Merry Christmas, Hit The Dom Button, Yearly Tech Recap, 2025 and Beyond

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (00:00) - Merry Christmas (01:55) - John's Workout Challenge (05:00) - Yearly Reflection (41:28) - Reply Guy of the Week (43:45) - DM's (47:15) - The Timeline

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. I am sick as a dog, but we're celebrating because we doubled and it's a Dom episode. You know what that means? We have a tradition around here.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  Straight into it.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Every time we double, we pull out a bottle of Dom Perignon and enjoy it on the show, live.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  And the timing with this actually worked well, given that it's Christmas Eve.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  It is. Merry Christmas, everyone.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  It is, uh, yeah, Merry Christmas, everyone. We're having, we're having quite the morning. We got here, we woke up around five, tried to get to the studio.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Jesus. Jesus.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  So bad. Oh my God, I didn't realize I was so pumped up.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's great. Um, anyways, strong, strong start to the episode.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Strong start. Jesus.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas, everyone. Merry Christmas.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyway, so we'll, I'll just recap the morning briefly. So we got up around five, wanted to get to the studio early because of course it's Christmas Eve and we have family stuff going on, family in town. But we weren't going to miss, uh, an opportunity to record a podcast. It just would not be on brand for us.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, so anyways, we get here, John is deathly ill from some, uh, from some disease that his cousin picked up at school.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  It's like a thousand times worse than COVID.

• 1:26Jordi Hays?

  It's, yeah. So if you've ever had COVID, COVID is a thousand times worse than that. He keeps horrifically coughing. We just shot another video and, um, it, it was tough to get through it. Uh, and then we had a huge, uh, sort of printer malfunction, which was making this show difficult, considering we rely on printed, quite a lot of printed content to get through it. Um, but we made it here.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  The worst part is that I got goaded into one of the hardest workouts of my life yesterday. So I heard a rumor that, uh, one of my buddies who's a founder of, uh, I guess Decacorn now is like the fittest man in tech. And so I hit him up and I was like, I hear, I hear you're the fittest man in tech. Like, I'm gonna challenge you, like, let's go. Like, I want to work out. Where do you work out? I want to work out with you, see, see, see how jacked you really are. And he sent me his, uh, his like

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Just sent, sent location?

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, he did, basically. He was like, meet here on the 23rd. He sent me his body fat percentage, 9.9%. Last time I tested, I was at 14 and a half.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  Which is good.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  It's good.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Healthy.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  But 9.9 is low, low.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  And so I was like, okay, no whammy, no whammy. I've been working out, maybe I'll be down 9.8. If I beat him by even point one, I win. So I get down there, get on the, the body fat scanner, comes back 9.4. I'm like, let's go, I beat him.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Really? You came in at 9.4?

• 2:51John Coogan?

  9.4, yeah. He gets on, 9.1. He dropped, something had happened, and so he just smoked me. But I, I beat him on, it gives you like this aggregate score for like muscle and fat, combines everything, complete like, you know, nonsense heuristic.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  Is this a DEXA?

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So it gives you like the score and, uh, and I beat him on that. So I was like, this is what we were really focused on here.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  It's not the body fat percentage.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  And then he proceeded to destroy me. He's been training for a Murph, you know, the Murph?

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  The mile and then the 100 pushups, 100, 200, 100 pullups, 200 pushups, 300 squats or something. And I just got destroyed.

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  It was so bad. But it was a lot of fun. And, uh, yeah, I was really close to bailing. I said to him, I was like, I got this terrible cough. I can't make it, dude. And he was like, don't worry, there's a bunch of doctors you can go to that are nearby. And he sent me a screenshot, just looking for a gynecologist nearby. And I was like, fuck. And I literally got in my car.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Mocked.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Mocked. I was like, I can't not go. And I was just coughing along, dying the entire time, and it made me so

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  You wouldn't have been invited back.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  I, I came back with a 103 degree fever. It was so bad.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  So bad, but I got through it and that's what matters. So today we are recapping the big moments of 2024.

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  Hey, before that, one, one big moment of the year was, uh, for us.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  We doubled again, cheers.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, we doubled in, in this podcast, very grateful for it and the brothers.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  It's been fantastic.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  It is an honor to record this.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  I really, I genuinely feel like it is a platform for the community.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  For us to highlight, you know, people doing great things, writing funny posts.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, changing the world, big and small.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's been, it's been a lot of fun evolving it from that first, first demo recording on Zoom that was just us like riffing about random stuff to a much more structured show.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Being able to highlight funding rounds, the size gong and personnel news and people hire job postings. We have a lot more planned for 2025. We're going five days a week, people.

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the big news.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Subscribe right now.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Five days.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  In your feed constantly.

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  Daily. It's a daily show, starting in.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  And just a little bit of a reminder, we are 100% corporation supported. Uh, we never ask our listeners for a dime. We want to avoid audience capture. We ultimately don't care what the audience thinks. If the audience wants us to talk about some culture war thing, or that'll go viral in the algorithm. That's not what matters. What matters is what do the corporations want us to talk about?

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  This Christmas, if you're looking for a Christmas gift for us, ask your boss. Maybe we could sponsor. Hit us up.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Starting at, uh, six figures.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, just six figures a month. You can support Technology Brothers.

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  It's less than what an average product manager makes.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  At a, at a fan company. So it's not much.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  Put us in the, put us in the team.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Um, awesome. Yeah. So, so for context, we just recorded a whole bit on our, on our annual awards, which will be going out via X. Uh, so you can look out for that. But, um, in going through that process, we spent the time to just kind of reflect on some of the bigger moments of the year. And it felt like a monumental year in tech for many reasons. I think the election played into that because. You know, tech was just so intertwined with the election this year, given the influence of X and Elon and big venture funds.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  And it was really more, you know, the election specifically was more of a, that more of a cultural battle even within tech than we're now even remembering.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  Like I saw Based Baron posted yesterday screenshots of all the VCs that were VCs for Kamala.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  There's a website, the website's since been scrubbed.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  But there were probably a hundred names up there from many of the biggest firms in the valley, people that were backing it. So I would, you know, since we don't talk about politics on this show or social issues, I would just vote that we just try to forget about that list.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  Focus on the tech.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  We just all move forward together. We should just have a website called VCs.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  And just any VC can, can just, you know, put, put your name on that site or like tech.com and you just like, if you support tech, technology.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  I'm just a VC.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  If you're a VC.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  I just want to put my name in the hat that I'm, I'm a venture capitalist.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  If you're a VC and you support technology, go to technology.com, you can put your name on the dotted line and you can support tech.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, who's that guy with the NFL hat? Is that meme where he's like, he's at the NFL game, he just supports the NFL? That's what you want to do?

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Just, just VCs for America.

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  Pro tech, pro business.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  I need to support both parties.

• 7:23Jordi Hays?

  Pro America.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Pro America.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think like the reason we're able to have a non-political show purely business is because we generally support everybody that is pro-technology, pro-business, pro-America.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was one of my hot takes, like the, what, what do you agree, what do you believe that very few people will agree with you on? Is that every American president is amazing.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  I love them all and I would get beers with all of them and I think they're all incredible and I think that you don't rise to that station without having an incredible life story. And every time I've dug into someone, even someone who's been controversial or I did a whole hour-long documentary about Trump and then an hour-long documentary about Biden and they both have like incredible stories and it's very easy to get lost in like, what's going on this week with this particular policy and is this policy good or bad? And there's certainly some politicians that benefited me or my worldview more, but I think we've never had a Stalin or Hitler in America.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  And every American president has been unique and interesting and someone that I would absolutely want to get dinner with if they were alive or available.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep, that's a great point.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Pro America.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Pro America. Uh, where do we even want to start here? There's a bunch of big moments.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  You know, everything from OpenAI to True Social going public to an almost TikTok ban that didn't end up happening to software dying and being reborn, to humanoid robots, to OpenAI drama, to.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  The OpenAI drama was mostly last year. This year was kind of a rebuilding year, really pivot to product.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  But the talent exodus this year was intense.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  That was intense, but also.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  They were, they were kind of two separate things.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  The cadence of product releases is really, really strong. The app is really, really good.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  That's why I put it at the top is despite all the drama and the various.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Jordi Hays?

  People, high-profile people, co-founders leaving, the product velocity was still insane.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  And they, and they didn't, and, and it's still throughout the year was this tug of war in terms of, you know, Anthropic versus OpenAI versus, oh, what is Gemini doing? Like, there was this.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  What's Ilya doing?

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was this sort of tug of war for attention and users throughout the year, but it felt like OpenAI seemed to be, stay mission-oriented, even if their mission had changed year over year in some ways, right?

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  Shifting to for-profit.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a remarkable shift from a research organization with a very much more academic style of employee to product-led. And like, some of the earliest problems were like, yeah, it was amazing, magical, like, god box that you could talk to that defeated the Turing test, like, out of nowhere, but it couldn't keep you logged in. Do you remember that?

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  You had to keep logging in. And then for a while, it was like, it's down, or it would, it would air out. And now they've gotten to a point where it's extremely reliable.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  And, yeah, it still goes down every once in a while. There's still rough edges and there's weird things where like, different models have different capabilities, what can generate images, what can, but clearly all of that product stuff is getting ironed out and they're going to have ads in the free version, all the way up to a $2,000 a month tier, or $200 a month tier. Like, it's going to be like, really, really polished differentiated product. So, I'm excited. I mean, it's on my home row and nothing has been be able to displace it for me.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we can't, um, understate how impactful it's been on this show. We, on average, have been putting out 10 hours a week of content, something like that. And some of it is actually more or less scripted and then it's like heavily researched and we, you know, write some of it out beforehand. And so, you know, ChatGPT has effectively replaced the need for a full-time writer analyst type person.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And then AI has worked its way into so many other things, just like transcripts are automated with AI, little captions that we put over videos, even just like some AI-generated images and some of the short-form stuff like, it's just like weaseled its way into all these like nooks and crannies. It's not, it's very additive.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  It's not like replacing anything that we're doing, but it's been, it's been hugely beneficial.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, another one on the list, obviously, Nvidia becoming the world's most valuable company. They were, Apple overtook them again afterward, but can't be understated how memorable that will be to me, even twenty, thirty years from now, like witnessing that.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  Remember Jensen signing that woman's chest? That was like, he's a rock star now.

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  After what, thirty years of building that company, more, maybe more.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and being, I would say, very benevolent, you know, positive

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  type of character within the tech world, right? He's not, doesn't have this ridiculous ego. He's generally very humble. The only, the only critique I would have of him is he has gone on an interview to say, I wouldn't do this again, you know, if I, if I knew how hard it was gonna be. Cause we don't want to discourage any builders, but, but yeah, can't, it really can't be, and it's so unclear right now. We're not in the business of making, you know, predictions around market caps or anything like that. But, you know, looking back at the dot-com era.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  Comparable companies, evaluations they achieved, it'd just be so interesting if, if this time it's different.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Well, they have over one hundred percent of the profits in AI right now.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Because all the other companies are losing money and they're the one that's printing money. It's also fascinating to just compare them to their. Their their rivals, Intel, which is a

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  A complete mess and Pat Gelsinger was ousted and they just haven't been able to take advantage of the CHIPS Act at all.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  And then AMD, there was like this bombshell report by semi analysis, Dylan Patel this week, uh, basically saying that like even though they're hitting the benchmarks on the actual like computing power, like price per flop, the software is so broken. There's so many bugs that you cannot train models on it. And George Hots is like chiming in and, uh, Lisa Su, the CEO is, uh, kind of scrambling, but she's done this before where she's like hopped on the phone with people and be like, okay, yeah, we're going to fix it. And then nothing happens. And so, uh, it's been a really crazy, just kind of like A B test to see that Nvidia just remains like so dominant, even when someone else can beat them on like the core metrics.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  The that CUDA, you know, polish. Oh, really matters.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  Here we go. John's, John's, the coughing is going to begin. Uh, the other, the other thing to highlight under here that was seemingly monumental, uh, was TSMC actually starting to produce chips here in America.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  Um, I don't think that can be understated, just given how important they are in the, in the value chain or supply chain. And, uh, yeah, I'm excited to see where that goes in 2025. Um, but in with the chaos of this year, um, it seemingly was not necessarily brushed under the rug, but it felt like it got like five hours of attention when maybe it was, you know, considering how dependent our entire way of life is on chips. It seems pretty cool that we were able to make those here.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, huge. Did you use an Apple Vision Pro this year?

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was, that was going to be the next one. Uh, I, uh, I'm going to sound like a Luddite for this, but I did not.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  You didn't even try it, not once.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even try it. One, um. I had no interest in going to an Apple Store and just like putting on something that hundreds of other people are putting on in a day. Just a personal preference. The other thing and the reason that I didn't actually buy it is I try to keep devices away from my head. So I use, you know, I use like wired headphones I have for years. I use my AirPods as like golf balls for practice in my backyard.

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  They no longer work, obviously. But I didn't try it. I haven't been.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  I totally would. It's not that I wouldn't, but I just didn't happen to be in a situation. But it is, it is fascinating that

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  how quickly the swing happened from people going on X in the first couple of weeks being like, this is the next computing platform. To I've never even FaceTimed a single friend that was like, oh, I'll call you for my Apple Vision Pro. We have a bunch of friends that have these.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  A lot of people use them for two weeks and then return. That's exactly what I did.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  It was great for two weeks. I watched a movie on a plane, watched a movie at night, but there were just too many bugs, too heavy, too expensive.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were seeing that. Like I remember I was at Soho Beach House, like somebody's just sitting there with it on. And it just looks, you know, it looks silly, but it's also, I don't, just because something looks silly doesn't mean that it's bad. It was like, I generally think that the Apple Vision Pro is very, I think it's cool. I wish it was like catching on more. I have a friend who's a super talented iOS developer. I was like hoping that this would be a computing platform that he would be able to build on. I did try one of the Meta Ray-Bans, which I was pretty, I was pretty impressed with, but again, I don't really want to wear. I don't need to, it's not quite, you know, significant enough to want to wear them around all day.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I think there had been some reporting that Apple was going to discontinue the Vision Pro entirely. I think they, that would be such a, doing that, like, there's almost seemingly some value to Apple in terms of maintaining their market cap to just continuing it. Because if they discontinue it, it's such a colossal defeat.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  And sort of like verifiable proof that you are an iPhone company.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  And, and I think-

• 17:18John Coogan?

  They should keep it going. I, I think they should do another version with the same screen because the screen really is fantastic.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's just- Yeah, and it's, it's, Apple has the leverage to be able to say, let's spend $20 billion a year on this. You know, they legitimately could do that.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  If they can keep the same screen, get rid of the external screen, switch it to plastic instead of metal. So it's half the weight, like, and half the price. Like, they have a winning formula, for sure.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Just in terms of, like, replacing a home movie theater.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Because you can just put it on and watch a movie. But even then, the software was really bad. Like, I would wear it in the dark and my room is really dark and it would get lost and, like, put up an error saying, like, can't track. And it's like, I don't care if you can track, I'm just trying to watch a movie right now. It's very, very frustrating. Yeah. Not, not fully polished. And it felt like the people who were working on it weren't using it in the real way. They were, like, using it in a demo at work.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  Lab setting.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  And, yeah, not actually daily driving it in the way that Steve Jobs daily drove the iPhone and realized, like, hey, like, it needs to be a glass screen because I put it in my pocket with my keys. And that was like a fundamental insight. That, that hasn't happened with the Apple Vision Pro yet. It's been very much like, of course you'd like a giant box and, like, take it out and, like, put it on for 10 minutes and do a demo and then put it back. And, like, it's like, no, that's not how people use these devices.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  But-

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people, people went from being like, oh, what case should I get to my Vision Pro? To the week, the next week being like, I'm gonna return it now.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm gonna return it. And, yeah, super bullish for Meta because they're clearly going to release, like, something that's equivalent. They just need to figure out the media. Like, you should be able to just buy any movie on any Meta headset. And I don't- Know that they have a partnership yet, but they need like a iTunes store.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Because that was the first thing I did was I went in and I bought like Avatar, all the Christopher Nolan films, all the movies that I would want to see in the theater. I bought all those, like 3D movies and stuff. It was amazing. All those were great. But it was just too heavy and too expensive and too, too janky. But if, if Meta comes out with something that's the same resolution at half the price and has that feature, just the movies are good. I also do think that there's a big opportunity for starting to create content in 3D right now. And then just waiting, waiting, waiting, and then eventually it'll catch up. I was thinking about doing that when, when it launched, if it was going to be big, I was going to do the history of VR. And I was going to do an interview series in, in spatial video in 3D. So you could watch it in the Apple Vision Pro.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  And it would be like you were sitting right here and you could look to your right and see me, you could look to your left and see like Palmer or.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  Carmack or whoever, whoever I would get to interview.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  About the history of VR. And it would just be like these really chill, unedited interviews. And it would just be like, oh, I'm sitting at a table with these guys, having a conversation, learning a little bit, no edits, like nothing.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Very natural. Anytime you're cutting, it gets really jarring. Anytime you're flying around, you don't want to move the camera at all. You just want to put the camera there and then let people look where they want to look. And that's really cool, but there's just no, they don't have a YouTube yet.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  For Apple Vision.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's one thing that was interesting. They had that app that was native to the device. It was, you could see dinosaurs.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  And it reminded me of the original like iPhone iPod Touch apps when I was probably, I forget exactly how old I was, maybe like 10 years old, 11 years old. Using these things where there was like the app where you could like play guitar or like drink, you know, you could pour a beer or whatever.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  It was just like these sort of, I, I don't remember anything outside of the dinosaur app that kind of broke through the noise.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Um, nothing.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Which is really proof that there's no or- organic developer activity, which is kind of a.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  People are lazy when it comes to VR. Like you want to just like lay down. Like one of the best VR games I played on the meta quest was a shooter, but the whole conceit is that you're in a kayak and you're a sniper like sneaking through waters. And like assassinating dudes on like oil rigs, basically. And like, so, so you're seated the whole time. And you're just using your VR paddles to go like this. And then you reach down, pull out your sniper rifle and then shoot. And it's really, really cool. It's awesome because you don't need to be like running around and it's not very jarring.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's good training for everyday life.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. Um, it's great. And so, um, it's, uh, like the, the figuring out how to break the, like, people just want, like, video games, I feel like had a breakout moment during like Final Fantasy VII. Where it was like a hundred hour game. You could just sit there and it would be like lots of dialogue, very chill, sit on the couch, middle gear solid, like these long games. And no one's figured out how to do that on VR because they're all so, they're all so preoccupied with like, well, you could run around and you could throw fireballs. But then it's like, okay, I'm just working out now. I'm like exhausted. Like, I don't actually want to like climb a mountain to live like Mission Impossible 2.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  I want to watch it.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  On my couch lazily.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  And so Palmer was actually talking about this one company that was building a VR headset that was meant to be used laying down. And so it had like a special pillow with like knobs on it. So you could like move your head very easily.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  But then you'd lay down. It's like very kind of matrixy and like creepy. Like you could easily get like wirehead and spend like eight hours in it.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  But if you look at like.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  Imagine the brain rot.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Oh, it's so brain rotty. But at the same time, it's like, how do people play Madden on Xbox when it comes out? Or Call of Duty, when that one comes out. They play for eight hours straight.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  And so you, you're not going to displace the PS5 until you can give someone an experience that they can go and chill with for eight hours straight.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  And so you have to lean into that design, that design like elements essentially.

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  And you're competing with the phone, which is so good at capturing attention, right? And every single, that's, that's, that's one of the big issues with VR. Is VR headsets aren't competing with each other. They're competing with every other screen, everyday life. So the competition is just intense, especially when they're this expensive.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Polymarket is worth bringing up, like Prediction Markets finally breaking through. Seeing the picture of Shane working in 2020 or 2021, like in his bathroom on like a wicker basket. No one really cared. Very low volumes, slogging through the next few years and getting to this year. And I just thought that was cool because we've talked about this on the show before, but it had been this sort of thesis that every, so many smart investors had for so long that Prediction Markets would eventually go mainstream. And it kind of took this election cycle. It took Polymarket's product getting to where it is. It took, it

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  took probably like sports betting, like blowing up and like becoming a lot more mainstream, to be honest, like kind of predated, I would say, like the, the, the Venn diagram of people that sports bet and people that like use Prediction Markets is like probably almost a circle, you know? But just a breakout year and yeah, it was, it was very, I would say, vindicating for believers in Prediction Markets based on how the election unfolded.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's been tricky figuring out like what the next major Polymarket segment will be because Chad Byers was in our replies talking about like, oh, we should do a Polymarket for when these guys double the next time or like 64K. And Mike over at Polymarket was like, the bots have entered the chat because if there's money on the line, somebody will just orchestrate 50K bots and just follow us and it'll just destroy everything. And so it's very, very tricky to figure out how to, how to, you know, price that.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The whole insider trading element is interesting too because people were betting on Brian Johnson's erections, like nighttime erection like, but.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Then I saw one of his employees was like, I just made XYZ money from like insider training on my bosses. You know, which is like, how do you really like, these are financial markets. Maybe they do need some, you know, element of regulation, or you just need to go into them and treat it more as an entertainment product. And say like, this is not a, you know, perfect security. Like it's sort of.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're almost, you're almost trading on like, how much insider trading will there be? Like what, what type of insider trading will there be? Like, what are all the incentives that buy?

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Or you could say like, oh, it's, it's all priced in, right? Like everything's priced in.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like, it's like, if, if we did the 64K thing, would there be another army that's, that's buying no shares? And then actively reporting every bot that follows us to not hit that.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  You know, that, that could be the dynamic.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  The levels.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Bot, like bot war essentially.

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  It's all priced in.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  What's next?

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Another one, SpaceX.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Landing with the chopsticks?

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Landing with the chopsticks.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  So crazy.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  Crazy moment, very, very well timed for Elon's brand. If, if, if that had not worked, it was, there was so much attention on, on him, given the election cycle and everything. Uh, but it was just a very, um, it should be a really uniting, you know, moment, right? Like, hey, you know, uh, America, you know, has, is home to a company that can achieve some feat that is so unprecedented and, and feels, you know, like it's out of a science fiction movie. The other thing that I thought was funny here was you had, for years, the meme has been, oh, you're an investor in SpaceX,

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  but you're an investor in this SPV that invested in this SPV that invested in like this fund that bought secondary at like 2X, the pref value or whatever. But I would imagine that most of those people are actually making money still. You know, even if they overpaid or there was like, you know, a lot of fees.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  Bolted on to these different vehicles, but it's been a good year to be a SpaceX investor. Last it was, I guess, getting priced at 350 billion most recently. And yeah, I'm interested to see, I'm sure there's, there must be an IPO on the, on the horizon. Don't have any inside info there, but you know, I think the narrative's been they go and start up the Texas Stock Exchange and, and can potentially, you know, bring a lot of.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  I don't know. Elon ran the A B test with Tesla and it was so brutal being a public company with Tesla.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  Why take it public if you can keep it private as long as possible?

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  That's a good point.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  He'll probably just keep it private as long as possible.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  Especially, yeah, as long as there continues to be exceptional demand.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Then nobody can complain, oh, we need liquidity. It's like, well, you.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  But really like every single founder should buy Starlink. Like you should never be without solid internet. You should always travel with the Rome one. It's 50 bucks a month.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Because I was in Yosemite and the internet was terrible and it was a big hassle.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  We recorded a video and John was like, okay, I'm uploading my.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Like 20 minutes of video, it took like four hours. It was miserable.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  I actually don't know what the upload speeds are on SpaceX and Starlink. I think it's probably similar as download, but either way, like anything was better than what we had. It was brutal.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Another one, I thought the Figma Adobe breakup was pretty monumental.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Nina Khan's last gambit, her.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Custard's stand. That was the most.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  The child, what is it? The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it, will burn it down to feel its warmth.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Yep, that's a good one.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  She could have been a product manager at Amazon.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  I felt this one personally because almost immediately after it got announced, I use Figma quite a bit. And the Figma product, they just rolled out these like absolutely horrific billing practices. Figma was always a very multiplayer product. You could make something, share it with somebody easily. They could edit it, comment, whatever. And they immediately rolled out these like billing approaches that were one, extremely confusing. And basically meant that you, if you wanted to share a file with anybody, you were just going to get started, you would start to get billed.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  For, for them. And it's so, such a toxic way to do billing because if I'm creating something and I want to share it with you and you're not like logged in right at that moment, it's just. Very, very annoying, but they, the $20 billion acquisition was off. They realized they probably needed to two or three X, you know, ARR like immediately if they wanted to maintain this sort of narrative that they were a 10 to 20 billion dollar company. And so I get it from their side. And, but it was just very, just like extremely unfortunate. I think a lot of those billing changes would have probably been rolled out with Adobe Cloud, but it was just like such, you know, Dylan, I think, I don't know.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  I think it's just the nature of becoming a big company. Like, I don't know that there's any way to avoid that.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  I think it's just like, you gotta charge for, you gotta capture all the value.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think, I think it would have been, it would have been jankier with Adobe, which is probably the worst thing.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  But I don't know.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, and, and again, there should be like an entire documentary on Miss, Miss Khan's era. Because I don't know exact, we, I don't think it's clear exactly why it happened.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  I wrote out a script once, I never published it.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  But the fact that, but the fact that two companies that like that can't just, you know, make love is tragic.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  Defense tech, yeah, we, I mean, this was the year of American dynamism. Credit, credit, you know, as much as AI was a dominant part of the narrative. American dynamism felt like it had an equal amount of attention from a meme standpoint.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  Kugan's law.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  Kugan's law. And credit to Andreessen for, for not necessarily being the first and biggest investors in that category, but they certainly coined it.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  And they get a lot of credit for the coinage.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  That's part of Kugan's law.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, I think.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  I mean, you look at Thiel and he co-founded Palantir, they did the SpaceX Series A and then incubated Anduril. And it's like, they didn't come up with the phrase though.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  Mogged by coinage.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Genius.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Coinages are important.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the three, the three major players, Anduril, Palantir, SpaceX.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  All start, all started, you know, long before American dynamism.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  Was a part of the vernacular.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:09Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I thought this was funny, you know, this has been talked about before. A lot of the valuations over the last year have been like pretty, pretty insane. You know, I have portfolio companies that are getting, you know, multi hundred million dollar valuations with no revenue yet. Right. It's like very, it's a little frothy. And can you imagine what, how, how much defense tech companies would have loved zero percent interest rates?

• 32:32John Coogan?

  It's insane.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  Zerp meets hard tech meets American dynamism would have been iconic. I hope we get that opportunity in the future.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it'll be great. But yeah, this, this is a good example, like I think. Trey, I remember Trey went on a podcast and was basically talking about how, you know, the founders fund thesis is this sort of monopoly driven power law. There's one company that captures a majority of the returns and that's presumably in defense.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  You know, hard tech defense that presumably is Anduril.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  I look at a lot of the defense tech happen, investing happening now and.

• 33:11Jordi Hays?

  I, I think I've talked about this before, but the government actually wants vendor diversity.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  So there is some argument to say, hey, we actually need more Andurils. There should be maybe one or two more, maybe they, maybe there's a power law dynamic there where if Anduril is like a hundred billion dollar company, we have another 10 billion dollar company. So I think we do need this. Anduril, I think benefits dramatically from a lot of this because there's so many smart teams that are building cool tech that just won't figure out distribution and actually getting contracts.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  Anduril will acquire them and they've already proven that they can be in a M and A led product development org, right? Where they're like, we have the best distribution engine into the, into the government. Now we're going to just bolt on other products to get in there.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  And then there's also, uh, just like the, the adjacencies that Anduril doesn't, you know, want to touch like flock safety.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Great company doing fantastically well, kind of like Anduril for police forces.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or deterrence, the company that, that.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  I help get off the ground, you know, deterrence is doing something that, you know, doing high-volume energetics manufacturing is not a sexy program of record type opportunity.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  It's not even necessarily...

• 34:21John Coogan?

  It's more deeper in the supply chain.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's deeper in the supply chain. It's a critical, you know, critical part of our defense overall, but, you know, ultimately not, not, there, there are still categories that, that Androl is not going to go after, you know, immediately. Maybe they will long-term, who knows? But plenty of opportunities and, and lots of great, you know, companies like Aon, Out Control Systems.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  Not to just talk my own book. But going on, meme of the year, we covered this a little bit in, in our awards, trend of the year, meme of the year, they're basically the same thing. I think, I think PG had this one in the bag.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:07Jordi Hays?

  Guy's still got it. And Founder Mode, Founder Mode, coinage, he took something that was kind of obvious.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Everyone knew this idea.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  But no one had ever put a phrase around it.

• 35:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  What is the difference between a founder-led company and a non-founder-led company?

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Founder Mode. And it's a very vague post. It faced a lot of criticism when it was dropped because it, it didn't define it very precisely.

• 35:30Jordi Hays?

  And that's because it's different for every founder, right?

• 35:33John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's very vague, but it's still useful. It's still a useful term.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep. One of my favorite moments, listeners will correct me if I'm wrong here, but Frank Slutman, I don't believe was the actual founder of Snowflake, was he?

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  He joined later as CEO, but very much amp it up, like he is like, brings that Founder Mode approach. And I just thought this was a crazy moment when, when he announced he was retiring from Snowflake. They lost twenty percent of their market cap in a day. They had been previously been a seventy six billion dollar company and a month roughly a month after the announcement, they were a fifty billion dollar company. So that's that's founder mode in effect. And yeah, it was cool to see people like Ryan Peterson, I think, was it earlier this year or maybe more than a year ago, but Ryan Peterson going back into Flexport. Now he's doing founder mode meets going direct. Yep. And that strategy is just like Killer.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  Killer, right? That's what Alex Karp is doing. Yep. That's what Palmer is doing, Trey are doing in many ways. So the winning formula is founder mode and going direct. And that's why if you try to make fun of a founder for posting a lot on X, just check yourself because some of the best ever are doing that. And yeah, other otherwise, like the the big one and we were going to cover this later in the show was just the foundation model wars. Like this was this like constant game of tug of war where it

• 37:12Jordi Hays?

  literally felt like every other week it was, oh, everybody loves Anthropic. Next week, everybody's back. And and and what that kind of exposed and you have to go back and and look, there was at one point this year that everybody said that all the value is going to accrue to the foundation models, like ignore everything else, apps don't matter. And then people realized that people were just switching back and forth from models all the time. And then everybody started to think, okay, well, now the app layer is like what matters and you should focus on the app layer. And then then it went back to, oh, like, don't launch an app because OpenAI is just going to launch that as like part of chat GPT and the next, you know, keynote. Search.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, search is a good example, right? And all this just got so spicy with with, you know, the perplexity CEO, just like constantly shitposting against Sam, OpenAI, and, you know, Elon feuding the whole time in this like very public legal battle. And that's still ongoing.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, we'll probably cover like the O3 Pro launch later in the show. Another one, acquisition of the year for me had to be Bridge.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  So I think that was, we talked about this, but a non-token $1 billion outcome in crypto.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  You know, you had Coinbase IPO.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  Obviously significant, but to show that there was a second, you know, sort of regulated crypto business that could be, you know, acquired by, you know,

• 38:48John Coogan?

  a non-crypto company.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  A non-crypto company, a tier one company.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  And Bridge showing that, you know, Bridge being, it doesn't even feel like they were that early to stable coins, but they were on time and very right.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  And they built the right product, a developer tooling that Stripe clearly saw a lot of value in.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, the last thing I would say is we kind of forgot about this, but in the Q1 of this year, TikTok was getting banned.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 39:17John Coogan?

  There is a law that's passed that should ban TikTok.

• 39:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  It's happening unless Trump overrides it.

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  And I thought this Trey post from February 21 was great. He said, concerned about losing our AI edge to China.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  Ban TikTok, concerned about AI safety, ban TikTok, concerned about child mental health, ban TikTok, concerned about trade imbalance with China, ban TikTok, it's really not complicated. Though it was very unfortunate that that wave kind of died down. I had bought bandtalk.com at the time, which.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  You're going to do with that, but it's funny.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, the idea at one point was either to make like sort of a, like actually just build like a, like an organization to more, and there had already been like internal stuff in Washington pushing this stuff forward. But the funnier idea to use that domain, which I did sell it, somebody ended up buying it for something close to what I got it for. But if you did like a vampire attack on TikTok, which was like, sign in with your TikTok account, we'll pull all of your followers and your following, and then we'll like rebuild the app.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  Somebody could probably pull that off.

• 40:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Nikita, something like that. And it's just interesting that the, after that movement died down, True Social went public.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  And Sword, which, you know, maybe that was foreshadowing.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  It certainly was foreshadowing the election. It's crazy how much money flowed into that company, just supporting Trump. It's wild.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  Greatest wealth transfer.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's time to probably get into some DMs in the timeline, but yeah, overall, felt like I think this is a year that we're gonna remember very long from now.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  Huge comeback year.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh comeback year.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Crypto's back, defense is ripping, AI is, you know, completely new paradigm.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  And if you were a GP at a major venture fund, you join the government.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  We'll be covering over the next year.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  Let's start with Signal.

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  Should we jump into some DMs?

• 41:18John Coogan?

  Sure, do you have them over there?

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so first, um, before we get into that, we got some reply guys to cover.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  And this is the first ever double Reply Guy of the Week award, and it's going to none other than Chris Amidon and Will, God, I'm gonna butcher his name. Stromber?

• 41:43John Coogan?

  Stromber?

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Stromber.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Is there an R in there?

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  Will Stromber and Chris Amidon.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  And these two brothers, you know, not only exemplify brother behavior, but have managed to find the perfect balance between being highly active in the comment section and highly active building their business. They're building a maritime defense startup. Chris is the founder and Will recently joined to run Ops. And these guys are absolute dogs. I will say that. Very, very patient, very focused. I can tell they don't have post notifications on, so it's not always immediate, but they're getting into the comment sections that matter.

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  They're engaging with other, other reply guys, other brothers. They are exemplifying the spirit of what it means to be a reply guy, and they outwork the competition and patience, you know, we've seen. We've seen Reply Guy comes in, you know, potential Reply Guy of the Week's come in, get super active for five days, not win, and taper off. And Chris and Will have just been at it, honestly, for like, months now.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 42:58Jordi Hays?

  And so, that's exactly what it takes to build a great company. And they have just proven time and time again that they are very deserving of this award. So, gentlemen, congratulations. Probably not the first time you guys win this award. I could see either of you winning Brother of the Week at some point, and potentially Brother of the Year, who knows? We'll be doing the show for a long time. And, you know, don't stop. We've talked about this before. You can win this award twice.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  That's great. What else do we have?

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  Okay, funny meme. This wasn't in the DMs, but Andrea posted this and said, "Stimmies over demons." She said that psychedelic psychosis is out and cocaine-induced opulence is in. And we don't support hard drugs, but we do support stimulants. And we do endorse and live a loud, opulent lifestyle.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  Love loud opulence.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  And so, loud opulence was... Loud opulence, I would say, is going to be the trend of next year.

• 44:09John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  So if, you know, going direct or Founder Mode was 2024, loud opulence is the year of 2025. America's back. And thank you, Andrea, future Brother of the Week, I have no doubt. And thank you for memeing us.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  We really appreciate it.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Let's go to Sar. He says, "Started listening to Tech Bros' pod. In a sea of podcasts, it has really nailed the vibes. A great blend of Twitch/Discord-style talk show, very online Discord, discourse and podcast format. Thanks for giving us the shout-out. We really appreciate this."

• 44:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Sar. I think Sar had to be one of the first 100 accounts I ever followed on X.

• 44:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  He's very... He's not as active as he was, you know, maybe six years ago, but when he posts, it breaks through. Thank you, Sar.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I I like that. Talk show is definitely what we go for. Um, I don't know what he means by Discord style talk show. I I haven't actually seen anything that's like Discord driven. I've seen a lot of Twitch content. Um, and a lot of Twitch streamers will pull up tweets and uh, there's a couple. Like Ludwig is a YouTuber who is also Twitch streamer or live streamer. And a lot of times what he'll do is he'll make a 10 minute video about something and he'll just have 10 tabs or 20 tabs open and just flip through them. And it's a great format because he just, it it drives like, okay, he's on to the next thing, he's on to the next thing. And he can just do a one take or he does like a couple takes. And it turns out to be a really polished product that feels like a scripted YouTube video, but it's really natural.

• 45:42Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that's how we're we're gonna do, we're gonna have to do a remote episode this week.

• 45:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so maybe that's how we do it.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, just tabs, shared screen, and then just go through and just be like, this is the story we want to tell. I really think that uh, doing some more organization around our content would be great and being like, okay, we're breaking down the ChatGPT like OpenAI launch. And here are 20 tweets that we're gonna go through one at a time and take you through like a narrative on these. Um, as opposed to kind of what we're doing right now, which is a little more random, but we're always learning, we're always getting better. So, thank you for that.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny, we're we're firm believers against building in public. Do not show your revenue online. Let people clock it by the car you drive and the watch you wear.

• 46:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but content, you're kind of forced to build in public because you're just sort of iterating live and and everything is very public, so.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Okay, Megan Nyvold says, what wine pairing if you're in a warmer climate outside of Palo Alto? Screaming Eagle seems a bit heavy for 75 in Miami. Thanks. What would you recommend? I mean, you can't go wrong with a refreshing glass of Dom pairing on. Cheers to that, Megan. Enjoy some Dom, you can never go wrong.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  No, it's great. Almost every time I I see uh, Brother Megan's uh, post, she's just somewhere like. Somewhere like, you know, Aspen, Miami, just really indulging, loud, the loud opulence lifestyle. So I think this is one of those questions where she already knows the answer and she's just kind of testing us.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  So Megan, why don't you DM us, tell us.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  What you settled on.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  What you settled on, because we know you already know the right answer.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  Let's go to Based Baron, he's been on the show before. We say, if my second mistress is going to, my second mistress is going to be so mad at me if I don't get @techbrospod Reply Guy of the Week. That's a good point. Well, you missed it this week, but maybe next week. Keep up the replies, Based Baron, we love you.

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Reply Guy of the Week is a, it's a, it's a duration meets quality.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  And we value, we value persistence quite a bit. So.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  There's other people, you know, Brody's been very consistent, right? Trip, Trip has been phenomenal, like, you know, and so it doesn't go unnoticed.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:49Jordi Hays?

  But it does take some, some sort of concerted, long-term effort.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Turner Novak.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Turner Novak, right.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  Let's go to Julia Black. She says, fascinating logic from Tech Bros Pod. I described the guise of El Segundo in a way they would gladly describe themselves, and that made it a hit piece. Humbled that John Coogan and Jordi Hays would devote so much time to discussing such an untimely, uninteresting story.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  Got us dead to rights. We, we both, we both enjoyed it and criticized it. Hypocrites.

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. She got us. I spoke with Julia after this, you know, she's, she's great. We, you know, we squashed, we squashed the beef.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  She was one of the nominees for Journalist of the Year.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Technology Brothers Journalist of the Year Award nominee.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  She's close.

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  Not by, you know, not by accident.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, she's gonna be, so she's gonna be shifting to covering Doge.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Starting, you know, basically now through next year. And so I'm actually very excited to see some of the articles that she starts writing. So if you're, if you're, you know, exposed to Doge and you have stuff that's, that's sort of able to be shared, it's not going to be damaging to the movement, go talk to Julia.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Let's go to my tech CEO, Jason. He says, LA-based founder I backed has totally lost it. And he replies, every angel's worst nightmare. Tech bros pod would appreciate advice on this topic. Was this the Jeff Wu video?

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't think that was a Jeff Wu video, but, but, uh, I think it was a founder, uh, that he, you know, founder in his portfolio, moved to LA, set up shop, started taking acting classes, and that is just a huge red flag. You'd almost rather a founder, um, you know, it's, it's, it's basically as bad as a founder saying that they're gonna go to Peru and have a psychedelic experience. So, acting classes, terrible sign. Um, ayahuasca, terrible sign. Uh, I don't know. You might want to just write that one off, Jason.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  Good luck. Let's go to Signal. He says, the eternal technological pursuit has always been about the commodization of every single thing that includes the human body, mind, and soul.

• 49:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Signal, after the oh-three launch, just went on a generational posting run. This is why he was one of the breakout posters of the year. Uh, the guy went on an absolute terror. So this was in response to that. Uh, I think that, um, yeah, it was just like very, you know, well put. Uh, I think that, um, commoditization of the human mind. I don't know if we have the human soul yet, but it feels like, uh, you know, talking with chat GPT doesn't feel far off from talking to a, a smart friend, right? It's not perfect. It's not right on everything. Can make mistakes, but, um, so do, so do all of us.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Pretty wild. Here, let's go to Antonio Garcia Martinez. He says, I find the AGI alarmism amusing. We've been a post scarcity society for decades. Ninety-five percent of the work we do is invented, i.e. needless add-ons to food and shelter. We will always invent new forms of work, making new products and services to occupy ourselves and compete for status. It's a good take. I mean, uh, AI solved chess.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Two decades ago and chess.com is a massive business and also chess masters like people like watching human chess players even though they are not the best compared to AI and I do think that there's something that will be you know around for a very long time around what can a human do in the ring or in this podcast or in this debate format even if an AI could win.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, another another take here that was interesting Sean Frank was posting that sixty sixty million people still subscribe to cable. So even though we have streaming.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  AI is going to replace everyone. Brother sixty million people pay for cable. We got time. Yeah, it's gonna take a long time to roll all this stuff out. It's it takes time to implement AI into your organization. There's a lot of risks, a lot of legal risks, like where

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think I think the one thing that's obvious if you look at the cell phone, you know, to compare it to something like cell phone adoption, which was dramatic, everybody have suddenly having a smart, you know, computer and like a personal computer in their pocket. It took maybe fifteen years to to get to the point where everybody that was participating in modern society had this personal computer in their pocket. I don't think it's going to take that long at all now that everybody has that personal computer, which is a distribution device for these AI products.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  I basically think that I don't even know it might people are kind of already interacting with these generative AI products, whether they know it or not. And so I think the adoption is is is already basically happened.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  And but the impact is going to take decades.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's go to Mark Andreessen. He says overheard in Silicon Valley. My biggest lesson from the last year is just it's all going to happen. All my childhood dreams of space colonies and brain interfaces and AI and robots. Everything is just going to happen. And Yaxine says, not only is it going to happen, you'll get to play with it in your basement. Three D printers soldering the future rocks. I like that's very optimistic.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I think we were able to, we're able to say that now that it's quote unquote just going to happen. Like, I think it's a great quote, but we're able to say that because many, many years ago, really smart, hardworking, visionary people decided to make it happen. Like, you know, Elon Musk's keynote, "The future should look like the future." That was the culmination of, of, you know, two decades of work to say, what, you know, autonomous cars, humanoid robots, all these things. So our dreams are going to happen, but it's because a small number of people decided to make them happen. And so if you

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  have a dream, don't just expect it to happen.

• 54:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's going to take 20 years.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  It's going to take 20 years and be persistent.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  But the best day to start is today. Let's go to Signal again. He says, "It feels like instead of all of us stepping into the future together, a few of us are watching our world change on a daily basis, while the remaining masses will one day have a startling realization that the world is radically different." This is true. I mean, there's a lot of people who are like, I talk to people who are outside of tech and they straight up say, "Oh yeah, that AI stuff. I gotta, I gotta look into that." It's like, wow.

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because...

• 54:32John Coogan?

  It's been like two years since ChatGPT dropped. And you're like, that's on my to-do list, is like, figure out if I should use that instead of Google.

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  And they don't realize that, that for almost everything that you do in life, you, you could be benefiting from the co-pilot that is, you know, ChatGPT or whatever your preferred model is. It's, you know, my wife will be like, "Oh, I have these four ingredients." What should I make? It's like instantly like cool recipe that, that just like takes no real effort to find. It just comes out of, it's just purely magic. So magic is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

• 55:09John Coogan?

  This is a great take by Pavel. He says, "Non-technical folks saying software engineers are cooked. It's you guys who are cooked. You're going to have X software engineers competing with everything you're doing now, and they're going to be AI turbocharged, 7,000 likes." And then he follows it up and says, "Engineers were simply doing coding because it's, it was the highest leverage use of mental power. When that shifts, it's not going to all of, to all of a sudden shift the hierarchy." Couldn't agree more.

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's funny is I think he would also agree, I got to, I got to hang out with Pavel for a bit at Holliday Party. And he's got, his takes are as good in person as they are online. But I would say that he's not necessarily speaking about the low agency software engineer at a big tech company. He's speaking about the high agency, you know, individual contributor engineer who's able to, you know, imagine something and then create it with code.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, it does feel like right now, you know, somebody, this guy, is it Nat Eliason? You know that guy?

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  So he was talking and he was like, he, he made some post about how, think about how incredible the tools are that are publicly, publicly available for $30 a month. And you have to imagine that there's thousands of tools out there that have been created by software engineers that are an order of magnitude more impactful and powerful than what's publicly available. And nobody knows about them yet. So if you're getting like a robo-call and it sounds like a regular salesperson, you know, and then it's actually, you know, like some like, you know, model.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  That person, the highest and best use of that tool might not be to sell it as a SaaS product. It might just be to use it for their business.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for, I mean, for a long time, coding was just a proxy for like intelligence. And there was a big difference between somebody who doesn't code because they operate at a higher level abstraction, they hire software engineers, and someone who's just like, oh, I could never even fathom figuring out how to code. That's a very, very different type of person. It's a very different level. So Vittorio says, "Serious question, what should a CS student, or any knowledge worker for that matter, do at this point? Even if the model is $2,000 a month, it's still cheaper than a graduate employee. What's the plan now?" And so this is everyone freaking out about O3 and AI displacing software engineering. And yeah, I mean, we just discussed it. It's like, you know, operate at a higher level of abstraction.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Everyone kind of moves up the stack. This has, this has been the story of, of programming for, for decades.

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Going from machine code and writing like binary to compilers to, you know, higher level abstraction languages to, um, you know, autofill and autocomplete on things to now being able to just, um, talk to Devon and figure out what you want to do.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. So all of the AI coding startups are still hiring engineers.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  And so there's clearly plenty of value in what you do. The key is if I was, you know, if I was 21, 22, graduating with a computer science degree, I would be figuring out, how do I use AI better than any of my peers? And how do I do 20 times the work that a typical college grad would do?

• 58:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:37Jordi Hays?

  Cause you now have no excuse not to write better code.

• 58:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  More code.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  Faster, you know, do it all faster.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  And so if you can come in, if you can do the job today using these AI tools that, that a previous new grad engineer would have been able, you know, if you can do the job of 20 new grad engineers for you plus $2,000 a month.

• 58:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  And you're going to be a great spot.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Let's go to Atlas Creatine Cycle. He says, really worried about the amount of X software engineers turned DJs we're going to get out of this. Tasteless beep boop music too cheap to meter. So funny.

• 59:10Jordi Hays?

  Atlas, uh, Atlas has been on a tear as well. He, he said he's been bored, uh, staying, you know, with family for the holidays and he's just posting through it.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, uh, yeah, we love to see it. There was already a big pipeline of people that were post economic becoming DJs like Justin Khan.

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:29Jordi Hays?

  Plenty of other examples. Uh, and so, yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of, a lot of software engineers turned DJs, but, um, maybe some beautiful things will come

• 59:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe it's more parties, more human interaction, less time online, more excuse to go and be together.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I'd stick to the Metropolitan Opera and the LA Philharmonic instead. Good call.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  You know, learn to

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  I think Atlas would as well. Yeah.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  The violin. Uh, learning concerto. Lulu says, building things will become easier and easier. Getting people to care will become harder and harder. And that makes sense. That was an entire thesis for OpenAI was that in a very crowded internet, a very noisy internet, they broke through and created a new consumer internet brand.

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  And, and to this day, you can stop someone on the street and say, where do you go to solve AI problems? And those tell you chatgpt.com. Even though it's a ridiculous name with like all these acronyms, it's not like the sexy name. People still, you know, identify it and it became, you know, just baked into the zeitgeist.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's interesting. There's like this entirely new behavior. Where I'm not necessarily wanting to search the internet for something, but I'm wanting to understand something. Which people historically would use Google to say, I want to understand intermittent fasting.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  And now you can just go, I still, I, I, I oftentimes know I'm going to get a better answer by going to chatgpt.com. So I'll just go there, type that, what I'm looking for into the search bar. And so just the value of a new consumer behavior that I don't think people use, like I'm going to GPT it.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  But they kind of, like, you kind of hear that.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this is a very different, like, pathway of like exploring things and asking follow-up questions and creating tables and ontologies. And it's just so nice to be able to say, hey, break down this new concept in like different levels of abstraction, create a taxonomy for me. Like what, what is

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  the topology of this idea? Like, what, what are the, what are the super categories, the subcategories? And you could get some of that on Wikipedia sometimes, but you can just do that for anything.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  Um, it's been, it's been really, really fun to learn about all the new things. And I find myself just like dropping like weird arcane knowledge and getting up to speed like way faster on things. Like there was somebody who, uh, was the first person like months ago to ever say the word Vacheron Constantin to me. And, and within like three months, I'm like clocking like, oh, that's a Cartier Santos. Because I've like literally gone from zero to 60 on that and just like become a watcher through YouTube and also through chat GPT. But like, understanding like, okay, break down all the watch brands, break down all the expensive ones, all the oldest ones, like just all of that. It's just so much faster to learn and become an expert in some random category, which is like. Crack.

• 1:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you can be like, what do AP enthusiasts think about Vashron?

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  And then you can get that summarized really quickly in a way that

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  It's way harder on Google.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Hey, John, you know, I love ads. We got a promoted post from our friend Austin Reeve, CEO of Morning Brew. He says, my favorite growth hack, find business influencers and turn them into your biggest customers and advocate advocates. It's awesome to see Mr. Sharma, genuinely loving the talent resource for him at Ocean's Talent. So Austin's one of the owners of Ocean's Talent. They help you find great offshore employees. And he just screenshots HubSpot here, which was clearly like, you know, MPS style survey. And Nick says, XYZ employee is a beast. He's taken on so much and has kept everything running so smooth.

• 1:03:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm never not going to not work with him in my life. He not only goes above and beyond what he's asked to do, but comes up with new ways to do those things better many times. Also, just coming to me with these ideas in the first place before being asked. So if you need to hire remote employees, check out Ocean's Talent, shoot Austin a DM. He's a pretty responsive guy. And yeah, cool, cool example of the product in action.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  That's great. Let's go to O3, Mike Newp, who runs Arc Prize, says, O3 is really special and everyone will need to update their intuition about what AI can slash cannot do. While these are still early days, the system shows a genuine increase in intelligence canaried by Arc AGI semi-private scores. And there's a fantastic chart here by Riley Goodside that shows the progress of the GPT models on on Arc score, which are these like color-based block puzzles that any human can do, no problem, but AGI or AI has struggled with for a long time. O3 is a reasoning model. The the high version costs $2,000 per solve.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  So it really thinks and it really puts tons and tons of cycles. And it's also been fine tuned on these. And so some people were saying, oh, well, if it's fine tuned, it's not that that good.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  Ruins post was being like, they trained on the train set.

• 1:04:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is ridiculous. But at the same time, like, there is a difference between. A model being able to one-shot an eval and actually needing the training set.

• 1:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  Like, a human does not even need a training set to do ARC. You don't even need to study for it. And so there is something there, although Rune is like, like basically correct. And that, and that this is remarkable. And Dylan says, if you look at this graph and don't feel any existential concern for humanity, you might need to revisit your priors.

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  So I, I was texting, I think it was Friday night with Brother Madfess. Jared Madfess, who coined Too Big to Fail, which was his thesis that entrepreneur, you know, highly technical entrepreneurs that can, that are in the thousand-pound club in weightlifting just are too big to fail. So he says, Jared says, basically tech used to be this great equalizing force. But now this is a thing. And so he's showing the, the, what we just discussed. He says, paying more doesn't lead to quote unquote more tokens. It now leads to quote unquote higher quality tokens with costs being exponential, but value generated per task also potentially being the same.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  So if you're a billionaire with a device running 10,000, 10,000 times the inference costs now gives you a god compared to the average guy.

• 1:06:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  And so, right now, a thousand dollars per task gets you basic human capabilities for most things and world-class capabilities for a lot more. Within three years, that will be sub 10 cents per task. And what does the thousand-dollar-per-task model look like then? And he says, inference time compute means money, energy and labor all converge on each other. So, and then he says, today feels monumental to me. Go long feudalism or fascism, AI smells the end of democracy. So anyways, bold, bold take from Brother, Brother Madfess. But I think that there's a lot there.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  Interesting. Let's go to Aaron Levy. He says, uh, here's a way to think about the market size of AI. US labor costs are 11 trillion. If a company pays 2% of headcount expense to get a 10 to 50% productivity gain with AI, that's $200 billion. The US enterprise software market today is around 150 to 2 billion. So AI doubles that just in the base case. Wow.

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is why, this is why it's a good time to be bullish. The end of software was, you know, a meme in many ways. A lot of the best AI products are software meets Gen AI. So don't be afraid to go build.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  And here's a related post from Adam D'Angelo, founder of Quora, co-founder of Facebook, I believe.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Wild that the 03 results are public and yet the market still isn't pricing in AGI. And then Elon says, the markets claim to look ahead, but mostly look behind. AI will ultimately render money meaningless. Bold. By the way, I look forward to your deposition on quote unquote, open AI. Wow.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  That's a heavy reply from, from the, from the biggest, most popular reply guy.

• 1:08:03John Coogan?

  I want them to be friends.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's focus. Yeah. Let's focus on the task.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, it's, it's real. Um, yeah, 03 I think is still underpriced. It's a big deal. Yeah. Very, very big deal. Let's go to Aaron Slodov. He says, why do you and adult technologists believe that a nice programming benchmark score means AGI? Fascinating stuff. He's always been very anti the idea that AGI is here because he works in the physical world and, uh, the AI has not been super useful to him in many ways. And there's still a lot of tasks that he can't apply AI to.

• 1:08:35Jordi Hays?

  But I feel like this, this video went, a couple of videos started going viral that these $4,000, you know, uh, robots, like, you know, factory grade robots have, have started to seemingly get.

• 1:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Some amount of traction. So yeah, I'm excited to see what the next year looks like for physical intelligence, which is a Lockheed Grum's company. He's building foundation models for the physical world, presumably robots. So.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  And also just like Devon-esque, you know, technology for cam programming and like CAD in design and just like what happens if you're, if you have a factory that has some software and you're able to just speed up the development cycle time of every piece of software that you develop or every, every stream of tokens that you write. Hopefully they move a lot faster. Hopefully the delivery times are faster, which would be great.

• 1:09:34Jordi Hays?

  John, I gotta jump in here with an exciting promoted post from none other than Ben Hilek. He has two exciting pieces of news that I want to bring here. One is that his company, Don Analytics, is hiring again for a backend engineer. And this was posted, I guess this was posted before 03 launched. So maybe double check to make sure they're still hiring that person. But he also says they will pay $5,000 to anyone who refers someone that we hire. So brothers, if you're hearing this, go refer a backend engineer to go work at Don. Very cool company. And Ben is actually the designer that is responsible for

• 1:10:16Jordi Hays?

  the Jaguar rebrand. So you get to work with an iconic designer, one of the best to ever do it, led the Jaguar rebrand, was covered in, you know, the mainstream media for it. And the opportunity to work with somebody that can do that level of, that has that level of taste would just be, you know, an opportunity of a lifetime.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Let's go to Jeff Bezos's wedding. It was reported that he was spending $600 million on his wedding. And it was, he was buying out a sushi restaurant and I was talking to somebody about this and they were like, $600 million of sushi? Like, that's all on a sushi? And Bezos debunked it. He said, furthermore, this whole thing is completely false. None of this is happening. The old adage, don't believe everything you read is even more true today than it ever has been. Fantastic.

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think everybody saw the headline and started running the napkin math.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  It was like, even if you were had a, having 600 guests.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, a million dollars.

• 1:11:14Jordi Hays?

  A million dollars a head.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  It's like impossible.

• 1:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Pretty difficult to do. I mean, if anybody could figure it out, we could.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but it'd be like, you know, one of one, a tag, you know, one of one thoroughbred, you know, uh, Kentucky Derby winning racehorse. Like, it would really be the, the gift basket at the end.

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Rack and ran it up.

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So. Yeah, very hard to consume 600 million dollars of food in a weekend. They just don't make it.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  You can, you can stay at a mon for 50 grand a week.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, per room.

• 1:11:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  So you got two guests in a room. And that's like basically all inclusive.

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, impossible.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, the mass not mathing. And it's funny, um, uh, you know, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post. Uh, it wa- it wouldn't have even have been effective for him to publish an article from the Washington Post saying, hey, by the way, my wedding didn't cost this much. He had to go.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  He had to go direct. Yeah. Let's go to Oliver.

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Classic Lulu win.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's go to Oliver. He says, US Department of M and A for Greenland, Panama Canal and other strategic acquisitions. I love it. I'm, I'm so bullish on the Greenland and Panama Canal and moon stuff. I really hope at least we get one of them. It'd be so good.

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  I know. That's the best part of this is if, if this just only leads to one more American, you know, source of natural resources. Uh, economic, you know, dominance.

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  I would love it.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Vacation destination. It would be, uh, let's turn Greenland into the world's largest Disneyland.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. I can't wait. I mean, uh, Ken Howery is now the ambassador to Denmark and, you know, I think he reads Pirate Wires. Maybe he'll work on Greenland.

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  By the way, uh, Brother Pat Blumenthal made a post that went quite viral and talking about how we were appointed as ambassadors to Monaco and all my least offline friends took it completely.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  Yup.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Posted the screenshot on Instagram, took it totally at face value.

• 1:13:14John Coogan?

  Yup.

• 1:13:14Jordi Hays?

  Sending me, "Congrats, this is amazing. I always believed in you."

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  I got a bunch of those. So funny.

• 1:13:20Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, Pat.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Thank you for creating the fake news cycle.

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Amazing fake news cycle. I got a bunch of messages to go through telling people that I won't be moving to Monaco.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  No, unfortunately. Maybe in the next cycle.

• 1:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Once JD's in, that'd be a great slot for us. We could move the studio, the family's out to Monaco.

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  I think we could do it.

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  I have a good story. I don't know if I ever told you this. My parents took us on like a 30 day road trip through Europe when I was 12. And maybe I was 10, somewhere in that range. And we drove through Monaco. We couldn't afford to spend the night there. It was too expensive. But we spent like three hours driving through it. And my mom said that at one point I stood in the harbor and was like, and I just said out loud, "These are my people."

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  These are my people.

• 1:14:09Jordi Hays?

  And she's like, "What are you fucking talking about?" Our entire family's income wouldn't run one of these ships for an hour.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Annual income. So anyways, we have Monaco in our future, definitely this summer.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 1:14:24Jordi Hays?

  And hopefully the ambassadorship at some point.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Let's do one more promoted post and we'll close with Arkesh.

• 1:14:32Jordi Hays?

  This was a toss up, but I'm gonna go for a post from Hermes. I don't know who it was, but one of our listeners sent us a saddle from Hermes. Hermes started making very high-end leather saddles. And somebody sent this to us. If you sent it, thank you. They said, "For the tech journalists listening to the show." So if you're a tech journalist, we know you love horses. If you're shopping for a tech journalist, today is Christmas Eve. You literally have 12 hours to buy a gift.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  If you don't have something, go to your local Hermes store. Get a saddle, pretty much, you know, gets it.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  This was a, this was like a shot across the bow because we had publicly mentioned a YSL saddle.

• 1:15:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  And Hermes has a much richer history in saddle making.

• 1:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  And so.

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  So maybe this was Sarah Hess?

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  I think so. And so this was, uh, this is a bit of mea culpa for us.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  I think we got it wrong. I think Hermes is the, is the obvious choice here.

• 1:15:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  And, uh, you know, YSL is great, but, uh, if you're trying to convince a mainstream media journalist to stop writing a hit piece on you, you really should spare no expense. You're gonna expense it anyway.

• 1:15:44Jordi Hays?

  Go straight to the top.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  Just go straight to the top with the Hermes saddle. Let's close with Dwarash Patel. He says, "We're way more patient in training human employees than AI employees. We will spend weeks onboarding a human employee and giving slow, detailed feedback, but we won't spend just a couple of hours playing around with the prompt that might enable the LLM to do the exact same job, but more reliably and quickly than any human. I wonder if this partly explains why AI's economic impact has been relatively minor so far." So Dwarash was spending hours tinkering with Gemini 2, Google's LLM, to effectively take his rough transcripts and turn them into really highly polished transcripts.

• 1:16:25John Coogan?

  And he finally needed to figure out that he needed to give it a sample of the input and the output and really write out. And so his prompt is big. It's really, really big, but he nailed it and it just works super, super well. So anyone with a podcast out there, um, I highly recommend adopting Dwarash's script.

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  It's such a perfect example though, right? Because when you hire a new employee, you're committing to forty hours of training them, right? Mentorship, uh, weekly meetings. Sometimes, you know, I've had times where it's like, hey, let's meet every single day for your first two weeks, just to fully ramp you.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  And then constantly learning by osmosis and the LLM just doesn't get that.

• 1:17:05Jordi Hays?

  And I would say most people have spent less than an hour prompt engineering.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Or like really trying to dial any of this stuff in. So this Christmas Eve, I don't know if this will go live today, might go live tomorrow, might go live the next day. Uh, but, uh, spend some time prompt engineering. Give, give the gift of dialing in your models to yourself.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  Highly recommend.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I think that's a great place to end.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas, everyone. Thanks for listening. Bye.