  That would take so long.

• 1:48:52Jordi Hays?

  I know, but in the GT3 RS, you're not exactly wishing the, the time away.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  You don't need the GT3 RS. You need the Thrust SSC. You know that car?

• 1:49:00Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  The Thrust SSC hit the, uh, the world record, land speed record out on the salt flats. It's basically a jet engine on wheels.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Uh, and I think it can go like 600 miles an hour.

• 1:49:11Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  And so that, at that rate, you are going as fast as a passenger plane.

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:49:16John Coogan?

  And in a tunnel, if you suck all the air out, it might be more efficient and you might be able to get there. But, uh, yeah, I don't know. You'd have to go pretty deep. The ocean's really, really deep.

• 1:49:26Jordi Hays?

  It's deep down there.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, they put the undersea cables down there for the internet, so maybe. But man, the pressure and everything.

• 1:49:33Jordi Hays?

  The pressure might get to you.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  You're gonna wind up in that Titanic thing, the.

• 1:49:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:38John Coogan?

  That's rough. Anyway, fantastic show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe or be relegated to a life of flying net jets.

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  What do you guys say? I just want to say, it's Thanksgiving this week.

• 1:49:48John Coogan?

  Happy Thanksgiving.

• 1:49:49Jordi Hays?

  Whatever you're doing, get together with family, friends, start a family.

• 1:49:54John Coogan?

  Start a family tradition. This is something that I've advocated for before.

• 1:49:57Jordi Hays?

  Start a family or a family tradition. Or both.

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. I have a family tradition that I'd like to share. I, I, I don't come from a family with lots of traditions, but I decided that's not a reason to not start a family tradition.

• 1:50:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50:09John Coogan?

  And so, uh, my family now has a tradition where every time we get together for one of these events or a birthday party or holiday, uh, all the men of the family go outside and we smoke cigars together.

• 1:50:19Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  And it's fantastic. And it's something that everyone in the family immediately adopted. And, uh, it would have been a much harder pitch if I hadn't said, said it was a family tradition.

• 1:50:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50:28John Coogan?

  And as soon as it was, now it's actually been a tradition because we've done it a couple of times and now it's gonna be.

• 1:50:32Jordi Hays?

  It's on the schedule.

• 1:50:33John Coogan?

  It, it, it is well on its path to becoming Lindy.

• 1:50:35Jordi Hays?

  Very Lindy.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  So I would encourage everyone to start a tradition. Um, think about what you can do.

• 1:50:39Jordi Hays?

  And don't be afraid to just adopt this. If you do, send us, send us a DM.

• 1:50:43John Coogan?

  Send us a picture of you and your, and you.

• 1:50:45Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully wearing suits.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  Sounders, yes.

• 1:50:47Jordi Hays?

  Smoking cigars.

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  Smoking cigars.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  After a nice turkey dinner.

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  There's a lot of different things. Nice toasts are a fantastic tradition.

• 1:50:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50:53John Coogan?

  Uh, my mom likes writing, uh, uh, rhyming limerick toasts.

• 1:50:57Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:50:58John Coogan?

  And, and with ChatGPT, you can really take it to the next level. Um, I, I would read one, but it wouldn't make any sense because it's all about my family. But, uh, I've been to a few, uh, you know, dinners with colleagues where someone has stood up and given a roast or a toast and called out everyone in rhyming fashion for various things. And it's hilarious and memorable and it just stands out. And it's just going a little bit, a little bit extra. Making the trip to the cigar store before the event, writing out the toast beforehand.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:29John Coogan?

  And it takes a lot of confidence to just stand up at your family event and give a toast. Uh, but if it's good, it's good.

• 1:51:34Jordi Hays?

  In the same way, in the same way, we recommend booking your Aman trips, you know, at least a year out. You know, plan ahead with your traditions too. Don't do it on the fly.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:43Jordi Hays?

  These are serious things.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  And, um, you're not gonna wanna, you're not gonna wanna Uber Eats.

• 1:51:46John Coogan?

  Maybe start planning out the Christmas one now, if you're listening to this on Thanksgiving or, or after. Uh, plan out the Christmas tradition now.

• 1:51:54Jordi Hays?

  There you go. That's a great place to end.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Happy holidays, everyone.