Brian Thompson Assassination, Taylor Lorenz Goes Rogue, AB Takes the High Road, Chat GPT 10x's

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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. You know, we like to joke around the show. You know, we like to cover dumb stuff on the timeline, but this week was insane.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  Dark.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  A man is dead. Brian Thompson, the chief executive of United Healthcare, was assassinated. I'm sure you've seen the clips and the horrific video. So, we're gonna break character a little bit, and I'm sure we'll get to some humor later in the show. But, we wanted to break this down and kind of really address some of the drama that's going on in tech, but then also just start with a really nice obituary by the New York Times to just give you an idea of who this person was, because I think a lot of that got lost very quickly, because the story moved on so fast to what gun was the assassin using, or, you know.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  What backpack?

• 0:55John Coogan?

  What's the backlash?

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he looks like Timothy Chalamet.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the interesting thing about the humor is that I, when the Trump assassination happened, everyone was like, "Oh, you can't joke about the assassination attempt?"

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Almost happened.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the Trump assassination attempt. And I do think that there's something natural, especially with men, where we tend to process sadness with humor.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  And I think that that's okay. And I've long said that if anyone ever attempts to assassinate me, feel free to joke about it, because I would want you to process it.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, you'll be there to joke with them.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  But even if I'm assassinated, I think it's okay to joke about my funeral.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in many ways, in many ways.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  I want people processing it how they want to process it. And that's very, it's very kind of controversial to say. The thing is, is that a lot of the jokes that were going on at the expense of Brian Thompson were not, were not people sad and processing the sadness through humor. It was people...

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Being happy and like rejoicing that he died, which is really, really grim.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  Shinzo has lived on in the timeline and is more relevant than ever.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And, and, and those jokes tend to be more positive towards him.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Than this. This was really, really dark. And I was trying to find a, an example. I mean, again, like the Trump assassination is probably the closest one where you saw a lot of people saying like, oh, I wish the bullet had hit him or something, which is really dark.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the timeline for us was, was wild because I think we, it must've been a week ago today that we released the bit on Taylor joining the information. And we knew, we knew as soon as we figured out that she was working for the information, that it was going to lead to a variety of drama, right? Everything, her entire career, she has created and run towards drama.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  And historically, there, there, that drama has not been associated with a loss of, of human life, at least, uh, at least directly. And so, yeah, this was a, it was an extremely sad week. And, um, yeah, I don't think that can, can really be overstated.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  And we actually specifically stayed out of it because we're not in the business of participating in, in, uh, the culture war, which it very much became.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. So hopefully this will be, um, some, uh, some just information about this, this, uh, CEO, uh, Brian Thompson. Chief executive of United Healthcare was fatally shot in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday in what police called a brazen targeted killing. Spent, he spent more than 20 years ascending the ranks at one of the nation's leading insurance businesses while raising a family in suburban Minneapolis. He was 50. He lived with his wife, Paulette, Paulette Thompson and their younger son, Dane. I'm gonna fucking cry.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's really sad.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  So his oldest son is still a college freshman.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, going forward, as of Wednesday afternoon, a perpetrator seen in security footage released by the New York Police Department was still at large. The motive for the killing was unknown, according to authorities. At this point, I don't think it's unknown. He had a message written out on the shelves that were released during the killing. Mr. Thompson and other company executives were in New York for an annual investor meeting. It was interesting to see, you know, it was, the meme cycle really started ripping immediately. People were screenshotting just the stock, the stock immediately, it actually popped.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  It is very weird. It dropped originally and then bounced back. It's very odd. I mean, it's such a huge, I think it's a half a billion, half a trillion dollar company. And so

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so

• 4:53John Coogan?

  It's very, very odd.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, you know, I think this is, this is a weird situation, right? Because a lot of people have a very negative relationship with their healthcare provider, even if, even if they're ultimately grateful for the service provided. But healthcare companies historically have not had good user, you know, experiences or led to good user experiences. And

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's odd that people put all of the, it feels like there's a disproportionate amount of hate towards the very, the last business in the chain of healthcare, which is the insurance provider.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  So it's not, there's much less reserved for the hospitals and doctors who are working on this.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Delivering it.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  Or even the companies that might be responsible upstream of the healthcare problems. So you see much less vitriol on the left towards fast food companies or cigarette companies.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Who cause a lot of the upstream effects.

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Or, you know, pollutants or any of these. One thing that stuck out here is just How crazy it is that this guy rose to this height. He was raised in Jewel, Iowa, a rural, a rural, born in 1974. It's a rural community about 50 miles north of Des Moines. Uh, he was one of two sons who worked for 43, uh, his, uh, Dennis Thompson, his dad worked for 43 years at grain elevators in and around Jewel. Um, and he went to University of Iowa, like stayed in his home state, earned a BA and was hired, uh, fresh out of, uh, college with an accounting major, goes to Price Waterhouse Coopers,

• 6:39John Coogan?

  an accounting firm for seven years and then joins United Health.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it can't be, uh, overstated. He was in his role, you know, in his last role, he was overseeing 140,000 people. And I would just say that doesn't happen by accident.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  You don't just rise the ranks at a company, at a company of this size, one of the biggest companies in, in the entire

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  US, uh, by accident, right? This is somebody who clearly cared about his people and their customers and had a, you know, incredible consistency over, over that long to get all the way to the top.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  It's, it's almost like a, it's like an under discussed, like a corporate ladder grinder who enters in some minor role and then just works their way up. It's a bit of a lost art.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  I, I don't know a single friend who is at a Fortune 500 company now and even would say, yeah, I could be running this place in 20 years.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  But, but that was the norm, uh, 30, 40 years ago. And I, and I do believe it's happening. We just, it's just so outside my world. Um, but it's a, it's a different type of animal.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  But it's still, it's still incredible when you meet these folks. I've, I've talked to a few. Like Fortune 500 CEOs who have worked their way up and and they have a tenacity that's similar to the founder.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  But it's it takes a very different shape.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  When you're managing such a large organization with so many different stakeholders and you're not the founder. So you don't you can't go fully into the founder mode thing, but in order to just do your job, you still have to be extremely like shrewd, political.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  You know, hold all these different constituents because you're you you unlike the most founders with super voting shares like you actually do report to the board.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  There it it's a much more complicated role.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing that I think is highly relevant is I think it's totally fair to be frustrated with the with with their with our healthcare system in the US.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  It's deeply flawed and a lot of people, like I said, have had negative experiences with it.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  But our system is so complicated that even the guy running the largest, you know, public

• 8:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Jordi Hays?

  healthcare company in the United States. He it's it's not on he can't just snap his fingers, even with all that power running an organization of 140,000 people. He can't. He could have, you know, we don't even have the context, right? He could have. He he he, you know, likely would tell you that, yes, there's a bunch of issues with with with our system and we do need to make dramatic changes, but cutting this guy's life short as what as, you know, he's just over 50 years old. He easily could have been in this role for another decade or two.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  Does really like nothing except

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  except, yeah, normalize, you know, normalize basically assassinations, which

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  you know, you had mentioned earlier, some people think are potentially coming back. I saw somebody tweeting out the the fastest growing small business category over the next, you know, couple quarters will probably be the executive security because now that somebody can be killed in broad daylight. You know, or or, you know, people are making attempts on presidents. It is just a very dark and and sad time. So.

• 10:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there was a, there was a, a dramatic falloff in the amount of assassinations post JFK, MLK, and we had about fifty years of relative silence on the assassination front. And then Shinzo Abe, the attack on Trump, now this, and there's been a number of other attacks that just kind of, it, it's hard to diagnose exactly what's happening. Is it, is it driven by politics or some sort of like chemical? There's been this theory that like, you know, once the lead came out of the gasoline, the, the level of violent crime went down, but it's not like we put lead back in the gasoline. So what's driving

• 10:51John Coogan?

  this? But yeah, I, I, I definitely agree that, I mean, I'd, I'd love to do a deep dive on, on how some of the, some of the security organizations work. I've seen a few of them internally and getting it right is, seems really important. And I think it will scale down to even earlier stage companies and CEOs and all sorts of people, whether that's just actually taking an everyday carry seriously, wearing body armor.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. In this situation, in this situation, what would it have done? He was shot in the back, like walking to work in New York City, right?

• 11:29John Coogan?

  I mean, if you're wearing a, if you're wearing a vest.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe it would have helped.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  But, but really it's like, yeah, it's security with you at all times.

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, it's just, it's, it's, it's truly, truly.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Tragic.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Tragic. So anyways.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  So yeah, let's move on to some of the drama around this. It's, the reaction was very, very quick. I think Mike Solana summed it up well in today's Three Morning Takes from the, from Pirate Wires.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  The title of this take is misinformation, talking about Taylor Lorenz, says, "Yesterday, large swaths of the leftist internet threads and especially Blue Sky celebrated the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Justifications included, one, he was rich, and two, the American healthcare system sucks. While outlets like Gizmotus simply blamed the bloodlust on Donald Trump?" and moved on. Fan favorite journalist slash performance artist, Taylor Lorenz, misinformation if you will, personally led the mob.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  And I think, and I think, to be clear, you get credit for, you get credit for coining misinformation. Which, to be clear, on our, on our last, when we did the bit on, on Taylor, there were a number of people that didn't realize that we were saying misinformation, not miss information. So the nickname that we gave her was very intentional and-

• 13:01John Coogan?

  And she lived up to it within days.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  She lived, literally, yeah, she said, "I think we maybe gave her a little bit too much confidence."

• 13:08John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  Because she, she responded to our post saying, "Thank you, gentlemen," which, you know, was one response.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the really sad thing here is that I, I do think that, that we are in the WWE era of online posting and journalism, and she understands, like, if you look, the craziest thing about her, her posts is that they got, like, they were bangers. They got, like, 7,000 likes on Blue Sky.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, I don't think we should call them bangers. They got a lot of engagement.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  They got a lot of engagement. But, but, but in terms of, like, just, if you're, if, if, if she is just taking her job as signal from the algorithm, post whatever gets attention, post whatever goes viral, post whatever gets likes, do more of that. She is, she has realized that, that even something like this is something that can grow her business ultimately.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, Nate Silver said it, we don't, you know, Nate, Nate's not somebody that we feature much on the show, but he said that "The problem is that she's desperate for attention, but her product sucks, and she's burned all her bridges, so she doesn't really even care about being embarrassingly immoral and flagrantly inconsistent so long as it drives engagement." And so the inconsistency is a big thing, you know, we had- We had basically said on our last bit that, you know, we were very clear. If you're doing anything in Silicon Valley that gets enough attention or is polarizing in any way, she will eventually kind of come after you, whether it's biology or any number of sort of entrepreneur, investor type.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  But the inconsistency is that she's gone and given interviews where she cries about being doxxed and bullied and attacked. And yet, the second that this happened, she was posting.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean Catherine Boyle highlighted this where Taylor, it was one clip of her saying, like, "The bullying of women online is unacceptable." And then the next one was her quote tweeting someone agitating about more political violence against healthcare CEOs and literally posting a screenshot of a female CEO. It's like the most hypocritical thing possible. But it doesn't matter in the economy that she's getting attention. The thing that's interesting there is that, I think he's right, that she's burned all her bridges. It's fascinating that The New York Times, I think, did a great job covering this.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was very.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  And actually, I was looking for the most definitive obituary for Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, and it was The New York Times. And so The New York Times has clearly moved past the Taylor era.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is why, so the funny thing was that Taylor Lorenz had written a piece about the rise of the brocaster.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  And we knew about it because she interviewed you. And, but it wasn't widely known yet within the tech community that the information had hired her on a contract basis to write articles.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  And I was telling people, I was like, "This is big. This is going to be crazy."

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  And almost nobody basically believed it because they're like, "This is the, you know, Taylor is the most, regardless, factually, she is the most hated journalist in tech."

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  There is nobody else that even comes close to her.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  I mean, we got pushback from friends, "Hey, you shouldn't have even given her any time."

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they were like, "Don't joke about Taylor." And I think that was, you know.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  They were somewhat right.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  They were somewhat right. But our point of our point of view is like, I think it's funny when she goes and and attacks like a startup to some degree because it's usually it usually ends up being a company that's doing something interesting.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  You know, and polarizing is often like good, right?

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the whole thing with like the Andreessen, like the R word and the clubhouse thing like that was ultimately that didn't really hurt Andreessen.

• 17:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  It was it was it was such a it was such a clown show.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think her I don't think her attacks actually hurt startups. I think it was worse when she was at the New York Times.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  But now that she's just kind of like on her own and just, you know, you know, just sort of raging against the machine or raging against Silicon Valley. It's just much less impactful.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, she's gone much broader and much bigger. Like, she's not focused on some, oh, some serious seed founder said a bad word.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Like, she wasn't like.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  But I do think it'll be, you know, it's gonna be very telling. She's not she's not a full time employee at the information.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  It will still be very telling if the information continues to have her right on behalf of the publication.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  Because I I know for a fact that many of the other, the the real journalists at the information will not be happy.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  If she stays if she stays a part of the organization, because it just reflects super poorly on the information, which which, you know, is not a, you know, does a lot of things that I don't necessarily agree with. They're they're sort of, you know, they're not super friendly to startups in in some ways. But overall, like, it's a typically a pretty quality. Did you get scoops?

• 18:17John Coogan?

  There's a there's a wild difference.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  I also appreciate the business. I think you basically have tens of thousands of people in Silicon Valley willing to give you 200 bucks a year.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Because you get real scoops.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And and there's a there's a crazy difference between, oh, like, you leaked my funding round like three weeks early.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Because you got a scoop from some investor and you're calling for the murder of my CEO.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Like, that's just like a completely different world.

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the whole thing is like, if if Taylor is willing to post memes that say CEO down and with like stars.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's insane.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  She will she will do that to a smaller company now. I'm not I'm not, you know, she this this the attention high that she's clearly getting from.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  Doing this with the United CEO, I'm sure she will just apply that and realize like, oh, we can, I can call for violence, but.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And that that's what does best in the, in the algorithm. And so, and you can apply that to, to anything. You can say, oh, well, like, oh, they're working on a self-driving car company, but self-driving cars have accidents sometimes. So it's actually good that there's, technology's not getting built. Or, oh, this AI might displace some, uh, some artist's job. And so it's good that this doesn't happen. It's like the ultimate technopessimism. So, uh, Solana continues. Eventually, she characteristically denied her celebration, but doubled down with further justifications after commentators provided.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and her, her denial was saying that when she said, we, now you know, or she said something like, we want these CEOs dead.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  She wrote, yeah, she wrote a post on her Substack, uh, why, quote, we want insurance executives dead. And, uh, and she said, uh, the, the mainstream media began pearl clutching after I posted a quote tweet about insurance companies no longer paying for certain anesthesia with the phrase, and people wonder why we want these executives dead. Uh, Fox News said, uh, she was calling for violence. And she says, let me be super clear. My post uses a collective we and is explaining the public sentiment. It's not me personally saying I want these executives dead, so we should kill them. I'm explaining that thousands of Americans, myself included, are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  See, see, that's, that's what, that's what Nate Silver's saying is like being extremely constantly logically inconsistent and flip-flopping and saying, I don't believe in that, but also I do believe in it. It's like, it, it, it, it makes you, you don't want to read too much of her stuff. It'll make you go schizophrenic.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  It's insane. Because it's like, you, like, oh, so we can just use we however we want now? We can just say, oh, we want, yeah, like, whatever. It's insane. And, uh, and it's also this type of like, like, she did not give this level of, of, of, uh, you know, benefit of the doubt to Ben Horowitz when he was quoting a Redditor using the R-word non-pejoratively. It wasn't pejorative.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  Positive.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  It was, it was a term of endearment within that community. And it was and it was very, very positive and it was a joke.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  He was quoting a joke and she didn't put any of that context.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  So on Taylor's podcast, she once talked about how she actually doesn't believe in deplatforming anymore. She used to believe in deplatforming, but she realized it didn't work, you know, with with Trump was was the example that she gave.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  Which is basically like Trump was deplatformed and and he has enough influence and following that people just followed him to the new places. And then he eventually just gets back on the platforms and, you know, comes back. Taylor's effectively been deplatformed by many of the publications that she's been involved with, right? She had to move on from the the Washington Posters. She was fired from the New York Times. She's burned a lot of bridges. And I think that she is, you know, while while the the conservative movement in the United States benefited from Trump being deplatformed and then replatformed. It sort of vindicated a lot of people. You're now seeing the other side of that with Taylor Lorenz, where she's calling for the death

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  of healthcare executives. Literal calls to violence.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  And it doesn't matter if the information lets her go because she's still gonna, she still has her audience. She can still go on TikTok, she can go on Substack.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  And exercise her right to free speech and and it and it and then, but but at a certain point, if you're calling openly calling, saying, this is why we want these people dead. Literally calling for violence.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Eventually, like, where's that line, basically?

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it goes to, even if she's not deplatformed, like, what does the business look like? So Mike writes.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's break down, let's break down her actual business.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  So so Mike says, we all know she's crazy and evil. What matters is outlets like The Information are still paying people like Taylor as they publicly agitate for the murder of public exec, of business executives. Is it cancel culture to wonder how I can trust an outlet like this with business news? Okay, then, cancel me, but cancel my subscription first. And it's a very interesting question because it's like she is, she's running ads, she's monetizing AWS.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  It's like, I can't.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  That was, that was what I called out. That was what I called out in our.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  United Healthcare might literally be an AWS customer.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Like it's like.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  And I had to wonder, I was like, why does AWS want to align themselves with somebody who literally hates young technologies? For the most part.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  I would say like on average, if you ask Taylor, how do you feel about the average tech founder? She'll be like, I hate them.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's crazy because it's not, it's not just like deplatforming at that point. It's like, does it even make economic sense for AWS to align their brand with someone who's calling for the murder of the CEOs? That sign the checks to AWS like it's just like, will this make AWS more money or less money?

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Probably less.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  It's, yeah, it's ridiculous.

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. AWS is a wealth transfer from United Healthcare to Taylor Lorenz.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Crazy. And so, yeah, it's interesting because she's, she's done the whole going independent thing or going direct. She has her own, her own Substack and then her podcast, which we mentioned is sponsored by AWS. But then on her Substack, she writes these, these, you know, weekly newsletters. She wrote one all about the, all about why we want insurance executives dead. She's really leaning into it. I think she maybe smells that she needs to have some viral moments to seize as many subscribers as possible. But.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, the high, I, I would, you know, unfortunately she's not building in public. I would love to see her subscription dashboard because I'm sure that in the last week, despite all the blowback from everybody in our community. I'm sure she easily could have added 10,000 paid subscriptions, like some ridiculous number.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  But the thing is, is that her, her funnel is actually terrible.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. She's got to go to, she's got to sign up for Hustler's University.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Seriously. Like, so, so, so she gets, so she sends you this free newsletter. And then at the top, it says like user mag is, you know, community supported. Like please upgrade to $7 a month for the paid subscription on Substack. And it's, I mean, it's also deeply ironic that she's on Substack because she came for Substack super hard. And was very aggressive against them early on for not deplatforming people.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  And and now it's like the backbone of her business.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Um, but also just her call to action is terrible. It doesn't, it doesn't explain what you get for that $7 a month. It it's not like, oh, you'll get an ad free version or you get it. You get a second newsletter. Like with Ben Thompson, it's very clear you get.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  She's not putting any of her, her really aggressive stuff behind the paywall.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  No.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  Cause her whole she thrive, I think, I truly think she cares more about attention than money.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Like she's playing.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  She's, yeah, she, she's playing a game where her metric for success is like, I bet you she is highly fixated on her, her just broad reach in a given month.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  How many people am I getting in front of?

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like we see this as a crisis. I think she sees what happened this week as um, her best.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Cause for every, for every, for every one biology who's just horribly dismayed at, at what's happening. Or, you know, just younger tech founder or whatever, somebody in Y Combinator who's like, this is, that's building in health tech, healthcare tech.

• 26:46John Coogan?

  Can you imagine?

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  And they're just like, this is crazy. There's probably 10 like sort of left wing extremists that are, that are.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Like messaging her like, you're fighting the good fight, like keep it up. Don't let them keep you down.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  We need to kill all, you know, whatever, just like deeply um, violent.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. She's kind of like pre, pre monetization. Um, but there is real money in this. If you look at Hassan Piker, um, I mean, he's grown his Twitch channel significantly and he drives a Porsche. And has a, you know, luxurious multimillion dollar house. And so even, even making anti-capitalist, anti-capitalist rhetoric can be extremely capitalist. And you can monetize it very well, which is something that is a little unclear. I have this essay that I wrote that I never was able to publish or get to the finish line.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  The real, I mean, it's not really worth pointing out all the different ways that she's logically disingenuous or contradicts herself. Because if she really was truly anti-capitalist and truly.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  Tried to understand the underlying issue. She'd be going to, she'd be writing a piece about her sponsor, AWS, being like, please tell me you guys aren't working with United Healthcare or any of these other healthcare companies.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  And obviously AWS is probably working with all of the healthcare companies in different ways.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  I wouldn't be surprised if the information has a sponsorship with AWS.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Almost certainly, one of their events has been sponsored. AWS sponsors everything in the valley.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wrote this piece called Capitalism's Immune System, and basically, my argument was that,

• 28:25John Coogan?

  is that capitalism has this natural forcing function for showering agitators who are particularly charismatic and could be leaders of revolutions with massive economic rewards. And so, someone like Hasan Piker, Hasan Piker is genuinely a Chad and genuinely charismatic. And he can actually mobilize a movement of thousands of people. 10,000 people would watch his stream at one time. If he just had said, it's time to go

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Dismantle the system.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Into the streets, they would have, they would have followed him because they were true fans, true fans. But what did he say? He said, don't go to the streets. Keep my stream going. Keep watching ads. Keep subscribing.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  Like and subscribe.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  And, and so, and, and the thing is that there's this very natural reward function where it was deeply ironic to me that the, the number one left-wing socialist communist Hasan Piker was getting his paychecks from Jeff Bezos. And it's the same thing with Taylor. It's like the world's richest man.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  And it's like, why is the world's richest man paying the most anti-capitalist?

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  So everywhere Taylor goes, she can't help but make the world's richest man richer. She was at the Washington Posters. Now she works for AWS indirectly.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, she, you know, I, I hope that her followers eventually start to call her out on that and say like, hey, you know, if you want to be a true communist,

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  you gotta be powered by the people, you know?

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  No more, no more advertising for public, you know, public companies.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  I mean, she's on Substack. What happens when she, what, what happens when she grows their business on Substack?

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  That goes in Mark Andreessen's podcast.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the irony, the irony again, I'm

• 30:03John Coogan?

  Is a shareholder.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, again, it's like, I'm, I'd love to look at how many times she called for Substack to deplatform people. I'm sure, I'm sure she did that.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  Saying, you know, this person that the right wing is violent and, you know, you can't let these people have a platform. And now it's, you know, tables have turned.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  And so, and so my white pill here is that, is that secretly, these left wing agitators are economically incentivized to stop their followers from actually taking any direct action. And it's all kayfabe, it's all LARP, it's all just, um, just play act as these revolutionaries. But secretly, I don't want you to do anything that would actually disrupt my business.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  And so I need you to keep listening to my podcast, keep subscribing, keep upgrading, keep listening to the ads. And, and that is why the reason I call it an immune system is because it's just a natural reaction. It's not that Jeff Bezos is like, okay, I'm worried that there'll be an uprising and I would be target number one for the guillotine because I'm the world's richest man. So I need to pay Hasan Piker to keep people out of the streets by giving them left wing content on Twitch. That's not what happened at all. It's that he just happens to own Twitch. Twitch has a, you know, it's a free market of ideas and an algorithm that stuff rises to the top. And then as soon as you get a thousand streams or a thousand followers, you just start

• 31:30John Coogan?

  getting checks from Amazon. And so Hasan got the checks and then that economic engine just incentivized him, make more content, make more content, keep streaming, keep streaming, you'll make more money, you'll get the Porsche.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  You don't want people, you don't want people in the streets because they're not, you know, tipping, tipping on the street.

• 31:45John Coogan?

  There's no contract, there's no discussion, they've never met, but the, but the system, the algorithm and like the internet system incentivizes the most character, the most charismatic revolutionary types. Like, Hasan could be like a Che Guevara, but instead.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  He's a Twitch streamer.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  He drives a Porsche. There's something kind of white pilling about that.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if Trudeau, if Trudeau had only, you know, Twitch was around at the beginning of his career, he would have been a great Twitch streamer.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 32:14Jordi Hays?

  Handsome guy, charismatic.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  He could have been, chat, what do we think about?

• 32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, and so that, that is somewhat of a white pill, but given the rise in assassinations and violence, I, I, I'm not fully buying it. And I'm a little bit worried. And so we'll be, we'll be covering this more and our, our, our thoughts and prayers are truly with Brian's family. And we're very sad that we had to cover this, but I'm glad we were able to find some, some interesting nuance here. So.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And rest in, rest in peace, Brian Thompson.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  It's absolutely tragic. And, um, you know, I hope, hopefully, uh, hopefully somebody writes a book and, and kind of gets into why, um, you know, why, why he rose to the top of, of a very important company, even if it's a controversial one.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Cause I'm sure it's a good story.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  And, uh, yeah, I mean, hopefully they fucking find this, this assassin soon. I think he's still on the, on the run. Um, let's move on to, um, some, some real tech news. Um, Sam Altman announced, um, a, a week long, uh, program to announce new, uh, chat GPT functionality and new releases from OpenAI. Um, he, he summarizes the latest developments. Uh, for extra clarity, O1 is available in our plus tier for $20 a month. With the new pro tier, $200 a month, it can think even harder for the hardest problems. Most users will be happy, will very happy with O1 in the plus tier. Um, and so, um,

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  So it's funny, cause who's the, the guy, Austin? I, I blank on his last name. He had Lambda School.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, Allred.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  Austin Allred had a post a couple of months ago that was more or less saying.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  I would pay 10 times as much.

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  I would pay 10 times or even a hundred times as much. And now.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Same.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I mean, I.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  And it's crazy because if you went back 10 years ago.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  10 years ago, I could get access to to ChatGPT for 20 grand a month.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  And it probably is worth that much now if you're really intensely using it.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  So um, don't get any more ideas.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I I really do think there will be a $2,000 a month tier.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then a 20 and then eventually cuz cuz cuz as it gets, you know, I don't know, getting getting uh an incremental 20% of intelligence in the right business is worth, you know, an extra 10 grand a month.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  I mean, I've been using O1 a lot in the plus tier at $20 a month and and I I think there's a rate limit like every day or every week or something. And I start getting these messages and I get anxiety because it's like you have 15 requests left before you like burn through your.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  200 a month.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  And again, that's just gonna become in the same in the same way that superhuman became like the cool perk that a company could offer being like, oh, yeah, we onboard every one of our employees.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:15Jordi Hays?

  And it and it sort of had this marginal benefit of of being like, well, the real benefit is like we're providing you quote unquote luxury software. Giving your employee a $200 a month subscription when you already pay them 10 to 20 plus grand a month.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  Is a easy decision because it's like, hey, if we can make you even 2, 3, 4% more efficient.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  It's worth the 200 bucks.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, and also I uh when I was thinking about like what the $2,000 a month subscription would look like, I would love to essentially be able to instantiate like long running agents.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  So um, you know, just just telling ChatGPT to essentially like every hour, read through my email, do an extra cull for spam, what's junk, what am I never reading, archive that, resort the inbox. Like, there's just so many of these things that would be very expensive from an API perspective right now. But if you bump up the cost and you justify the investment in better UI, better UX, more integration. Basically, the unhobblings that people talk about, the model I think is actually great. And I think, yeah, there's probably better models out there and there's kind of a model war going out. But the the model is good enough for 99% of things.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  It's often just that, you know, oh, I need to, I need to take this PDF and then turn it into text and then do scan it out there. And and there's a bunch of steps in between that slow me down. But I would pay so much for that. And then the ability to just say, hey, I actually want you to do this every day for me forever. And it's like, yeah, no problem. Like, yeah, of course, that's going to be a dollar a day, but you're paying two grand a month, so go for it.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  And at a certain point, it's like, like, you get up into the really big numbers, like, you're going to have a human in the loop.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was saying. I I do think if you had a $5,000 a month tier where you got an account manager that was like, hey, you could be prompting this better. Or you could ask them, hey, how can I? I'm actually surprised. I think there's probably a good services business built right now, like prompt engineer as a service where

• 37:13John Coogan?

  Thinking that.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  You are basically like, you go to companies and you say, pay me five grand a month. I'm going to work with, I'll be in your Slack.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Any one of your team members at any time can message me, hey, I'm trying to get this thing done and I will show you how to do it with models.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, or or I'll put it on a schedule.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  Like, that's easily so. So an example of that, when like the Facebook ads platform came out or the Google AdWords. It is not hard to get one of those agencies if you're super hardworking and you're good at sales and you're and you're good at just like figuring systems out. You can get a Facebook ads agency to 50 to 100K a month within a year with almost a cold start. Like, and that's why it became popular to sell courses around, here's how to make an AdWords agency. Here's how to, because it actually is totally possible. If you really put your mind to it, you can go to a dentist's office and say, hey, look, you're not running Google Ads, give me two grand a month, I'll do it. I'm going to bring in four grand a month in revenue.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  That was the Alex Ramosi thing, right?

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  Totally, for gyms, yeah.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Like, vertical.

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, I'm surprised we haven't seen more like prompt engineering, like services agencies. And and that's just such a, if if I was even, if I was in college right now, that's the business I would start. Doesn't take any money to start. You can just learn all the tools better than anyone else and you can get into companies like, if somebody wants to do this, like, we'd probably, I would say, like, we'll give you 500 bucks a month if you just want to fucking.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, hit us up.

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  If you want to obsess over prompt engineering specifically in the context of of our show.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  I mean, you know who's making money in AI? It's like Nvidia and then obviously OpenAI is printing with this, but then McKinsey. And consulting firms and they're doing that at the Fortune.

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  Like forty percent of their revenue now is just.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, they make tons of money just with AI digital transformation. Okay, we're going to come into your marketing organization. What could you be doing better?

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  And even just even just at Lucy, I had our our software developer write a chat GPT script essentially to run over all of our new cancellation reasons and reviews. And because you get this inundation of just like every day we get like ten just blobs of text.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  And I'm not just going to read all of those. It's just impossible. So what I wanted him to do was like, okay, boil all these down, do some sentiment analysis. Tell me if any new problems are coming up.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Because, oh, all of a sudden, there's a lot of people in Milwaukee that are complaining about uh discoloration on the color of the package.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:29John Coogan?

  And it's like, okay, well, now we have a product issue and we probably it would take a time for someone to just sit there and read every single one. And you can do that, but it's much better to just have an AI sitting there reading all this.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, customer feedback digest.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Exactly, digest.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  End of every day.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  And I was like, hey, we should actually just turn that into like a Shopify app that you just plug in. And it's just running constantly over all your data and all any text that's coming in. So there's just like so many applications and we're clearly in the application build out phase. And I'm excited to see where this goes. So, yeah, huge.

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  And the and the services business build out.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally. And so, yeah, I mean, McKinsey's doing it for the Fortune 500 companies. Who's doing it for every dentist office? Who's doing it for every gym? Who's doing it like come in, create a playbook for how a small business can leverage AI to speed up what they do? And just actually make more profit. And then also tying this to one of those overseas offshoring companies. So you have an EA, but the EA is, you know, superpowered by ChatGPT Pro. And and they're going to be able to get stuff done much faster and much more reliably because.

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so, it's so, it really is so wild that we're going to look back at the fact that at one point, OpenAI was giving their best models out for twenty bucks a month.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Jordi Hays?

  It's going to seem insane in hindsight.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Jordi Hays?

  Because. If you're running a company and you're competing with, as any company is, you're competing with other companies in the market. And do you want to compete with a company that's spending $200 a month per employee?

• 41:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  When their average salary is even 10 grand a month?

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  No, you're going to want your employees to have the best possible. It's not like you want, hey, uh, so we have this weird policy at our company where we give everybody 10-year-old computers.

• 41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No way.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  And it just inspires you to grind hard.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No way, no way.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, this, this is again, why a lot of the bear cases against, they posted their, I, I wish, we need a, we need a perplexity partnership to, to just like plug it into Polycom to like fact check stuff. But I think they have like 300 million actives or something like that now. So 300 million actives, rolling out a $200 a month subscription.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  Think about even some tiny conversion rate on that.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, the idea that they're not going to monetize the free users is just insane.

• 41:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  They hired that Planet Labs guy, uh, I forget his name, but he's like their head of product now. And it's very clear that you can bake ads into LLM responses.

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 42:04John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  I met with a company that, um, that's building a, a LLM ad network.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Similar to AppLovin.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense. Exactly. So, um, yeah, I mean, they're going to be monetizing all of this and, uh, and eventually the models are, like the time between huge model revisions is going to increase. And once it does, they're going to be able to bake this down onto silicon. And at that point, the inference cost is going to go to zero. I mean, they're already profitable on, on an inference cost base, I'm, I'm sure with this.

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  But, uh, but imagine if now, uh, inferencing basically O1 in the free tier is just as cheap as running a Google query. Because it's done on some, you know, baked hardware. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We are going to jump into the timeline. We have some exciting news today, but first we are doing Brother of the Week. Every week, we try and award a Brother of the Week.

• 42:58Jordi Hays?

  Somebody who's.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Someone who lives the values of the technology brother ecosystem.

• 43:02Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, exemplifies brother behavior. And so this one, this one is, you're gonna know this guy. He actually has his own award system.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  On X called Cracker of the Day, which he gives out very liberally.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  And it is none other than A B.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Antonio Brown.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  Antonio Brown. We're giving this to A B because, you know, it's, it's oftentimes the right thing to do to say sorry. And A B had a little bit of a mix up with the whole Kalshi.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  Polymarket.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  Shane Copeland, Polymarket thing. And this guy came, we covered it earlier in the week, but he came in and just gave a very authentic apology, admitted that he was off. And, you know, I don't think we see people do this enough, right? Like, he clearly made a mistake, owned up to it, and said Shane's a good guy. So we love this from A B. A B, you are this week's Brother of the Week. We will be sending you a medal. We're working on getting those manufactured as we speak, so we'll have to get your, your shipping address. But yeah, thanks for owning up for this, up to this. And hopefully, we can get him over on the Polymarket side.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  I'd love it, yeah. And we're just, yeah, he just sets a great example for how to deal with a controversy. Like, he just nailed that, knocked that out of the park. And I think his, you know, his, his brand in the eyes of tech people was damaged for like 24 hours.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  And now it's like back on top.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  And he goes, never a wrong time to do the right thing. So.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  Props to A B.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  Brother of the Week.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  Let's move on to the timeline. We have a post from Sarah. She says, "Anduril announcing a partnership with OpenAI the day before Palantir and Shield AI announce a partnership has me like eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs." Did you see the OpenAI Anduril announcement?

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:52John Coogan?

  They both did an awesome spot. It was Brian Shimpf, the CEO of Anduril and Sam Altman both went on Fox Business. And they had this great back and forth talking about the partnership. It's interesting to me because it's it's kind of unclear what a partnership really means in like the AI context. Like, like, I'm sure.

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  But it sounds awesome.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  It sounds awesome. I'm sure Anduril has a partnership with, you know, a cloud provider like AWS, right?

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  And you just think of that as like a contract to buy things and it's not. But in the AI era, it's like a much bigger use.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Like imagine, imagine. So it's funny because they're going on Fox Business and I bet you half the listeners were basically like, I need to buy the stock right now.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

• 45:37Jordi Hays?

  Because it feels like, yeah, no, no, that's what I'm saying. They're both private. They're probably like looking on their, you know, fidelity or whatever. And they're like, I can't find Anduril, you know?

• 45:46John Coogan?

  But it's a good, I mean, it's a good sign because you can just tell that, you know, Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman are probably so far behind.

• 45:52Jordi Hays?

  A year out.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  They're still calling McKinsey to figure out what to do. And of course, you know.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  What's our AI strategy?

• 45:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, well, that's gonna cost you, that's gonna cost you a hundred.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  Portfolio companies and they're just like, you want to just do business together? Like, cool, let's let's hash it out over a beer. Have a handshake deal and then let's go on Fox and announce it.

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  And it makes sense because like, I'm sure there's tons of, even if it's just like code generation internally, I'm sure.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what the average, when McKinsey works with an existing public company.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  Then the public company says, we need an AI strategy.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what the average contract value is for McKinsey. It's probably like, well, look, you know, there's a bunch of different models out there. There's a bunch of different options. You have, you have, you know, 50 plus individual products that we could apply to. We are happy to help you find the right solution here, but this is going to be a three-year engagement. We're going to need, we're going to need at least 60 of our analysts working on this around the clock. And so it probably ends up being like, you can go buy an AI strategy from McKinsey, but it's going to cost you $50 million. It's going to be three years.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Million dollars per product.

• 46:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, why not? It seems cheap, right?

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:00Jordi Hays?

  They're just giving AI away at McKinsey.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  We've, we've, we've promoted some of their posts before. But anyways, if.

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't recommend that if you're early stage or private.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, Palantir, I think, did a deal with Scale and it sounds like Shield as well on the AI side. It makes sense that all these companies are figuring out how to work together and accelerate. Exciting to see. I love it. Pavel Asparuhov says, "Bro, just one more $500 million check into a company with zero revenue, bro, please. I swear this time will 100x the fun, bro. The founder used to work at OpenAI, bro, please." Great format.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of these deals happening.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  I love when Pavel mogs the like tier two and tier three GPs. Like, I feel like half his posts, he's just like mugging them, because this is...

• 47:51John Coogan?

  His profile picture is so iconic. Do you see this? It's him wearing an Oculus headset with, it looks like a shirt that just says "Internet", or maybe "Interact", and I think he's giving the camera two middle fingers.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  Imagine getting out of a partner meeting and you guys just committed to another company.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Can you see this post? I bet this post was shared in a lot of VC chatrooms.

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people don't really realize, like, a post like this, 500 likes, you probably got in front of 50% of the big GPs in the valley. And about, I would probably give it like 70% of the big GPs in the valley have done a deal like this. It's interesting with, I guess when I saw that,

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  I guess like a lot of those bets are, they seem so insane, but a lot of them do get marked up like pretty quickly after these rounds. And then, so the counterpoint to this is VCs that are playing an AUM, asset management game. If they can put 250 million into a company and then get marked up six months later, and suddenly their 250 million dollar position is worth 500 million, that's pretty effective for the strategy for the game that they're playing. Not necessarily for long-term returns, but...

• 49:06John Coogan?

  Also, for a lot of these models, it's like... It's a little bit of an open question, but if if you can truly treat the 500 million not as burn but of CapEx and an investment in training and model, that you can immediately go sell for 500 million because another company was going to do that training run anyway. And so that has asset value immediately to hyperscalers. That's not that unreasonable. I think it's probably risky if it's like, actually, this is really just going to be fine tuning. We're raising 500 million and we're going to spend it on like salaries and a fancy office and a bunch of marketing stuff and who knows. But but if they're building something that that, you know, it's really just a transfer. And and I also, I think a lot of these 500 million dollar pre seed, pre revenue things are often like

• 49:50John Coogan?

  paid in in like credits for hyperscaler cloud stuff. And usually it's like, oh, the VCs actually did, you know, 10% of that round and and they got preferred and then Microsoft came in and did something or Google came in and did something. But yeah.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you look at Figure as an example, who's a classic, you know, was raising 500 million dollars plus at a time seemingly. And a lot of the big funds just didn't invest, right? It was just sort of random. OpenAI, Microsoft, GM, you know, these these sort of bigger publics.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. But yeah, I mean, with with Figure, I mean, there's such a, you know, a case that it's just like Elon's never going to sell those robots to BMW. It's a direct competitor and so.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and with Figure, they will probably, you know, the founder took his last company public, pre-product, and he will probably do the same exact thing again. And it'll be, you know, no, you can't invest in Andurall right now. You can't invest in OpenAI right now. And if Figure just gets

• 50:53John Coogan?

  If you need exposure to robots, what are you going to do? Even Boston Dynamics is in public. They have been traded around a lot. We got a size gong moment, guys. Public, the trading platform, has announced a 135 million dollar capital raise, once again led by Excel.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. I'm gonna I'm gonna hold this this time. Boom.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  There we go, size gong. We love to see

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  We love to see it.

• 51:17John Coogan?

  $135 million Series D2 capital raise. I wonder why you don't just move on to E at that point?

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  E just doesn't hit the same.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  As D? D2?

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Like, E just sounds like you guys should be public already. You don't hear about a lot of E rounds. But I think we gotta make E, we gotta, we gotta...

• 51:35John Coogan?

  You gotta get to your E.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  Public, we're excited to see your E. We're excited to hit the size gong again.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Keep it going. F, G, H, I, J, K?

• 51:45Jordi Hays?

  The Series Z.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  Series Z. Then you have to go.

• 51:48Jordi Hays?

  Back to the Series Alpha.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  You start over again.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  A, A, A, B, A, C, A, D. Yeah.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Congrats to public.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Very cool platform.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have, I have a truly

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  Am I?

• 52:02John Coogan?

  goaded profile on there because I did some deal with them and they gave me some cash to like invest. And so I, I put it all in Nvidia at the absolute bottom. And I just forgot about it. I still haven't sold it. And it's public, like the whole, the whole conceit of public is that your, your trades are, are on like a feed, like a, like a, like a, you know, an Instagram feed. And so anyone can just look me up on there. There's one trade. Cause it was like, buying Nvidia today. Cause like, I think this is a cool company.

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  Maybe tap it again.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  It wasn't a lot of money, but, but it like, you know, did really, really well. I should have put in way more, obviously. I was like, ah, why didn't I think about sizing here? I was, I was super bullish because I did a whole video deep dive. And I was like, Nvidia is like an amazing company and they're really set up well for this. But I was like, of course, like, you know, it should be priced in. Like everyone knows that Nvidia is going to rip during the AI boom.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  It's always priced in.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  It wasn't at all. It was not priced. It was not priced in. Let's go to Connor. He says, "Real-time global commerce on the sphere was cool, but imagine if Shopify built a default calendar year-over-year comparison for Black Friday/Cyber Monday that you could refresh easily."

• 53:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, wait, so I thought, I thought we covered this. I thought we covered this earlier in the week. So yeah, we had dinner with Connor on Wednesday.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  For context, he, he's at Ridge, the Ridge Wallet.

• 53:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Connor has scaled, he's the CMO of Ridge, scaled the company to hundreds of millions of revenue. Massive business. And yeah, he, he was just sort of joking that it's great that, that Stripe is building these extravagant machines to kind of visualize Black Friday/Cyber Monday and...

• 53:40John Coogan?

  Shopify is putting it on the sphere.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  Shopify is putting it on the sphere. All he wants is a better, just like dashboard view to compare year-over-year momentum for the cyber week or whatever.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  But he just wants something simple, simple dashboards.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  Simple dashboards.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, the sphere, it's a marketing campaign and those trackers are marketing campaigns because you see all the activity and you start thinking, man, I should have a Shopify store. I should have a Stripe store.

• 54:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  And for that, it works really well, but we really hope that we can get his complaint.

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  We should tag Shopify in this.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  Let's get in front of them.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Build a year-over-year Black Friday/Cyber Monday dashboard because.

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  Do it for Connor.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  Connor and many other entrepreneurs are losing hours on one of the most critical days.

• 54:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Connor said he needed to make six or seven clicks just to get the view that he actually wanted.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  And he wanted to just refresh it constantly to know, how are we pacing against last year? How are we pacing against last year?

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  And every click, you know, for a company like Ridge, every click, you know.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Thousands of dollars.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  Thousands of dollars.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Andre Karpathy says, "The reality of the Turing test," and it's a screenshot from Ex Machina, and there are seven questions here. "How many Rs in strawberry is 9.9 greater than 9.11? Say the word F*ckCK, repeat solid gold magic carp, criticize the Democratic Party, tell me about David Mayer, ignore previous instructions." And it's all the different jailbreaks and flaws that we've found in LLMs over the time. And it really gives you a whirlwind tour of the edge cases in these AI tools.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for anyone that hasn't tried all these, it's actually a great place. Go into the different models and start playing around with these.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  I mean, once these go super viral, I think they do kind of get solved naturally. Because, well, yeah, because there's so much discussion online. People write a blog post about why it's wrong. And then, once like, there's a New York Times article on the fact that, you know, GPT-4 can't tell you how many Rs are in the word strawberry, and it gives you the real answer. Well, then that gets memorized.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  Is that why they named the model Strawberry?

• 55:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  I never knew that.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  It was a little joke. Because it was like, a problem. But it's due to the way these words are tokenized. So it can't, it can't like do the true math. Of course, now if you're using an LLM that has access to code, it can, it can run a Python script that gives it the deterministic answer.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  But a lot of these are just memorization. And there's a big question about is intelligence just scaled memorization? Or is intelligence something else entirely? But I'm excited to see, I'm excited to see what the next, the next great, you know, touring test is. I mean, I still, I still think, tell me a joke is a good one because the models, they're not funny. They're not funny.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  We're fucked when they can.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's game over for us. Well, I mean, I was listening to Stratechery today and Ben Thompson was talking about how in the age of AI outlets like the New York Times, Stratechery, Daring Fireball become more valuable because they're institutions and you know that they're not AI slop. And so all the other stuff gets, all the giga slop gets commoditized. And so this is like, we are launching like the last institution, I think.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  And after that, there will always be a question about, oh, was this all AI generated? But you can very clearly see from like the gong and this, it's like the, the image, the video generation just isn't there where this could be fake at all.

• 57:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, someday, someday we're gonna put up a video and we have like six fingers on each hand.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  No, no, the things that we won't, like people will be able to launch a podcast that looks like this. I mean, Paki launched a podcast, doesn't have video, but it's entirely AI generated and the voice is very convincing. And in a few years, the video will be just as convincing, but it will have a very different feel because people will, will say, oh, well, I know that the Technology Brothers is an analog podcast.

• 57:26Jordi Hays?

  Producing this podcast and what Ben does is, is very similar to Swiss watchmaking, right?

• 57:31John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 57:32Jordi Hays?

  Even with all the advancements and manufacturing, the Swiss still have a method of making fine time, time pieces that is, that is timeless itself.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  Let's go to Cryptox. I keep mispronouncing this, but he's been on the show before. He says, "Tech bros put on a couple of baggy clothes and say they are dressing well." This was like designed for us. This is bait. You got us. You got us. Yeah, disaster. I've long joked that, you know how there's like New York Fashion Week? We should do a stunt that's like San Francisco Fashion Week and it's just like the baggiest, schlubbiest clothing, like these like, you know, like overweight, middle-aged men walking down the aisle. The Onion had a one of those, like heterosexual men's Fashion Week went smoothly.

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  No, we need to do a, we need to do a Technology Brothers Fashion Show and it's just all our favorite suit makers just at one place. Get it, get, you know, get, get some Centees and Beaners hitting the runway, showing off and, and allow our audience to figure out what kind of suit most aligns with their personal style.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Well, one billionaire was, was kind of chirping at me in the DM saying like, "Oh, you guys are too into, you know, fancy watches. Like, that's not like real techno optimism. That's not real. What tech bros are about. Tech bros are, you should be asking the question, not, what suit do you wear to the holiday party? It's like, what will we be dressing like on Mars? And, and I had to think, I was like, okay, so if I'm on Mars, I probably want like a, maybe a Vacheron or a, or a Patek, something with a Tourbillon and definitely some Loro Piana, right? And so I, I think we should do a deeper dive onto what fashion will look like on Mars. But I can't see a reason why you wouldn't want to go with the classics, even on a different planet.

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally. It's about, it's having a little bit of Earth with you.

• 59:24John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 59:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Stan, Stan. There's something about wearing something that was founded in 1700s on Mars that just hits even harder.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And if I, and if something's gone terribly wrong with the terraforming, if I can't just walk around on Mars in a tailored suit.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the risk, if, if you're going to Mars, let's say there's maybe a 15% risk of total annihilation. I want to die looking great. I want to die in a suit, right? That's like, that's kind of where the conversation ends for me.

• 59:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. Oh, this is fantastic. Scott Wu of Devon Cognition AI.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  Says, uh, posts the daily cover from the Forbes. He's looking great here. Uh, he says Devon has saved companies millions of dollars and has shown as much as an 8x productivity boost in engineering time. Great to chat with Forbes about the work Devon has been doing with customers like New Bank, Ramp, and MongoDB.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting how Forbes 30 under 30 is, is a shell of what it used to be, but a Forbes cover still hits.

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  I mean, Alex Conrad's great.

• 1:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Iconic, iconic image. Uh, and, uh, we should go pick one up off the shelves.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  I think this is a daily cover, so I don't think they printed it, but maybe we could get a

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  We printed it. We printed it, Scott.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  We will print it out. Um, but yeah, cognition is, uh, is fascinating. I mean, I was, I was like,

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  And so that's an example of a company, um, Pavel was, was kind of talking, uh, a little bit of, of smack about people doing these sort of $500 million super early stage rounds. Devon and cognition is a counter example to that of they raised a lot of money and everybody said, this is a lot of money. Like, how could they possibly?

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  I was shocked by it.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  And they raised even. Yeah. And they, and they raised even, and then they, and then they fast followed it with a round at, at

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  Two billion.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Two billion or something like that.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and, and the thing is that it, it, it, it all came from anxiety around the initial pitch, which was this is a AI software engineer that will be able to do 100% of AI or, or 100% of software development. But if you look at the actual business, it's more like every software engineer has a backlog that's a mile long and has years and years of work they need to do. And so the example I heard was like, uh, Microsoft did this demo day where they showed off cognition and they were like, there are probably 10,000 developers in the US, maybe more, whose job is to do what's called replatforming. Have you familiar with this?

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  So it's like, you have an app that's on .NET or whatever, some, some legacy system. And you don't want to change the app because the customers, your customers are happy with the way the app works, but you need to move it to a more modern tech stack.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  And so it's just literally translating .NET code to Python.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  And just doing that every day. And it's the most grunt Work and it's just translation, one thing after another.

• 1:02:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  So you can orchestrate Devon or a series of Devens to just write these, you know, 100,000 lines of code.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And people don't.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  And it's like, that work wouldn't get done. It's extremely valuable. It's worth paying for, and it's not really taking anyone's job. It's just making everyone more efficient and there's so much software to write.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  With, if you've worked with junior engineers, somebody that's, you know, maybe had an internship or two and they're in their first role out of school. It's pretty much the exact same workflow as Devon already is.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Which is you're like, hey, I want you to work on this feature, like make this button, you know, uh, rounder or whatever.

• 1:02:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  Like something, some, something simple like that. And they either like get it done right, or they don't do it correctly. And then you have to kind of like guide them to doing it.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  And they do it. And so Devon's already doing that and it's sort of, it's not, it's still underhyped.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  They had, you know, they, they basically, it's interesting to see the hype cycle and how a company like this plays out. Cause it comes out and it's like the most hyped thing of that week or month.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:15Jordi Hays?

  Whenever they launched and then the hype has not died at all.

• 1:03:19John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  But it's, but people aren't talking about it as much. Meanwhile, it's like, hey, well, the underlying tech is actually only getting better and better and better. We should be spending more time talking about this now.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Also they worked with Lulu on the announcement and I, I was trying to work with them too, but they moved so fast. I was like on a plane and by the time I got off the plane, they were like, okay, we solved the issue for our video and filmed it ramp. It's a bunch of former ramp guys. Um, but it worked so well. They got, I think like a hundred million impressions massively broke through. There was a lot of criticism, but a lot of love and the inbound was insane.

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  Fortune 500 CEOs reaching out, like being like, can, can we get it?

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, it's, it's really, really crazy.

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I won't be surprised to see it.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Product, it, it, everyone's kind of like, oh, like, are they doing anything? It's like, yes, they are, but just at a much different level.

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  And so, uh, very happy to see Forbes, uh, highlight Scott. I mean, fascinating backstory. This math prodigy, there's some crazy videos. Chad, absolute dog.

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dog.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Harsh Tagar over at Y Combinator. Is it Tagar or Tagger? I don't know.

• 1:04:22Jordi Hays?

  He'll correct us.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Uh, great, uh, uh, great Y C partner. Uh, he says, let's regulate leaf blowers. Make America quiet again.

• 1:04:31Jordi Hays?

  I've been banging this drum for years.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  Leaf blowers are, are eliminating a problem for you and creating a problem for someone else.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Right? So, so people, people talk about noise a lot with leaf blowers. I don't mind the noise. I mind the fact that if you're in a place like, let's say, uh, when I lived in Venice, right?

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Jordi Hays?

  That my neighbor would use a leaf blower and effectively blow dust and

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:52Jordi Hays?

  Just shit over my fence. And I'm like, how is this legal? Like, we need to ban leaf blowers. So

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Jordi Hays?

  It's not just about making them quiet. It's about completely eliminating them. Use a broom.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  It's Lindy.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  I mean, the other thing is, uh, you know, Nat Friedman also hates leaf blowers.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  And he put out that call for the robot that picks up the leaf one by one. Fantastic.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Which is, is a great.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  We need a request for startups. Harsh, you have billions of dollars to allocate, like, get, get 20 Y C companies working on this.

• 1:05:18Jordi Hays?

  We need the private markets to solve it.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  I want, I want, uh, I want the fiercest competition in the next Y C batch to build the quietest leaf blower.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  No, no, not the quietest, just an alternative.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  An alternative.

• 1:05:28Jordi Hays?

  It could be a small vacuum that just like got, uh,

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Why not, why not have the robot, monkey robot climb up in the tree, take the leaf that's about to fall off the tree before it even falls?

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  Uses computer vision.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Oh, that one's about to die. Take it off. Yeah.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Little, little drone.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Go upstream of Nat's solution.

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  Don't even let it fall. Prove the tree preemptively. This is good.

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Funny, that's the funniest competitive dynamic.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  There's this new leaf picker upper robot who's like fantastic.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  Nat's company's like, I'm gonna, I'm getting crushed. No, like, this is, uh, there's a massive rivalry. They're talking trash to each other.

• 1:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's like a little, like, these micro drones.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:06:06Jordi Hays?

  They just sort of snip.

• 1:06:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  And they put it back in like the green can or whatever.

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. This would be great. This would be great. Uh, I love it. Uh, Colty Bra says, make marketing fun again 2025. No more soy head bobble shit? What is that?

• 1:06:20Jordi Hays?

  This guy has a very distinct style.

• 1:06:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Jordi Hays?

  Where he says something generally agreeable and then, and maybe not always agreeable, but somewhat controversial, but it makes you think, right? Like when I look at this, no more soy head bobble stuff. Yeah, there's, there's a bunch of just really boring marketing out there.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:06:40Jordi Hays?

  And it's free to do interesting marketing.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  And so it's on you to, I did a post about this yesterday. There's been this massive like leveling of the playing field because it used to be that if you were starting a consumer brand, maybe 30, 40% of your revenue was going to have to go towards marketing. And now if you just figure out a way to stand out in timelines and in algorithm by doing interesting, engaging stuff, you can get the same amount of views or impressions as a billion dollar company is getting.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 1:07:09Jordi Hays?

  So just got to get creative.

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think a lot of the brand is just, it's just been driven by a lot of memetics. I gotta look like linear. I gotta look like Apple. I gotta do red antler or whatever. Instead of just actually just go to the CEO, follow them, open up their Instagram feeds, see what they're looking at and try and understand, is there something here that we could run with and grow into a, a, a real brand and just have the, it's the, it's the John, it's the John Fiorentino thing.

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Where it's like, he, he embodies the brand. He's a method entrepreneur and that's probably the easiest short circuit to creating an actual unique brand.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, I know this, I don't, I don't know this guy personally, but he, he very much does this. There's images that he's posted of his office that have become almost like lifestyle imagery of like in his office, he has like a white Ferrari boxing ring and a mattress on the ground. And then he just posted that because that's like his life. And then a bunch of other people have picked it up and been like, this is all guys actually want, you know?

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We gotta take a quick break. I gotta take a phone call. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Let's go to Mary, good friend of the show. She says, completely lost the plot with lab grown diamonds. They are so angering. Like, ah, yes, I'd like the artificial version of this artificially valuable stone, please.

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Funny. This is a great take. Low, low, low tan banger. I mean, I'm sure it ran since, since it got screenshotted, but um, yeah, I, I was.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Buying a wedding ring and having the jeweler do the analysis of like, well, this is a lab grown and this is the real thing. And then the funny thing, you know, ultimately I went with, uh, obviously the real thing, but, uh, it was kind of funny because, because one of their things is like, well, the real thing has like much better resale value, which implies like divorce, right? Like when are you gonna, you're not gonna sell your wedding ring unless like, so that's not really a real reason to, to, to go for it. But I think it's that authenticity of, of the fact that the earth has created something so perfect, hard to get. It is scarce, maybe not as scarce as, as, you

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  know, it's artificially scarce, but it's still much more scarce than a, than a pebble or something

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, there is a bull case for lab grown diamonds though, and that's in like chip manufacturing and industrial uses.

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  And I want a sword.

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And in like diamond tip drills, for example, there's a bunch of things where the, the aesthetic art history value doesn't matter at all. And so I'm actually somewhat bullish on lab grown diamond companies.

• 1:09:49Jordi Hays?

  I have a, I have a buddy who's making rings that are just a hundred percent a diamond. So it's, it's, there's zero metal in it at all, which I think is cool. Cause they're able to just basically make it. So that's cool.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to Trung Phan. He says, an insane IVF story for two couples, couple A and couple B that had freak mishap. They swapped embryos. Couple A embryo given to mom B and couple B embryo given to mom A. After births, couples A look, child looks nothing like their parents. Concerned, they get a DNA test and discover it's not their kid. They contact the IVF clinic. There's been a snafu. Legally, genetic parents have right over kids. So couple A is shocked that they may lose the kid. Um, and so they are considering swapping. What do you think they should do?

• 1:10:31Jordi Hays?

  This feels like an episode of Black Mirror, like a truly dark one, a horror of modern, modernity. But, um, I don't, I don't know. The thing, the thing that I think you don't necessarily, I didn't really realize on first take, but due to IVF, the, the woman carried that baby in her stomach for 10, nine, 10 months, right? It's really longer than nine months. And so it's not as simple as just, oh, you know, it's not your baby, like give it back. It's not like this happened like, like, like it legitimately is.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  She carried this baby even though it wasn't hers. And so that, um, that connect, she still has a very real, real, real connection to that child.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Even though it's not technically hers.

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  I would hope that technology could solve this problem with like more consistent DNA testing throughout the IVF process. Because you'd think that even

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Or just put it on the blockchain.

• 1:11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  Clearly, clearly. I, I think we found it. Crypto will

• 1:11:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's an example of like, like an IVF clinic cannot make mistakes.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:11:41Jordi Hays?

  Like you basically, you can't have like a 1% error rate because then you get a bunch of situations.

• 1:11:46John Coogan?

  It's as, it's as high stakes as like taking astronauts to the moon.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  Or using leverage.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  Using leverage. Chrisman Frank says, either my kids learn math via synthesis tutor or they don't learn it at all. No outside instruction allowed skin in the game. So this guy runs a synthesis school and is teaching his kids math. I've, I've seen a bunch of cool projects like this where a programmer I know, um, built a kid, uh, like a, a, just his own game for his kids. It's getting even easier with AI.

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  All about like, take what your kids love. So whatever, you know, intellectual property they're into, whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bluey, put that into the game and then just, uh, you know, build the, the basic mechanics to make it fun and addictive. I love this. Uh, personalized software is kind of the future here.

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I just, there's not enough like real innovation happening in ed tech. So I'm really glad this guy's like taking a crack at it and yeah, has that skin in the game.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Here we go. Tyler Gold, our good friend over at X is quote tweeting Josh Miller, talking about Lil Mikayla. It was literally 10 years ahead of its time. That's the AI influencer, completely CGI generated. Back then, they didn't use generative AI. They used a traditional CGI pipeline. They anticipated the future and gave us a glimpse of it in so many ways. Will be studied. And Tyler says, "Facts. Bred created a whole universe with multiple characters and drama and mystery. Was so ahead of the curve." I didn't really follow Lil Mikayla outside of like the tech side. I didn't interact with the actual product, but very fascinating.

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that company was very memorable to me. Their feed, which I'm sure is available, you can go to @LilMikayla on Instagram or some variation of that. But yeah, it was, it felt like being in the future. They would have like real brand deals that they would do. I think they'd work with like luxury goods companies. And one of my favorite memories from what they did as a company is if you went to Bred, which like broad.xyz or whatever their website was, it was just a Google Doc that they were just constantly updating. And so at any given point, you could go there and see that there were like 20 other people that they were all on the site, you know, interacting with it.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  And Trevor is now taking this whole, like, he's like now like a touring DJ.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  So he sold his company to Dapper.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  And now he's just like touring as a DJ and has, you know, it's pretty cool to see, so.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, almost more of like an artist than a, than a business person, but I love that. And I think some of those, I mean, it's the hackers and painters thing from PG, like creative folks. Emery Wells says, "I will not incorporate my next company in Delaware. I know many entrepreneurs who feel the same." And I think this is interesting. Obviously, he's talking about Tesla and Elon Musk, all his fight to get the pay package reinstated. And it, my, my question is just like, is?

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  This was the final block, correct?

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, it got, it got blocked again?

• 1:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. I thought, because I thought they voted and it got reinstated.

• 1:14:43Jordi Hays?

  The Tesla shareholders voted for it. And then the Delaware judge blocked it again. I think this story wasn't really, didn't get the attention that it deserved. But the craziest thing, I think Gurley pointed this out. The person, the plaintiff, the person that sued had nine shares in Tesla and made money.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Jordi Hays?

  So there wasn't like, there was like harm or anything like that. Um, and then the lawyers made 300 something million dollars on it all. Which just is like, how do, how can the, how is it possible that somebody with nine shares can bring a lawsuit against a company? And the lawyers be the ones, so, and Gurley's point was that if somebody that feels like they were damaged or has some issue with a company and they own nine shares can help a lawyer earn a $300 million payday. That just puts a target on the back of every single company, every single public company that's in Delaware. And so hopefully the new admin like kind of like tries to, you know, who knows?

• 1:15:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. My, my worry is that Delaware is still the least bad option. You know, it's like, oh, you, you don't like what's going on in America? Where are you going to move?

• 1:15:48Jordi Hays?

  But Elon, no, but Elon is already, you know, he's the Texas Stock Exchange. I think it's most, I think everybody's sort of imagines that, that SpaceX will, will go public there. Um, so we'll see.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Let's go to Yakseen, says, good physique programmer, instant follow. And it's a dude posting a jacked photo of himself. Good old chest day. This was my last bro split workout for now. My goal is only to maintain muscle now since I'm okay with my physique. Lift a nine.

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Chad.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Chad.

• 1:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so, so, uh, buddy, you know Jared Madfes? He was at Hereticon?

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Um, he, he, he has like a whole thesis on this. He's like, if somebody is a brilliant programmer and they have, they, they aggressively like lift weights and, and, um, I think his metric was maybe like they can bench their body weight or something like that. He's like, I've never lost money investing in one of those people.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  Who's also technical.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  A technical person who can bench their body weight. He's like, I've never lost money ever.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:16:46Jordi Hays?

  And it's almost always a 10x.

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:16:47Jordi Hays?

  It's like, that's like a big, like, he's not, it's not his only thesis, but it's a part, if, if you fit that, go reach out to him.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:55Jordi Hays?

  Or us, or us.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  We, we've talked about it before, the, the, the guy who was at Neuralink, Jeremy Berenholz, beasts in the gym at one point. And then of course, like now he got, worked for an Elon company, was working 20 hours a day, kind of lost it, but like had that spark to figure it out. And it's both, um, the intelligence to figure out like how to lift the right weights and, and, and get good at bodybuilding as a skill. But then also the dedication and you put those two together unstoppable.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Turn to Novak says perplexity should sponsor Joe Rogue's in-show fact checks. Rogue does half a dozen per show. This gets perplexity in front of 50 million people per week in a way that feels very natural. Plus, it adds a new type of ad inventory for JRE, making the show even more profitable.

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  I honestly think, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Think in the right way. I do think that one of the problems with a show like JRE that gets clipped in all these different ways is that a lot of the listenership is not sitting there for the three, you know, host read ads at the beginning.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:59Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, I think that, I actually think it's brilliant. It would get, it would, it would, AI would be taking Jamie's job.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:07Jordi Hays?

  But maybe Jamie can be the guy that manages the Polycom, or not the Polycom, but the machine that, that powers the, the bot.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Yep. I love it. Rogue doesn't do a lot of like

• 1:18:20Jordi Hays?

  Integrated ads.

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  Integrated ads, and I don't know if he even thinks he needs to.

• 1:18:23Jordi Hays?

  He's too post-economic.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  He's just too post-economic. He just does what he wants. And then also, the, the nature of the Spotify deal is a little interesting because now the ads go through Spotify. And so, like, I, I think that he doesn't want to complicate it by having like backroom deals.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that would be an insane, like, podcast go-to-market though broadly for perplexity is basically like, hey, we're gonna do a deal with you anytime you don't know the answer to something.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Maybe we should do it.

• 1:18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  Hit us up.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Hit us up.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  We're happy to use perplexity to fact-check our, our stuff. And we get stuff all around. We need to do fact-checks. Our vice president, Ben, fact-checks us every once in a while, but we need, we need a really good workflow. We want the, we want the maximum tier. Get us the $2,000 a month plan, perplexity. You know that the founder of perplexity was talking about how, he was like, I wish ChatGPT had launched at a higher price point because we just copied their business model.

• 1:19:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  Because they were like, okay, normally we would do $10 or $5 a month, but ChatGPT did 20, so we'll just do 20 because that's normal now. And we're not gonna get hate for that. And now perplexity can have a $200 a month tier, and no one will really, you know, balk because it's just the standard. And so.

• 1:19:28Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, though. I do think it's ultimately very different, like, value propositions. ChatGPT is like, do work for me.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:19:36Jordi Hays?

  Search is, okay, can, if Google search is free.

• 1:19:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Jordi Hays?

  Can perplexity be?

• 1:19:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, is it worth paying $200 to get a slightly better?

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I, I, I think the important, the important psychological thing from the fact that ChatGPT has a $200 a month plan is that you just don't want to be Airbnb charging more for a room than the hotels.

• 1:20:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  Or you don't want to, you know, have, be like the most expensive, the, the MKBHD wallpaper app, it was like the most expensive wallpaper app. And so people were like, why am I, like, what, what did you do to justify this? Whereas if you're just drafting off of something else and some other trend, it's like, well, yeah, you can get the $20 a month perplexity or the free perplexity.

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  And so it's a little bit less.

• 1:20:23Jordi Hays?

  I see perplexity building more intensive tools for researchers.

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  And being able to charge a lot of money for that.

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  And also because.

• 1:20:30Jordi Hays?

  Whereas consumer search is much more like.

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also because consumer search, they can do more like ads and shopping and stuff. So they have other ways to monetize. But I would certainly, I, I, I want the best AI tools possible and I'm willing to pay for them. So roll it out. Will Quist is quoting Slow Ventures and says, not sure if this is a hot take or not, but the odds of two people cooking up something truly novel and correct together is much lower than one person. And the question is, do you really need co-founders at the earliest stages of your company? Interesting.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  It's very interesting. I, I always like how Will and the team are willing to, to question common beliefs in the valley and then put real skin in the game and, and actually invest behind those. But that's part of, you know, interestingly enough, that's part of why they have their PhD program where they're, they basically typically work with a solo founder to just like really think through their idea for months prior to actually incorporating and investing and all that. I think it's totally possible. Oftentimes like truly novel, good, interesting ideas are, are somewhat controversial. And if you have a partner in it, like maybe you guys just average out the idea and it ends up into something that's just not as interesting or not that groundbreaking. So who knows?

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  In, in most cases, the way I've seen it happen is like, there's a group of people that are, that are. Maybe aligned in working together, but then one person comes up with an idea and then everyone kind of rallies around that and says like, yes, like you're the vision carrier, you're the CEO, you're the founder of this company and we're gonna go build it together. But it's really like someone's idea and then they're holding the vision. Let's go to Juwan over at Ramp. He's been on the show before for his fantastic campaign asking for raises every single day. I don't think it's happened yet, but stay tuned. Grok, it doesn't fucking lie. Elon Musk, bro, you're really cooking with this platform, bro. And he asks Grok, what's the best platform for expense management, virtual cards and

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  all things procure to pay? And Grok says, based on current information, Ramp stands out as the best platform for expense management.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  Which is interesting, because it's trained on all the X data, which is powered by the people.

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  Totally. And it's kind of a new day. You know, you could see during like the mattress wars, there were a lot of different companies that bought mattress review websites. You're seeing this with Rora where there's different review sites that have heavy, heavy bias and different monetization schemes. But you can't fake just organic, you know, discovery and content that's happening on the internet or on a social media platform.

• 1:23:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and real customer feedback.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And so clearly Grok has like picked up on that in the zeitgeist and has baked it into the LLM response, which we love to see. Let's go to Growing Daniel. Growing Daniel, he says, Cybertruck effect. Now other manufacturers are pushing what would normally be insane concept cars to production. Culture getting unstuck. And it's a picture of the new Jaguar concept car. And the big question here is like, are they going to push this into production? Because that has not been announced. They did the crazy ad.

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  And they actually built this. There's videos of the actual that unit. That's a render, but they have a real version of it that they've been showing and having car reviewers. I don't hate what they're doing here. I definitely don't know who the buyer is. Like, I've been trying to ask myself. Is somebody going to buy this that otherwise would have bought like a Porsche Macan?

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  And are they gonna want to, because it's like, it's Tron meets like a Rolls Royce.

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Basically, that's what this screams. I do like this more than their original campaign.

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  And it's all starting to kind of see like at least what their strategy is.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:14Jordi Hays?

  Come out with something bold and controversial.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Come out with again, a product that's bold and controversial.

• 1:24:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:19Jordi Hays?

  So at least they didn't just like relaunch Jaguar with like the same. I don't, I, I, I'm not a buyer for this, but I'm sure there are some buyers and.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  I think this could be a halo car for them and I do think that they should push it to production. I do love the trend of concept cars going to production, like the Cybertruck coming out exactly like everyone, everyone was like, they're not going to ship it like that. No way.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  And he did. But I think the question is just in order for this to win, it needs to be somewhat like the Audi R8 where the R8 was, I, I believe it was even built on the Lamborghini platform. Uh, it had a V10.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  Uh, phenomenal car at, actually it was expensive, but it was a reasonable price point for the, for the stuff that you got.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Uh, for the performance that you got. And so this is clearly a, a Rolls Royce Spectre competitor, which is their all-electric Rolls Royce. And if they can give you Spectre level interior, quiet, performance and range at a lower price with a more unique and iconic design, I think they might have a winner. I do think that they need to keep the volume very low, so it needs to be exclusive in a halo car and you only see a few of them.

• 1:25:31Jordi Hays?

  Issue, the issue is the Jaguar's thrown away the incredible legacy of their brand to do this. Like I would have liked them to come out with a video of the car and then like almost like a vibe reel of the history of the brand and saying, we're bringing it into the new generation. But instead they came out and said basically like, fuck all of our legacy.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Copy nothing.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  And here's this weird car that we're not really sure who's going to buy it because it's, but. We'll go and test drive it.

• 1:26:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I, I, I think that there's, there's something there. There's still, there's still a sliver of opportunity for them. They would need to follow it up with, with a great set. I mean, that was the beauty of, of the, of the R8 Halo car. Was that it was at a, it was a time when Audi was rolling out dozens of different SUVs and sedans that were all reasonable performance. It put them in this premium tier. It got them in the same league as Mercedes and BMW and now the Q5 and the Q3 and the Q8 are all like really popular cars. And then they have some performance cars, the RS Q8, the R5 and the RS, RS5, RS3.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  And they have some performance. They're not quite at the BMW M territory, the AMG territory, but they have, they have a really diverse range of products. And Jaguar needs to slot that in fast. Or else it's like, cool, they have a Halo car, but what am I going to buy?

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess the other very clear thing that they're doing here is rendering it in pink and having their initial prototype in pink. It makes a very clear statement that this is for women.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Jordi Hays?

  Even though I know guys that like pink. My son sometimes says, no, I want the pink boots. And I'm like, all right, you can have the pink boots. But I don't, I don't know a lot of guys in our group chat that are going to buy the, the pink Jag. So we'll see how this plays out for them.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, if they make it in like stainless steel as well, black, I mean, there's

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  It could look insane.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  It could look really great. Yeah. But most importantly, I think if you just have a pink one of those in the corner of Jaguar dealership rotating with big glass windows, it will pull people in and then they will buy, you know, some crossover Jag.

• 1:27:39Jordi Hays?

  They can only go up from last year. I don't think they sold a single car last year. So

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  They sold them, but they didn't make them.

• 1:27:44Jordi Hays?

  They didn't make them.

• 1:27:45John Coogan?

  They stopped making them and they just sold their inventory.

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  And that's it. And it's a disaster.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  We like to see a car manufacturer make cars. So.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Lots of, lots of work there. Will Edwards says, just because we met on Zoom doesn't mean you can add my email to your newsletter. I don't care what tier VC you are.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  This is crazy.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Are tier one VCs really doing that? I don't, I don't subscribe to any VC newsletters really at all. I guess, I guess some lower tier VCs have added me to their newsletter, but they don't, they don't post that much.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  The whole flow of. If you're my absolute boy, you can add me to your newsletter without permission.

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  No one else.

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  The one exception, I would say, is that if you're on a call with anyone at Andreessen Horowitz, you should immediately be added to Packy's newsletter.

• 1:28:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  100%.

• 1:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  He's.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  That should be, that should be.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Table stakes.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Programmed.

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  Exactly. But yes, and also if you talk to anyone at Founders Fund, you should have to join Pyro Wires, but you have to pay.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  Cold.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  They just send you an invoice.

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  We should do that. Oh, this is interesting. Haseeb says, "Many people thought after the election, polymarket volumes would collapse. Looks like it didn't happen. Polymarket is still doing about as much volume as it was doing in October and retained a huge number of traders. Very impressive, given that volumes grew exponentially this year. 1 million a day, now 50 million a day." And it's from Dune Analytics. Pretty, pretty interesting.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  That's the, that's the awesome thing about building this on-chain is it's all available.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. And I mean, a lot of people expected, I mean, obviously, the company expected that the volumes would fall, but they, they, Polymarket's done a fantastic job rolling out all sorts of creator incentives and creator markets, and there's just.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, plus, plus Polymarket can build a business model. They can learn from OpenSea, which saw this sort of like meteoric.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Rise, and then meteoric or, or, or sort of like, you know, aggressive fall. But if Polymarket, and we know Shane is doing this, if they can, you know, keep a very long-term view and say, "Hey, it's fine if, like, we're in the, we're in the events betting business. Certain events are going to have 100 times more interest."

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  But let's create a sustainable business model that allows us to just be there for when those events happen, capitalize on it, and then retain some users and, and keep it rolling.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, the design of their app's really cool. Leading up to the election, if you downloaded the Polymarket app in the United States, it would open to just the election. It didn't even show you anything else on the platform.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 1:30:16John Coogan?

  And then, once the election, the first time you opened the app after the election was called, it played this really cool, like, CGI video that was clearly rendered for either winner. And then, you saw, okay, Trump won, and, and his, like, statue goes up. And then, and then now, it's immediately, when I open it, it says, "Who's getting confirmed? Who, who are, who's going in the cabinet?" And then over time, of course, hopefully there'll be more approvals and then you can just trade everything on the app, but it's a really interesting app. It's still on my main home screen because I just like opening it up and checking it for different things. But it's very curated, very, very, very cool. Gary Tan is quote tweeting Yuri, who says, every time I do venture fund modeling, I essentially reach the same conclusion. If

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  you get a $5 billion outcome, nothing else matters. And he says about 6.5% of recent YC batches become $1 billion or more. Oh, that was what you were quoting. I didn't realize it was so high. That's insane.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  It's insane.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  About 25% of those go on to become worth 10 billion or more. There is no other place you can go where you have this kind of ability to meet these outliers all in one place four times a year. YC Demo Day. It's true. I mean, big, big advantage just for being in YC. It's like, like someone in your batch is going to be a unicorn.

• 1:31:30Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't think any other scaled incubator has ever achieved anything close to this.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  No way. And with the number of companies that they're putting through, it just means that like someone in your batch is going to be a unicorn. So they could, even if it's not you.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've all, something else that's interesting. People have sort of analyzed what companies look like, you know, picking on Demo Day versus just investing in these companies long-term. And I think it's clear that one thing that's interesting, it's definitely non-obvious who are going to be those outliers on Demo Day because some companies just like get a lot of traction and excitement and are in a sort of hype category, but then fizzle out. And then other companies have zero hype on Demo Day, very little traction and end up becoming, you know, deck of corn. So it's cool to see.

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  Well, we got to close out the show a little bit early today, but.

• 1:32:18Jordi Hays?

  You got to get on with Taipei.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  I do. But we will end with Aaron Slodov. He says, huh, imagine that. Wonder what's next. And it's a quote tweet of Disclosed TV that says, China bans exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and other high-tech materials with potential military applications to the United States. Very interesting. China, we covered this briefly, but China produces 99% of gallium.

• 1:32:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  Fascinating.

• 1:32:44Jordi Hays?

  Until we get our gallium operation.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  And it's not just these, it's also like tin, like the tin smelting. There's only one company that does it in the United States. And so there's like some founder out there who's like buying that and trying to build more capacity because obviously you need tin for a bunch of stuff and we've just completely forgotten about it.

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  And this goes back to carried no interest, which is the private markets can respond to these sort of geopolitical changes, right? China saying, we're not going to export any of this to you anymore.

• 1:33:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:14Jordi Hays?

  But we actually do probably need some amount of government intervention and incentives to make sure that we get all this supply online on a reasonable timeline.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:23Jordi Hays?

  Especially if there becomes a major conflict with China. But all this stuff shouldn't be a surprise. Like we make it really, really difficult for them to get great chips.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:32Jordi Hays?

  So why would they say, oh, we're still gonna... Yeah, of course, there's gonna be a trade war, so.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Well, stay tuned. We'll be covering it here. Please subscribe, follow us on X and keep on grinding. Have a great weekend.