LA Fires Continue, Max Long Caruso, Tech Award Show, F40 Modifications

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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. Jordy is back in the studio. He made it out alive.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm back, got the suit on.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  Half of his city has burned down, half of my city has burned down. But we are here recording, bringing you the news and the breakdowns. And we're still on the topic of the fire. We're going to do a breakdown on Rick Caruso, who a lot of people have been talking about. But first, we wanted to do a little unboxing of a Starlink I picked up yesterday from Best Buy.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Not a lot of people have heard about this device, but it is really wild. You can get internet almost anywhere in the world.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  And we should just set ours up.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, a couple hundred bucks. And it comes with a big, long power cable. I got a power brick too. And I'm very excited to get this set up. I'll definitely be traveling with this because get caught lacking without wifi anywhere. But very, very cool device. I'll have to figure out how to put this together. But pretty simple. You just kind of aim it at the sky and as long as you can see the sky, you have.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  So it's interesting. I was actually using satellite messaging on the iPhone.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  I've seen that.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. So the way that it works is if, so during, starting like 48 hours ago, I completely lost cell service, power, gas, et cetera. Basically, my neighborhood was totally in the dark. So we were trying to figure out what was going on. Yeah, two nights ago,

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  the fire was really starting to pick up. The wind was still picking up. And yeah, I've had pretty good success with the iPhone satellite imagery. I don't know what the tech is actually based on. But if you've never had this happen, basically if you lose all cell coverage, it'll pop something up that says you want to send messages and you really can't do much. You can't send images, but you can send text based messages. And you just have to get outside and it actually has a pretty interesting.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  So I think it's on the older satellite network, not the low earth orbit Starlinks. It's on like one web, ViaWeb or OneWeb. ViaWeb is the PG thing. OneWeb is the bigger satellites. So they're big. I think they're geostationary in higher earth orbit. So the delay is crazy.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Delay is crazy.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  So you could never do bandwidth overload.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  And they give you this little graphic. You actually have to like aim your phone in a certain way to try to get the messages out.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  But I'm super stoked.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  But good in a pinch.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great. So yeah, I've been recommending that everyone get one of these, especially if you're a founder doing important work, doing deals. You'd never want to be without internet. So pick one up. And shockingly, they were still available. And Elon's giving out a bunch to people that are in affected disaster areas and hopefully keeping people online and communicating. I mean, it's funny to joke about doing deals and just reading posts, but like having access to the internet, if the grid goes down and the-

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I actually didn't have one and really, I also didn't have power.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, you need a battery pack. Cause this just runs up a wall. So you can get a battery pack that will run this for days.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  So I don't know if you know this, but my, the house I bought last year was a fire rebuild. It had burned to the ground.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  Literally to the dirt in 2018. And so my entire neighborhood's pretty savvy around fires. I was sort of used to it. And so most people have these gas powered generators that just use natural gas.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  And so when all the power was cut off, everybody was like, okay, their generators flick on in 30 seconds. And then they cut the gas lines for some reason, which everybody was like, why are they cutting the gas lines? They run underground. But then it turns out that the gas lines for Western Malibu where I am run through Eastern Malibu. And so we're now looking at potentially multiple, SoCal Edison, the utilities provider for gas, said that they will have to send somebody individually to your home, every single home in all of Malibu, to get the gas actually turned back on. So we're now looking at probably

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  at least two weeks, something like that until, and so no, no hot water. Nobody has gas right now.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Bad day to be a minibar at a five star hotel in LA.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, stayed at a hotel last night, which was, which was great until we woke up and their HVAC system was pumping the outside air. Into the house. So I woke up. I have a sick six month old and with like some type of respiratory thing and it smelled like somebody had been smoking like chain smoking heaters in the room for hours. So anyways, got out of there. Families now in in Palos Verdes, which has better.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Did Augustus D'Arcy drop by?

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Augustus. It smelled like when we woke up in the room, it smelled like Augustus D'Arcy had had ripped through four packs.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Just grinding.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Just grinding.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  Just grinding.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  This is not a coworking space.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I actually, I mean, we don't need to go into this now, but I do think that it in a world where Rainmaker can deliver rain anywhere, it's going to be extremely valuable because you look at, we just lost hundred, probably hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage. I don't know what the exact number is yet.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're throwing around 55 billion right now, but that's early estimate.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  Early, early estimate. And by the way, last night was wild, too. Everybody, I mean, everybody was just hyper fixated on the timeline, kind of watching the stuff unfold. And then the sunset fire popped up and then all these AI generated images of the Hollywood sign. People were starting to share that around that were fake, but there was, I mean, that looked really bad and apparently it was arson. So anyways, dark times, but the show must go on. So here we are.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Nikita is advocating for the hero we need, the Dark Knight, Rick Caruso. He says, if you didn't vote, even if you didn't vote for real estate tycoon Rick Caruso in LA's last mayoral election, you're basically a moron if you don't do it this time, since we're going to have to rebuild the entire city. 3K likes. And Gabby Goldberg said they were morons the first time, too, for what it's worth.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  And then Nikita, kind of unrelated, says, I live a block away from Karen Bass, the current mayor of LA. So yesterday's fire in my canyon was put out in 30 minutes. Sleeping like a baby tonight. Taking shots at the current mayor. But yeah.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  So I don't know if you remember when the election, election night, Rick and Karen Bass were totally head to head.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Election night.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  It seemed like. Rick was gonna be able to pull it off.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  But then I was at a fundraiser event for Nathan Hockman, who's the new LADA that Rick was backing. And they talked a little bit about the ballot harvesting that the left does in LA. Which they have this like ridiculous ground game where they basically walk around.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  I think it's called fortifying.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they walk around with ballots that are pre-filled out.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  And they just, you can, they walk through homeless encampments and say,

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Sign this.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  Hey, can you please sign this? And that's fully legal.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  And so as the day after the election and the following days, Karen just like had, it turned into almost a landslide. So who knows all the details? I won't, if I had to talk anymore, I'd throw on the tinfoil hat, but um,

• 7:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta keep it more accessible.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  Either way, when, when Rick lost, it was, many people in the community were pretty devastated because if you go to Rick's spaces, you look around, like if you went, if you go to the Palisades Village, which is one of, you know, one of his developments, you see like groups of children running around by themselves, like having fun. It's, it's, it's the kind of environment that I grew up in as a kid in a small town where parents would give their kids $5, $10 and say, go, go have a nice like evening and you could go get food or whatever.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Go hang out at the mall.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  But you don't see that, you don't see that in LA at all.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Not at all.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  Groups of like 10, 10-year-olds running around, it just doesn't happen, but it still happens on Rick's properties.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, he said that he, his goal for the Grove is, like his imagined avatar is a, a mother pushing a stroller with a baby, should feel safe at all times.

• 8:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  And, and what that requires is inordinate investment in private security. They have off-duty LAPD officers who actually open carry a sidearm. They used to be discreet, kind of undercover, and then they changed this to,

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  Open carry.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  To show the gun.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  And they also have facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, a bunch of different technology that's all put together. And it's hilarious to contrast, I was listening to a podcast of him talk about all the technology that they use and how they integrate everything

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  at the Grove to keep it safe. And then meanwhile, Karen Bass is doing a press, like a press junket, press conference and, and says, "You can find more information about the fire at URL."

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  And it's like.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  One of the most insane moments. I mean, her, her, you know, she coming back from Ghana, she was not gonna have a good time.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  No.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like she was briefed on the fires on Monday, decided to stay in Ghana.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Really?

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, she was fully briefed. I mean, we knew, so, so I knew, I knew Sunday night, I'm so trained now that when the Santa Ana winds get really intense, that fires are coming.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  So, so we knew our power was gonna get shut off Sunday.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  Really?

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  They were already telling us, your power.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you were texting about getting a generator. I remember that on Monday. Yeah.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  And so, so everybody knew this was pending. She knew this was pending. She decides to stay in Ghana. She comes back. Immediately, she's getting off the plane. I don't know if you saw this video.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  I, I was making a joke about it, but she's fully NPC mode. You know, your, your talks, you know, this reporter's talking to her and she's.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  It's like a legitimate reporter. I'm pretty sure it's like BBC or something.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, pretending that she's like not hearing it or whatever. So, obviously, you know, not a great response there. She could have showed some amount of empathy, saying, yeah, it's terrible.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  Like I'm rushing back.

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  Happy to be back, you know. A lot of ways that she could have handled that. And then, and then clearly wasn't even processing what she was reading.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, we, we, we do a bit of writing and do a bit of newscasting here when we're reading stuff out. I think we would notice if it's.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Said URL and bold.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Go to grok.ai, but it says, go to, go to URL. Go to URL, check it out. Let us know what you think.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  It's a true Ron Burgundy moment.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  It's bad.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  Um, but anyways, uh, yeah.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  We're deep diver, Caruso.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  And everything, so, so everything that Caruso represents is what a lot of people wanted for LA, right? Security, family environments, strong. So his, his properties are some of the best performing from retail standpoint.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  In, in the country, like in the top 5%. So he knows how to, how to get people places.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's the whole like post-COVID mall apocalypse where there's a lot of empty retail chains. Not at Caruso properties.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I, and I, and I, you know, go to the Palisades Village multiple times a week. It's, it's fantastic. I bring my family there. It's, it's a really great environment. So a lot of people, you know, the best evidence that he would have been a great mayor is being at his properties.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Right? And so when, when, when Bass was elected, it was devastating in the moment. She quickly had, um. She quickly had her home robbed by criminals.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, you said this.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  And she had loose guns in her house, so they, they, they, the criminals managed to steal guns that were not in safes.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  Um, so right away, that was like a, sort of not a great omen for, for her.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I mean, that seems kinda cool to just have like guns everywhere in your house, like without safes.

• 11:51Jordi Hays?

  It's cool to lock up your guns if, uh.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Does she have like an indoor firing range? Is she one of those people where you walk in, there's the wall of just all the guns?

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  American flags, two A.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  That'd be super sick. Just like, oh yeah, I got an FFL and I, uh, I have a.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  Dueling, apparently she has.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  I got the switch on my AK-47.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  She has a chess piece that's just dueling AR-15s.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's getting like the military hardware there, you know, you get a fully automatic, uh, M4. It's like, I thought that was military only. It's like, yeah, it was.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:21John Coogan?

  Till I was, got my, my firearms dealer license and I can get silencers in California now.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anyways, sad, dark. Um, I, I wish that, uh, I wish she was doing, uh, a great job. But, uh, unfortunately, Rick was, was always my guy. Um, we don't, we don't discuss politics on this, but he was my guy because he's a phenomenal businessman.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  And he has created billions of dollars of value.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  And he has a wonderful watch collection.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  He also has a wonderful watch collection.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, let's go through.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  But let's get into this. He was born in 1959. And, uh, father, uh, started a small business, was a small business owner, dollar rent a car.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Not, not, not super small, um, but, uh, start, it would have started relatively small. So his father started as a small business owner, was an Italian immigrant, uh, which he credits to his work ethic.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  So he goes to USC, then he, uh, goes to Pepperdine Law School. Graduates, becomes a lawyer, works at this law firm called Findlay-Cumbell. And in 1987, I believe, that that law firm goes bankrupt.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Which I didn't even know was really possible for a law firm because.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Services.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  It's a services business. You'd think you'd just adjust prices and stuff. I don't know how that happened, but the whole law firm explodes, collapses.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, he does go on to use debt pretty well. So it's possible that the law firm had levered up in some way. And that was the cause of it. The only thing we skipped over that I think is relevant. His mother was a billboard model in her youth, which is cool because we love ads.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  But it's funny to think about, there were just mod- there were billboard models, like a model that specifically were just model for billboards.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, I don't do magazines. I work best on a billboard.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  No TV, billboards only. But it makes sense. The guy is an absolute stud, very handsome. You can see, you know, maybe in another life, he would have skipped being a lawyer and a real estate developer.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Maybe a TikToker, maybe an Instagram reels guy.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  If he was born in 2005, he would have been a TikToker.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  He had the broccoli hair and been shilling AG1.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  So he quit his, so he transferred, he gets out of this law firm that's collapsing. His boss comes in, kind of puts a check on his table and says, hey, the law firm's going bust. This is your last check. You better cash this today because it might not, it might not clear tomorrow. He has always wanted to do real estate. He said he was doing corporate law, didn't really like it, saw that it wasn't his life's work. And so he started a real estate development company. First deal he does is buying parking lots and he uses his connection with his father, a dollar rent a car, to act as the anchor tenant of these parking lots.

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  This is my opinion on, on the.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  People in life that have the potential to benefit from nepotism.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  I believe it is your duty to maximally utilize that advantage, relationship, whatever. And so what he did is really smart. Rick wanted to buy buildings and in real estate, if a bank is going to lend against a property, they want to know that there's some type of income

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Cash flow.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  Stream, cash flow associated with that property, right? It's a business that has no tenant in it is not worth the same as a business that has a 10 year lease or 20 year lease. And so what Rick would do is he would go, he'd find a place he wanted to buy. He would get his dad presumably to write from Dollar Rent-A-Car to write an LOI saying, if you buy this property, I will lease it for X number of years.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  And so then he would take that LOI to the bank and say, look, I have this great tenant. Rent me this, you know, help me buy this building. And so that little bit of alpha, you know, he was able to snowball into a $4 billion fortune. So if you have a dad that owns a small rental car business, leverage that into accumulating $4 billion.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  It really, I mean, it really does like, it's a perfect encapsulation of what it means to be like a deals guy.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Because I think too many people think about the deal as like one way. Like I just need the tenant or I just need the bank. And really it's like, he is creating almost like an arbitrage. Like the bank wants to lend to a parking lot that has a relationship with Dollar Rent-A-Car. He's acting as the intermediary there. And I mean, we've seen this with the work that we've been doing where once you start getting deals going on both sides of the equation, and you can even view like a startup as this, where it's like, okay, there's a amazing AI software developer who's going to join the team. If you get, you know, a venture fund to lead your seed round and you kind of got to play both sides. And then the really good deals guys can get both of those done, match them up. And then the value creation starts from there.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  And the guy's just become a beast. I mean, he's amassed this like insane portfolio in Southern California, the Grove at Farmers Market.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  He actually became, so interesting enough about the origin, he became, he's very well known for not selling any of his properties.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  So he's the sole investor in his properties. But then he never sells.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  He just, he just benefits from the appreciation and the cash flow. But early on, the lots that he would do with his father, he did sell those. So he used that to basically accumulate the seed capital that would allow him to do the bigger developments.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  So he doesn't have like a real estate fund where people are trying to get out in a certain timeline. He's not flipping things. He really is in for it in it for the long term. And you see this with other with other real estate projects where someone comes in and they pass it on to the next person. And that next person isn't thinking about the long value creation cycle that's going on.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  And yeah, he has this, he has this interesting framework for thinking about like how he creates value at a place like The Grove. So he says that we have customers and then we have guests and the customers are actually the retailers.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  The Apple Store, Nordstrom's and, and for a long time, an indoor mall was basically you have two anchor clients.

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  At one end, Macy's at one end, Nordstrom's at the other.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  And then, and then I think they pay nothing, like you make essentially no margin off of them. And then everyone else in the middle, you hopefully fill in and make money off of them.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  And he, I think he kind of flipped that around and said, okay, this doesn't make any sense. There's like a much better way to do this, seeing kind of all the tenants equally as customers. And then really focusing on the guest experience and getting them to invest.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  And he's giving them a phenomenal product, which is places that the one commonality that you see across his properties is people just really enjoy being at them.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  Very simple. He's creating an environment that's safe, that's fun.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  That's clean.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  It's everything that you want a city to be.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  But it's just these sort of micro cities.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  And it's always, it's always remarkable when he does it because it's like, how did they close down this street? It's so hard, like, but, but once you actually enclose that, it just becomes this like wonderful oasis to walk around in.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  And it's the, it's the, it's, what's that meme? It's like the type of mixed use dynamism that people don't want you to have.

• 19:46Jordi Hays?

  Walkability.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  Or something, walkability that people don't want you to have.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  Caruso figured out mixed use, uh, walkability.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So one thing, so.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  He didn't do, uh, residential at The Grove and everyone was like, we want to live here. And so now he's been doing residential. Potential in the new projects.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Palisades Village, I think, has some apartments around it. So one thing that's interesting, too, about, you know, early on, he leveraged his, his father's business in order to create, you know, a meaningful business himself, which was smart. The other thing is that early on, when he was doing his first, you know, development, he, he even admitted to himself, he didn't have the clout to attract coveted retailers like Bristol Farms and Barnes and Noble. And so what he did is he didn't focus on, on the, the retail side, the retailer side, he went and focused on the public side. He, he, he did everything he possibly could to make the public, uh, love what he was doing, which I think was super important. And.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  We should go through some of his tenants of like designing spaces, his human centered design focuses on the emotional impact of real world details like height of curbs, the crown on streets, feeling of open space. He says, quote, "Our minds catch what's real. The more real it is, the more organic it is, the more comfortable you are in that space." And you really feel that at the Grove when you're like not tripping over things, even like the manhole covers are like, you know, flush and stuff. So you're not just like, all these little like things that just kind of jar you out of it, don't happen. It really does feel like Disneyland, Italy. He's very inspired by these places. I love his story about the, the Grove's trolley. He, uh, it was built from the ground up.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  People said, why the heck are you putting in a trolley? It doesn't go anywhere, but its purpose was to bring people here to enrich their lives, to give them joy. And so kids will say, I want to go ride the trolley. My son loves, loves trains.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. He basically was thinking of these as creating these almost mini Disneyland, right? Like really a destination.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  And the trolley is a crazy story because that needed, even though it just goes one block, it needed to be licensed as a train. And so we had to go through all the train regulations to get it approved. And so he's been someone who's pushed through all this red tape, but also can see the other side of like, okay, maybe we need a more efficient system on the government side to get things done. And he joked that. On a, on a number of passengers per mile, it is the most productive train in the world. Because it just moves dozens of people back and forth one block. And it does more than like the Manhattan's train system or something. It's very, very funny.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so there's a quote in here that says, Rick is extraordinary at reading the market and the consumer in the area that he's building something. So he had started with a property that was called Lake Havenhurst, which was a, which was a development that went, originally went bankrupt. For, that another developer was working on and he took it over. And one of the things that he notoriously did early on is the, the residents were so against the development. This was in Encino. One, he, he started including them in the process of developing the space.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  So he, at one point, took part of the, he took residents to go out and start like picking out trees that would go on the property. He said, you know, I, I understand if you don't, you know, want the development, but why don't you come with me? Let's go look at some, let's go pick out some trees for the property. So he literally, you know, paid to, to, to transport all these people and made them feel included in the design process. So he basically was making the residents, to give you a tech analogy, design partners in the development. And so he started, you know, he, he, everywhere he went, he would make these sort of grassroots movements around working with local HOA leaders, working with local residents. Like he started with the residents, which are his guests.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  And by making them love what he was doing, he was able to attract the, the customers, which he, he considers the retailers, right? Cause he's not directly monetizing the, the guests, right?

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of stories about him having to do a bunch of deals and build coalitions. When in 2011, when he was building the Americana at Brand, he. Went to Nordstrom, who I think he already had a relationship with, because I listened to him on the Nordstrom podcast, which I didn't even know was a podcast.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  Great show. Check it out.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Nordy Pod or something. That's a funny name. But he wooed Nordstrom away from the rival Glendale Galleria and will bring the department store to his Americana at Brand Shopping Center in fall of 2013. And there was this big fight with General Growth, which I think owned the Glendale Galleria, and they sued and they had a ballot measure to block the building of the Americana at Brand. He got it all through and now he says he's excited to be working with them. And they have come through their difficulties and the past is the past. And there's, there's always been this like dynamic with the Glendale Galleria and the Americana at Brand where some companies like Glendale Galleria is a little bit cheaper.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  It's an indoor mall. And so some businesses, if they don't have the right margins, they'll move over there. And it kind of like flows back and forth. Interestingly, Apple actually maintains stores at both, because I guess they can just afford that. It's probably like

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. His projects all have taken, he, he made, he's made the perfect developments for LA, which has 300 days a year of sunlight. So why build these, why build these fully indoor malls?

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  That's one of the reasons that Palisades Village is so nice is you have the benefits. You have, you have St. Laurent, you have Bottega Veneta, you have all these, you know, Lululemon, you have like all these nice retailers, but it's set up in a way where you can walk around outdoors and sit on the grass.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  And, and I see it every place. Like, I mean, Rodeo Drive is like this, where it is cool, because it's like this single lane. You see a lot of cool hypercars, which is honestly awesome. But how, how much cooler would that be if they just shut it, shut down a couple blocks of that and you could just walk across at any moment? Same thing in Old Town Pasadena. I've been beating the drum of they should shut down that couple of blocks in Colorado and make that the same type of crusoe style, open walkability. And a lot of cities were experimenting with that during COVID, because they, you know, they need more outdoor dining. So they kind of moved all onto the street. And then people realized like, maybe we didn't need those extra 10 parking spaces. Maybe we should move a little bit further. I think New York just shut down, or a couple of years ago, shut down Times Square, right? So you can walk around constantly.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  And just doing a few of those where they're not going to really throw off the flow of traffic is great, or bury the streets if you have the ability to tunnel. And then people can still drive exactly like they would, but you have a bunch of walkable space above.

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  It's so, it's so, him losing the, the last election is so devastating because his body of work is truly, he's created, what do you want a city to do? You want it to be highly enjoyable?

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  Livable.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Safe.

• 27:04Jordi Hays?

  A, a place where commerce can thrive. And that's what all of his spaces have become.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  Almost a hundred percent hit rate. And it wasn't enough, it wasn't enough proof to, to, to win the election.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. I liked him on this onward fundraise podcast. They go into more of like the macro side of the finance of real estate investing. And this is from earlier, earlier this year, they were talking about potential recession in 2024 and how much rates had climbed for them from three percent to six percent. And for a lot of businesses up in like the 10, 11, 12, 13%. But he goes back to the surviving the SNL, the savings and loan crisis in 2008. Caruso stresses having enough liquidity to take advantage of opportunities when disruption occur, calling it being a bit of a warrior. You've got to get ready for battle.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  He says he stresses preparedness over reaction. He points out that where I see companies getting in trouble is their reactionary, emphasizing early anticipation and cutting costs quickly in uncertain times. I mean, we certainly saw that with startups when SVB collapsed and the market and the interest rates went, went wild and a lot of the VCs pulled back on funding. The companies that cut their burn, like the same day that YC issued that letter saying, hey, this is going to be rough. They, they made it through just fine, but I, I got an investor update from a company that was like, we think we're going to have to cut our burn. And I was like, it's been a year since the market collapsed. Like, what are you doing? And then of course they went bankrupt immediately. Disaster. But he takes calculated risks. It's all his own capital.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  And so there's a hell of a lot more downside than potential upside.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't have investors, he said, I get the freedom to make decisions I think are best.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  And after. This many decades of absolutely killing it, he clearly has good decision making ability.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, he talked a little bit about like relationship banking, which I thought was pretty interesting. Obviously, although he owns all the equity in his properties, he still needs to work with banks to secure all sorts of different loans. There's construction loans, then there's ongoing mortgages on all of the different properties and the buildings as well as, you know, he's going to finance stuff out so he has more capital to work on other things. You know, it's like a private equity deal as the as the business grows, you can take more out and then do the next project. So he stresses like building relationship with bankers, but what he was saying was like, it's kind of frustrating because a lot of the bankers like bounce around from bank to bank. And so it's very hard to like, like you really have to have strong coverage across like an entire

• 29:41John Coogan?

  banking sector. And then more recently, he mentioned that he was actually, he changed one of his financing strategies and went out to Wall Street because you can go to a bank for financing or you can do mortgage backed security and take it to Wall Street. And that just has different cost of capital, different process, but obviously opens up a new like liquidity window for the company. So that was exciting. And he was talking about how he's, it's funny, somebody was saying like, oh yeah, like, can you explain like some of the more complex like derivatives and instruments that you might use? Because a big question was like, if you locked your interest rate in 2022, right?

• 30:23John Coogan?

  3%, you were great and your business was just fantastic. Not every bank was offering fixed rates at the time, but with derivatives, you could actually synthetically lock your interest rate, right?

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was, that's been the challenge for the last couple of years in the commercial real estate market is most people were using this variable rate debt, thinking that interest rates will stay low forever and then all of your profit goes away in months.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  But yeah, they were, they were talking about all these like arcane financial instruments and, and the interviewer was kind of like, oh, like, can you explain some of these? And he's like, I don't really use them. I don't really understand them. Like, I just focus on the guest experience. And I think it's like more of a pure play. He's more conservative and I, I think that makes sense.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  And he's not trying to be.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  A financial engineer.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  Financial engineer. Otherwise, I'm sure he would have sold a lot of his projects at different points.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  And also like, like it's, it's, it's a little less sexy than like, oh, he's like this genius trader who has all these like crazy plans to, to, to, to make money and, and pulled money out of thin air. But if I think about like who, how do I want the government run? Like, I don't really want them doing fancy stuff. I want someone conservative. Just, okay. What's the revenue? What are the costs? What's driving value in the city? Let's keep it simple. Let's actually grow this thing. So he talks a little bit about

• 31:42John Coogan?

  his decision to run for mayor with a successful real estate empire and fulfilling family life. Many question why he would step into politics. He explains, it's the city that I love. I believe you're given the ability to help others. You go and do it. His top priorities are highlighting homelessness, crime and government corruption as the city's biggest challenges. Homelessness is absolutely fixable. Crime is running rampant and public service should be about service for others, not for yourself. His leadership approach, he aims to replicate his track record of collaboration and results, saying, I want to be mayor for everybody. Let's make it a little bit nicer, cleaner, better life for everyone.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, one thing I've always been impressed with, every time you hear this guy talk, whether it was talking to reporters on TV the last 48 hours. We're at this fundraiser that I saw him at recently. He, there's not a single word that's out of place. He can go sit in front of a group of hundreds of people and speak totally off the cuff. And it, and it, and it sounds like he had a, had a speechwriter. So this guy is just a true, true, true professional. And if I were to, you know, really one of those. Types of entrepreneurs that if I'm sure if he went into the venture world and went into tech, he could have been wildly successful.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  But chose to focus on his local community and play a very specific game and do it at the highest possible level. So next time you're in LA, go support a Caruso.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Grove became one of the region's top attractions with about 20 million visitors in the immediate pre pandemic years, edging out Disneyland. More, but yeah, bigger than Disneyland.

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  I don't even.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  That feels like.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to believe. Yeah.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Possible. I don't know.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  It's in this LA Times article.

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  For him, it's it's just that balance of ridiculous charisma.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  Long term thinking, playing his own game, right? Not doing the investor thing, not hyper financializing what he was doing.

• 33:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  And then using early on in his career, using the advantages that he had, which was, which was, which was, you know, a relationship with his with his father's business. So combination of those, all those things is an incredible man. And I remember after the last election, it was the the word on the street was that he wasn't interested in running again. But I do think there's going to be so much pressure.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  On him now, not pressure, but just people saying like, please do this, right? Because I would love to see Los Angeles run by our guy Rick Caruso. So.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  He's also donated a lot of money. He has a family foundation. He's donated to Loyal High School, Brentwood School, law schools, University of Southern California. You know, we don't typically celebrate giving money away here, but I hope that brought him a lot of happiness, I guess.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  But he's been recognized by Pepperdine and the Los Angeles Business Journal and Ernst & Young and had a very successful family life with four children and a wife that he's been married to for 37 years or something like that.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  You know, the one, one of the critiques during the election was that he was a fake Democrat.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  That was basically the number one critique is he was historically a Republican.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  Or was independent at some point and that was during, I guess, you know, whatever. And it's such a good example of how about we don't judge people at all based on their political party affiliation and just judge them purely on their work.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  And his resume is these incredible developments of people of all political backgrounds love being a.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, he really is like founder mode person. Generally, you can tell he owns a hundred percent of his companies. He never sells. He builds these things, manages them for a very long time, clearly runs through walls to get stuff done.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Does things that people think are impossible, closes streets and like really changes the landscape, but winds up creating a like a great product that he's clearly happy with and so are the guests.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  And the customers.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can tell he's creating the product for himself.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  Which is awesome.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Expressing his taste.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Crazy taste.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  It's great. So hopefully we'll be tracking that. The election is in 2026.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  Karen Bass is already on the campaign trail.

• 35:57John Coogan?

  She is.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Her Instagram shows that she's campaigning already.

• 36:02John Coogan?

  I wonder why. Is it that fun being mayor? I don't know.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think maybe, you know, after.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  We'll see. We'll see how big this story gets and how, how big the deal is.

• 36:13Jordi Hays?

  She has an opportunity to redeem herself. It's just if you're speaking publicly, get the URL right.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  Pretty simple.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Please Instagram video, YouTube video. We want to tour your gun case.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  She needs to be going direct. Honestly, Karen Bass needs to.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  It would be so different if she was just like, yeah, I can't do anything about the fires, but like here are my top five guns from 2024. Yeah, I recommend the new Glock. Get a, get an AR-15, go to Arley, they're local.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  You know, one of the few gun stores in, in Los Angeles. You know, and then get a sniper rifle too.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Maybe shotgun.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  Get a full loadout.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  Full loadout.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  Should look like a cod lobby.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  Cod lobby in the mayors.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, she does have an opportunity to win back a lot of voters by doing that.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the big two A voters in Los Angeles. Huge block.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  Honestly.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  It's increasing. It's increasing, but slowly. I mean, Adam Carolla had that whole take that like this is going to flip. This is going to flip California or LA red.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  So I.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  Did you watch that video?

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  I think it, I think it is, I think it is totally possible.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is a crazy, crazy moment.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  But we're getting on the edge here.

• 37:27John Coogan?

  Of talking politics.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  We're getting on the political edge. And it's not our forte. We like to focus on business, technology, and capital allocation.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Let's move into a question that we got from a listener. Ozzy says, interesting how much coverage the Palisades fire is getting compared to Hurricane Helene. Helene so far was far more devastating. Hundred and twenty-four to two hundred and fifty billion in damages for Helene versus fifty-five billion for Palisades. Two hundred and forty-six deaths for Helene versus at least five for Palisades. Hundred and twenty-six K homes damaged versus, I'm sure, a few thousand in LA. What are your thoughts, he asks? So what do you think about that? Coverage of Helene versus the Palisades fires?

• 38:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Helene, I wasn't actually familiar, so he's correct. I paid far less attention to that.

• 38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, you don't remember the conspiracy that like it was, it was like the Democrats like caused it or something? The Republicans caused it?

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I remember, I remember the coverage. It just wasn't, I wasn't focused on it because, because this fire has been in, literally in my backyard.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  And many, many, many friends and, and, you know, business relationships have been affected by it.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:41Jordi Hays?

  The other, so yeah, the damage for Helene was devastating. South Carolina and North Carolina both had fifty-ish billion dollars worth of damage. Like ridiculous amount of damage, way more deaths.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  It's very dark, sad, there's still a bunch of people missing. But anytime you have a disaster strike, the epicenter of media and entertainment, where it's the highest, you know, it, this is the highest density of people with huge audiences in the world.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  So obviously, there's going to be a lot of coverage on it.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  And then for us. Again, living miles from the epicenter.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  It, it obviously is going to be top of mind. So.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  I also wonder if there's something to the actual like visual nature of this type of disaster. Like with a fire, you can go up in a helicopter and film it. You can't film a hurricane having a destroying a single house. Like it's very, very hard to be out there because you get blown around. It happens every once in a while. And then you can look at the satellite map of it spinning and you're like, okay, that looks bad. But it's very different when you see a drone shot of the palaces as flattened.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the fire, the fires are fires are growing up in California. Being through a number of fires, it was really nasty in Santa Barbara. During the, the Woolsey fire area, there's been really devastating fires in wine country where I grew up. I, I think the unpredictability of fires where it doesn't even, you could be 10 miles from where wildfires raging. And then an ember lands and it starts another one.

• 40:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  There's also quite a lot of, um, just like poor behavior that springs up where people start. People just start looting houses because people evacuated and, and so you can, there's people around the perimeter of these fires.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  It also has this like crazy power law outcome where it's like either your house burns down and you're destroyed. Or your house is totally fine.

• 40:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:45John Coogan?

  Right. Whereas like, I feel like with the hurricane, it's like everyone deals with a little bit of flooding. Then there's houses that get blown down and destroyed and like, and it's more of like a gradient of like.

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  Every house, but it's like all over. Whereas this, it was a lot more of like, oh, there's a fire over there. Everyone's got to leave and move and stuff. And it's just like.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  And, and yesterday, so yesterday, my, I'm, I'm in Western Malibu. The fire really devastated Eastern Malibu and the palisades. But we were already starting to pack up because we had no power, gas, et cetera. Uh, and then a fire popped up out of nowhere, like half a mile from my house. And so I'm looking at this watch duty app that everybody's using. And they're, and it's like, oh, it's two acres and now it's five acres. And then I'm getting videos from my neighbors and. I don't know. It's also, it's also is, one, one thing I would call out is like the, the, you know, Keith, I don't know, are you Buddy Siff?

• 41:40John Coogan?

  Wasserman. I, I've never met him.

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, really, really good guy, sort of tech adjacent, because he's done some tech investing, had a, had a real estate tech, tech company, but he mostly is a real estate investor. He posted, which what I thought was a very fair ask, which was, hey, my house is about to burn down. Are there any sort of private firefighting resources that, that I can hire?

• 42:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  And, and got, you know, went mega viral, got mega canceled. And I thought it was like a very fair ask. Like if you look at the way he phrased the message, it wasn't like, hey, any off-duty firefighters wanna come, you know?

• 42:19John Coogan?

  Save my house instead of someone else's.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Abandon your post. It's like, private firefighting, just like private security is, is an industry.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Insurance companies leverage private firefighting brigades all the time. There was this whole drama a few years ago when there was fires in the Hidden Hills area. And there was a private fire brigade that descended on Hidden Hills because it's like a billion dollars of property value. They don't want to lose that, right?

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:46Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, I, I just think Keith is a, is a great guy and, and obviously didn't have any bad intentions with that. And sort of, sort of unfortunate that people far away from the action decided to have an opinion when it was a very fair request.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  It does seem like he killed.

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  And it didn't work, by the way. His house burned to the ground. So like, yeah.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 43:08Jordi Hays?

  Bravo to everybody dunking on him.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, he did, just a little like comms advice. He did a pretty good job of mitigating the cancellation, like the, the hatred, I think, by, I think he locked his account or like deactivated his account. And everyone's like, oh, he deleted his account. But really, like, you can turn it on in a few days and it'll be fine. But what that does is it stops the quote tweets. And so anyone who quote tweeted you, if you're getting canceled, this just happened to me when I talked about how I'm gonna move to Alaska and take it over and make it a tech mecca. And everyone in Alaska said they would kill me. I'm not kidding. They were, they were like DMing me pictures of their guns, being like. Bitch, like you wouldn't last a day up here, you Californian.

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  Cali boy.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  I was like, okay, respect. Like this, this makes me want to move there more. But then there was, there was like, the right wingers were canceling me.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Challenge accepted.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, the right wingers were canceling me for like, being like a pussy, basically. And then the, and then the left wingers were canceling me for like, you know, colonizing indigenous spaces or something like that. And I was like, this is too much. I just locked the account and then it shuts down all the quote tweets. And then everyone just moves on because like, they're not getting that. Like, they don't have anything to go off of.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  Material.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. This is very funny. But I, I, I think he did that and I think he'll be able to come back hopefully because it's a good poster and there's some good stuff. But, okay, that's not important. Let's move on to the timeline. Hopefully there's some fun tweets. We get more on the tech side. Talk about what's going on outside of the fire, which has consumed us for the last two days. But hopefully there's more interesting things going on. We got some big tech alert. This is very exciting. Catherine Boyle at Andreessen Horowitz has started following at Tech Bros Pod.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Brother Boyle. She's, she's engaged with some of our stuff before. I, I think we probably have covered her tweets, but she created American Dynamism, did she not?

• 44:56John Coogan?

  And she talked about how there's a need for an Oscar-style award show in tech.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  And years ago, there was the Crunchies and there were some hilarious photos from the Crunchies.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  I never, I never knew about that.

• 45:10John Coogan?

  Put on by TechCrunch, yeah. And they would give you a physical statue and it pulled really big people. I mean, Teal.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  There's a picture of Teal with a Crunchy. And I think it's like a man on the moon type of thing or something. Or maybe it's like an ape. I don't, I don't know. It's something crazy.

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  But the Crunchies, they, I, I remember the moment that they peaked because Paul Graham said on Twitter at the time, wha, it was an ape? Okay. Yeah, wow. Oh, yeah, yeah, there you go. That's kind of cool. We gotta, we gotta buy one of those on eBay or something. But PG said, "We don't need TechCrunch to award Startup of the Year." "It's a useless award because in tech and in business, you have the market constantly telling you how the company is doing."

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  And so with the Oscars, it's like, the Oscars don't just say which one made the most money. There's an artistic value there. And so I think it's actually good that with our award show, we focus not just on who's the richest person in tech, or like, the award for-

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  We focus on size lords like, like Josh Kushner, who repeatedly made some of the highest conviction, biggest bets-

• 46:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's more of a qualitative-

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  ... in a broad spectrum of companies. Yeah, there's some element of-

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:28Jordi Hays?

  Editorial element where you could argue that Gary Tan's a bigger size lord, because he just funded more companies in the spring-

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Conversation starter, you know, oh, you know, should Moonlight have gotten the award, or should La La Land have gotten the award?

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  Have gotten the domain acquisition of the year.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Like, these things are, award shows should be more, if you're doing an award show for tech, you should lean towards something that's a little bit more qualitative, a little bit more artistic. But you won't be doing an award show for tech, because we already got that locked down. So don't copy us, okay?

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  But you can come.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  You can come.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you there.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  Great.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  If you wear a tux.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  Let's go to Andrew McAlip. Been on the show before with some great... Wait, is this the question?

• 47:14Jordi Hays?

  So it's less of a question. So basically, Andrew has developed this Doge-themed art piece-

• 47:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  -which he's gonna sell for-

• 47:23John Coogan?

  I've seen it in person.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  -five million dollars.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:25Jordi Hays?

  It needs to sell for five million dollars, because Andrew needs an F40.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  And so I just wanted to put the word out, because Andrew is looking for a home for Doge fin-

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  Because apparently, wherever it's being stored right now, we would house it here, but it's gonna be, I think it's a little bit-

• 47:42John Coogan?

  It's huge.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  It's huge. And we're on the 10th floor of a building, and carrying it up the stairs sounds rough, and I don't know. I think the weight limit is probably too high for the elevator.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  So he says he's doing a bit of spring cleaning, two things that need to be moved out. Would anyone be interested in a large vacuum chamber? So if you're in the market, hit him up. It weighs about 1,500 pounds. No pumps, no warranty. Bring a trailer. Please DM me. It's free. You just have to do, you just have to promise to do something incredibly interesting with it. And then two, Dogshin needs to find a new home if you want the 600 pound magnificence gracing your factory floor. We should talk. I would prefer to keep ownership and do a storage slash loan thing as I need to sell him at Art Basel to pay for my F40. Shout out to Tech Bros Pod for making the decision. In retrospect, with Carmack and Mueller owning one, it's a no brainer, Mueller. And he shows the vacuum chamber and the Dogshin, which you should go take a look at. It's a wild piece.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  I mean, stunning piece.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Chamber has some interest. Y'all better move fast.

• 48:39Jordi Hays?

  Actually, so maybe now that I'm thinking out loud, I should honestly put this in my backyard.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  I don't know if he wants it to be outdoors. You have to cover it all the time and stuff. I don't know how treated it is. Maybe he could do like some coat or something.

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Andrew, treat it. I'll put it in my backyard. I'll give it an ocean view.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  It'd be a great place for Dogshin to pass the time until he sells.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  Let's do one more and then a promoted post. Signal says, Vibe Capital was born out of the realization that traditional diligence is just the polite lie we tell ourselves after making decisions with our gut. No pitch decks, no financials, no fake process, just human connection. We invest in founders with ideas that make us feel alive. We're betting that intuition beats spreadsheets and that founders thrive when they're treated as the connoisseurs of culture, not as risks to be mitigated. If the idea makes us smile, shiver, or swear under our breath, we're in. We believe capital is a commodity, but vibes are scarce. And he's quote, he's quoting a segment from a book about Andy Bechdelshym investing in Google. Bechdelshym ran to his Porsche and returned carrying something. We could discuss

• 49:48John Coogan?

  a number of issues. Why don't I just write you a check? He said, ebullently, I can't pronounce that at all. With that, he presented.

• 49:56Jordi Hays?

  Mogs by a word.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Mogs by vocab. He presented Bryn and Paige with a $100,000 check payable to Google Inc. Bryn and Paige explained that Google hadn't been incorporated yet and didn't have a bank account to deposit the check into. Well, when you do, stick it in there, Bechdelshym said cheerfully. Then he disappeared in his Porsche without saying what share of Google he imagined he had bought.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is a real alpha because you can still do this.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  If you know, even if a company hasn't incorporated, you know, usually, usually you want to be investing pre-incorporation. You want to be given that handshake before the company's even been formed.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  So you're going to get the best price and the most clout, which is what angel investing is all about. Low entry prices and clout.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  More about the clout than the, than the investment.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  The funny thing is that-

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  Because by the time you're getting any liquidity, you forgot about the investment. You don't even know what they do anymore.

• 50:47Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but checks are cool because, because I've been in situations where I'm like, well, I want to invest, but you haven't set up the company yet and just write a check.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  And just get the, get the C corp name right.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  And every time I use a check or every time I write a check.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  You can just make it payable to cash.

• 51:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm like, checks are actually a fantastic innovation. I, I've, I've only written probably sub 100 checks in my life just because digital payments were really, by the time I was an adult, they were just so widespread. But every time I write it, I'm like, wait, I can write any number in here and just give it to you and you just deposit it. That's great.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, no limits or anything.

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's almost as cool as stable coins.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The, the checks, the funny thing is that I feel like if you did that today with a founder, depending on the founder, some founders would be like, great, $100,000, I'm going to go out and raise a $100 million post-seed round and give you 0.1% of the company.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but then if they have to raise again at a lower valuation, you'd convert in at the lower valuation. You've got to get that MFN clause in there. Otherwise you're an idiot.

• 51:49John Coogan?

  You gotta watch out. Let's do a promoted post.

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post, uh, this one from Kyle Boddy, who is quote tweeting a, another post by a guy named Grant.

• 52:01John Coogan?

  I put this in there because I wanted to promote those wheels specifically.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  So Kyle says-

• 52:05John Coogan?

  This is an ad read for these specific wheels on Amazon.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we're running an ad for some Hasali store on Amazon. And these are rubber office chair wheels that you can take, presumably take any-

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Something you'd see on like a Razor scooter.

• 52:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so these are Razor wheels that you can give your office chair. So we don't use-

• 52:23John Coogan?

  We should put these on-

• 52:23Jordi Hays?

  We don't use chairs with wheels on this podcast, but I do have an office chair at home that I know, I can see this attachment. I know they'll snap in, so I need to get some of these, but $20, you turn your office chair into a Razor scooter. Kyle got nerd sniped by them.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  The GT3 RS of office chairs.

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  You know?

• 52:42Jordi Hays?

  So these things are gas.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  This is the Y-Soc package.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is the Y-Soc package.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  On your, on your Herman Miller.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got such a great Herman Miller. It's not that comfortable, but it looks amazing. That's what, that's what matters.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  I mean, you'd put an exhaust on it if it was a car.

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  Why not put some wheels on it?

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  Slap some wheels on it.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Slap some wheels on it.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Okay, let's go to a bucket pole, bucket pole.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  Do you wanna, do you wanna re-explain the bucket pole versus banger concept?

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, okay, so, so, so we have, so, so we have, you know, we react to a lot of, a lot of posts from X on this show. We wanted to create some differentiation here. And so, uh, when we see something on the timeline that's a banger, it's, it's from a friend, it's from a brother, maybe a previous brother of the week, someone really important, it's about a really important topic, we put it in this stack. We print it full size. It's a banger. This is from Max Meyer. You know it's gonna be good. It's important. He's setting the discourse. But every once in a while, we see posts that are good, but from people we don't know. Maybe they're just kind of random, timeless. We could just react to them whenever we want. So we print them on these small four by six cards, and these are the bucket poles. We put them in the bucket.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  Champagne.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  We shuffle them all around.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  Champagne bucket.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  We shuffle them all around, and we take them out of here randomly.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  Use the tongs, too.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  These are a little, the, the bangers are a little bit more sordid. We, you know, we know we wanna talk about Max's post today, but the bucket poles are random, and, uh, we, we got this idea from, uh, Kill Tony, Tony Hinchcliffe. He, when he runs his comedy show- He brings on his friends every show. They're regulars. They do a minute of stand up. And you know that those friends of his are going to be the regulars are going to deliver. They're going to deliver high quality, but he also does bucket pulls. He pulls random people from the audience who maybe they've never done start stand up. Maybe it's their first time. Maybe they're, maybe they're terrible. Maybe they bomb. Maybe they overperform. And at the end he gives them a joke book if they do.

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  Some variable reward is.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  Addicting.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  Exactly. So, so on the show going forward, you'll see we do a couple bangers. We do a promoted post and we do a bucket pull. And so this is a good one. Let's do this one from comrade Cisco says, new workout goal is to have a body where if I commit a crime, the media posts my shirtless pics and everyone's like, wow. It's a picture of Luigi Mangione. And my goal for this year is to make Luigi Mangione look like the Trump shooter. Do you see that kid? That kid that really, really skinny dude?

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  Very frail.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  I'm trying to get so big that everyone's like, ah Luigi's skinny.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is. It is crazy because a lot of people say, oh, like all your problems will be solved if you just get super healthy. And clearly if you're messing with 60 Mesoamerican demons.

• 55:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't matter.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Well, I think that's a pre one-shot photo.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  First. Because if you look at him now, it's not like he's a week out from the bulk. He's months out.

• 55:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  And also he, there's a big question about people are like, oh, he's so hot. He has tons of fans. People are looking at this. They're really upset about healthcare. They're on his side. The public's on his side. Well, that might not matter at all in the courtroom. And there was this whole like, how much does the court of?

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  The way he looks should not matter in the courtroom.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  It shouldn't at all. And, but people are kind of acting like it will matter. And they did the same thing with SBF. People would be like, why is SBF on X right now in a space talking about how he's innocent? And it was like, he's trying to win over the public. But like, that didn't matter at all. And so I don't know that, I, I, I think like this is obviously just some joke posts, but I don't know that it actually works. Like I, I, I don't actually think there's any way to, you know, sway the public. I think the jurors are going to get in there. They're not going to care. They're not going to be extremely online. The lawyers will filter for that in voir dire. They'll be like, are you a communist? And are you doing ayahuasca all the time? And are you, do you have, the, the phrase is hybristophilia? Have you heard of this?

• 56:38Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 56:39John Coogan?

  Hybristophilia is.

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  You could just make stuff like this up. I'd be like, no, but.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  Hybristophilia is sexual attraction to criminals and it's fairly popular. Yeah. So when you hear about, oh, there's some serial killer that's getting, you know, 20 letters a week from women across the country who have like fallen in love with him. You're like, why? And, and there's actually like a paraphilia where people are like, that's hot. I guess it's crazy.

• 57:06Jordi Hays?

  There's same thing with podcasters. There's a very, uh, uh, famous podcaster who gets one letter every single day.

• 57:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:15Jordi Hays?

  That he hasn't talked about this publicly, obviously, but he gets one letter every single day from the same woman in Europe who just hand writes a letter and puts it in the mail every single day, like a love letter to this guy. And it just goes to the P O. Box and, and just like rots there.

• 57:30John Coogan?

  Two letters a day.

• 57:31Jordi Hays?

  Two letters a day.

• 57:32John Coogan?

  We're coming for you. You know who you are. You're listening. Um, the other thing is that Luigi is short. So fuck him. Uh, anyway, Max Meyer, as we said, banger. He says, we must put a 100,000, a 100,000% tariff on Ozempic and Legos in order to force the Kingdom of Denmark to give Greenland to the United States. Ozempic and Legos are like 45% of the Danish economy. It would be over for them in 15 seconds. That's hilarious.

• 58:03Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Max is a media mogul.

• 58:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:06Jordi Hays?

  And he has studied the art of the deal clearly.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  And it's just trying to feed ideas because he knows that.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Big dogs watching.

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  Trump administration is very online.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  They're going to see this stuff and they're going to be like, that's a good idea.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  But, um, but yeah, I, I, I think Lego and Novo Nordisk are both fantastic companies.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Did you see the flag I posted? I posted the 54 state flag.

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  Who did the Photoshop on that?

• 58:33John Coogan?

  I just did that on my phone. I just copied one of the rows that has four stars over and just, it looked pretty good, right?

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  It looked great. Yeah.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  And so the 54 star flag, it's still pretty balanced because a lot of people do the one extra star, which is hilarious, moon or whatever. And you just say it in place. But I was like, we're talking about four. Places. Let's just see what that looks like. Looks great.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  Looks great.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Downstairs, there's a 45 star flag that was prior to Alaska, Hawaii, but then a few other states. Looks great as well. Very balanced. And what's hilarious is that someone pretty high up in the Trump administration texted me and was like, this looks great.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  No way. Yeah, the, the, anybody complaining about symmetry issues is not a good reason not to, to

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:15Jordi Hays?

  expand the empire.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Honestly. And, and the comments on that post were great. And people were saying, let's add Mars.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  I think that's a promoted post.

• 59:24John Coogan?

  This is a promoted post from our friends at The Ridge and our friends at Meta and the friends at Ramp.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Sean Frank run is the number one wallet salesman in the world. And he's able to do that by running on Ramp. I thought this was cool.

• 59:45John Coogan?

  Deal to life.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  Ridge spent a hundred million dollars on their ramp cards. They spent a lot of money on meta ads and inventory and things like that.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Size lords.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  And absolute size lords and hit it. Nice.

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  And Ramp sent him this, this deal toy. Fantastic. It's crazy to think that there will soon be a one billion dollar club. And Ridge will eventually get to that.

• 1:00:09John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:00:10Jordi Hays?

  They are highly profitable. So, you know, they're, they're, they're not even spending as much as they could.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  But if, if Ramp really ramps up the deal toys, Sean might be like, I'm going to spend a little bit more this month. I'm going to spend a little more this month. So they've got the whole like savings focus.

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:00:25Jordi Hays?

  The average company on Ramp saves 5% a year. But when you have deal toys like this, it's going to tempt some CEOs to say, you want to jack it up. You know, jack up that spend a little bit. So.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we'd love to see it.

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  Some of the new clients we're hearing about Ramp signing, they're going to be in the billion dollar club on day one.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  If we keep hiring creative agencies like we've been doing, we're going to be in the hundred million dollar Ramp club soon.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  For sure. For sure. Should we go to promoted post or was that it?

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  That was.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Okay, let's do one from Vittorio. You know, he's been on the show before. Says, this new wave of imperialism is oddly refreshing. It's like I can feel my ancestral blood stirring again. It's time for war, spiritual war. Very pumped up about the Greenland and Canada jokes and all this stuff. Hard to say what actually happens here. But certainly a lot of fun. Also, isn't he like living in Italy or something like that? I thought he wasn't even in America.

• 1:01:17Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, actually.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:01:19Jordi Hays?

  I, uh...

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Be very funny.

• 1:01:21Jordi Hays?

  It's Chad, though.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  I, I would say if, if, uh, not, this is gonna kind of not really land, uh, cause it, but, um, uh, with the right audience, but anybody that's unemployed right now that's American, just go to Greenland. Just literally fly there.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  And just post up. I bet there's cheap...

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  Squatters rights.

• 1:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Hotels, hostels, Airbnbs, that kind of things. And just post up, like, hopefully this happens and, uh, you know, you, you have the opportunity to be on the ground and, uh, really kind of, you know, lead the charge, so.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Jordi Hays?

  D-Day mode.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Okay, this is a great one. Uh, Buck in SF says, "Is Strategery still relevant?" And Ben Thompson, the founder of Strategery, drops a nuclear bomb on him in the form of an entire Strategery article explaining that, yes, in fact...

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  To be, to be clear, the whole thing is very cordial. It's a very cordial exchange.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  It was, it was, because Buck has been, uh, has been a, like, a fan and kind of, I guess, asked Ben a lot of questions over the years. And so they, he, he said, "I decided to give you a very earnest answer." And he says, "It depends. First off, I'm pretty proud of Strategery's record over the last couple of years. When it comes to the big companies I traditionally cover, I think I've been pretty sharp, including sketching out their relative risks and strengths in AI, calling out Apple's strategy, pre-Apple intelligence, made a comprehensive case that Meta was actually the best positioned, and of course, was basically the only person to strongly defend Meta when they were at their nadir. And he has sources for all of these. I've also been on the Nvidia case for a long time, explaining what their moat is and why it's relevant, long before they became the juggernaut they are today.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  I guess I, I do regret not forcefully making the case that they were going to go to the moon, but I generally think that if you read Strategery regularly, you're pretty well positioned to capitalize on moments like that, because I laid the groundwork." And he goes on and on and on, and it's amazing, because, uh, I think Strategery is extremely relevant, and I still love reading it.

• 1:03:14Jordi Hays?

  So, so here's the thing, here's the thing, though. So, the reason that ads are the best, uh, business model for media is because you get the widest possible reach, right?

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people... Don't subscribe to Stratechery. So they miss all of this really, really, really high quality content.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:31Jordi Hays?

  And he has less influence because he's reliant on his readers and he makes his readers fork over their hard earned dollars.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Which, which works really well for him. I think he likes the predictability of just knowing as long as I write good stuff, there's revenue there. He doesn't have to focus on selling to advertisers. But the same thing happened to Joe Rogan with Spotify. You remember Joe Rogan's influence fell off a cliff for a few years when he was off YouTube and you basically didn't hear about him.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

  Unless, so it went from being-

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  And then the Trump interview on YouTube got 50 million views.

• 1:04:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  It's like-

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  So you know that, you know that, so, so the Joe Rogan deal, I was talking to Rob Mower at Heberman about this, co-founder of Heberman Lab, and he was saying like the, the Spotify Rogan deal like was very good for everybody involved. Like it just made a lot of sense, but you know Rogan's happier now that he can just be out freely sharing content generally everywhere. So I'd like to see, I don't know, it'd be interesting. I'd like to see more people like Ben follow the model of I'm going to release stuff, it's going to be paywalled, paywalled for a week and then open it up.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  Well, he does, he does do that.

• 1:04:41Jordi Hays?

  He does eventually release archives.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  So the main, the main articles are free to read. You can subscribe just to those, get those. And then he has podcast clips and, and segments of the show. So he has a number of podcasts that do one free, one paid, but when you're paid, you get the full subscription to everything, which is great.

• 1:04:59Jordi Hays?

  It has to be like links being killed on X also.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  He was huge on LinkedIn early on. He would post links and on Twitter as well. And now that Twitter doesn't have those like viral, like he hasn't figured out how to put his content into like an X native format.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  We need brain rot slop TikToks of-

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, with the subway surfers and then Ben Thompson talking. Yeah, the problem is that he just doesn't care about like reaching that audience as a-

• 1:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I think you could argue that his influences, there's a bunch of really large capital allocators that read his coverage and use that to make size lord investment.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  And also executives at big tech companies, for sure. Like who knows if Zuck is reading everyone?

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  He talks with constantly.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  But everyone he talks with is definitely reading it.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  And that's why, again, the reason to subscribe to him, not only because the writing's very high quality and he's been, he's like David Senra in the way that he- Has so much depth with these companies and the history of them that he can just talk forever about them, but now they all text him and call him and give him actual scoops and insights that no other writer has.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's do another Greenland post and Canada post and then we'll go to a promoted post. J5killer says, post a screenshot from 4chan where someone's thinking about why Trump is talking about Canada. The question is, why does Trump keep joking about Canada? Why does he keep joking about Greenland and the Panama Canal? The answer, for those of you who are not familiar with geopolitics, is shipping. Canada and Greenland, and by extension, Denmark, control the Northwest Passage, which due to ice melting is set to become one of the largest shipping routes on Earth. Canada can't defend it against the other claimant, Russia, without US support. America is also going down the path of wanting to further

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  control shipping routes to maintain their hegemony. While these come off as jokes now, make no mistake, these are long-term US strategic objectives, whether through conquest, economic partnership, or some means, the US will eventually control these routes. Whether under Trump or someone down the line, he is just putting one idea into the atmosphere.

• 1:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  Pretty interesting take. I hadn't heard that. I thought, I was definitely in like, oh, it's just a joke camp. And when I thought Greenland, I thought skiing or something, you know?

• 1:07:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Just like, oh, it's cool.

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  There is a rift in the Trump admin, right? There's some parts that want to absorb Canada, and then there's another part that says, we already got the best Canadian. We got Jeremy Gaffon, Gaffon and Company. We got him already. Why do we need the rest of the country, right?

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  True, true.

• 1:07:31Jordi Hays?

  We have, you know, a future billionaire.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  He could have gone on to, you know, be the richest man in Canada. Now he's going to be one of the richest men in the US. Do we need to go through the trouble of integrating this entirely new country into state and all this stuff? But, so we'll see how that plays out. Jeremy's laughing to the bank.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, either way, he wins.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  As he does. Promoted posts. We got a promoted post from the founder of Lava. Lava is the only way to borrow against your Bitcoin. All other loan solutions require you to give up custody. So you end up borrowing against bank coin and lose your Bitcoin. These custodial solutions have lost $100 billion in customer funds in just the last few years. So what are these companies again? There was, what was the one? There was two. There was Celsius, not the energy drink company. That offered amazing rates and went under BlockFi, FTX.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  There were a lot of companies with.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Non-custodial way to get some leverage. We, we love leverage on the show. We love betting on yourself.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  And we love holding Bitcoin and not selling.

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice, but lever up.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's go to a bucket poll. This one's from Alex Kerr. He says, today I learned that Evan Spiegel has a private 737. Let's go. Action for that. He's got the Boeing Business Jet. Fantastic. It turns out that N3E, an airliner 737 configured as a private jet is owned by Snapchat and Evan Spiegel. The operator is listed as SE Logistics, short for Spiegel Evan. Snapchat owns the largest private hangar at Van Nuys Airport. Wow.

• 1:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my only critique here is that it should be wrapped in yellow.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 1:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Because I don't think yellow, there's some issue if you want to make your plane black, it's way too heavy. Yeah, it seems.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  There's even a whole brand. Isn't spirits color yellow? You get confused with spirit. It's rough.

• 1:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Heaven would not want to get confused.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  You don't want to be thought of as like the spirit of social networking. That'd be rough.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Evan kind of came about too early, right? Cause you would always get so much shit for driving supercars around Venice. Are you gonna get mad at a young billionaire for enjoying?

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Supercars. Enjoy the fruits.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  10 years from now, it's gonna be completely normal for the average product manager in SF to drive a supercar to work.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, street park it.

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Street park it.

• 1:09:54Jordi Hays?

  And so Evan was just too early.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  But he, I mean, it's still early.

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  But he's still here.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  He can go in his own arc and be his own person. And, and there's just so many ways.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Spiegel's actually somebody I would like to see step away from Snapchat. It's never going to make any money. There's a, there's a sort of an enrichment scheme for employees, right? And a, and a, and a strong public markets bet for some, some very online ex people.

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  But I'd like to see him leave Snap, start a new foundation model, consumer hardware company, go compete with, try to compete with Avi from friend.com.

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's see him like go big, like I want like a two on, two billion on 10 billion seed round, like.

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:33Jordi Hays?

  That would just be good entertainment, so.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if I'm going entertainment with Spiegel, I, I, I want him just to lean into the personality, the lifestyle. Let's, let's see your watch collection. Maybe he can just take it in a different direction. Doesn't need to compete on price, but if he's got little, oh, he went a little bit crazier at West Coast Customs. Oh, you got the Cayenne minivan?

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  He's got the F40 minivan.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Cayenne six by six.

• 1:10:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  What about that?

• 1:10:56Jordi Hays?

  He's got the Sterrato built on an F40.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  You know, you know, the F40, you think about that car, everyone loves it, only has a V8. Swap a V12 in there.

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, V12 swapped.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Quad turbo.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  F40 with the Sterrato with the, the roof racks.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  F40 Sterrato. There, now we're talking some Navi tires on that thing. It doesn't, it, it has a manual. Everyone says that was the most engaging drive. Throw an automatic in there, like get some paddles going, it'll be faster.

• 1:11:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Let's, let, let, let's really class it up in there. Paddle shifting in your F40. Just, just dig it all out. Throw a 296 in there.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Porsche transmission in there.

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, PDK.

• 1:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just slap everything on it.

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  Yep, this is the way to do it. Just really.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  He's like, oh, nice, nice minivan.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, turn the F40 into a minivan. F40 minivan. Sterrato, Sterrato.

• 1:11:47Jordi Hays?

  The perfect car to get to the snow.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you can't, you can't really afford an F40 if you can't afford to take it to West Coast Customs, drop another million converting it to a V12 with off-road tires. And you also, you know that if you do.

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Carbon fiber roof racks.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  You know that if you do that Ferrari will sue you, right?

• 1:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  So, and you can't really afford an F40 unless you can fight the lawsuit.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  The crazy Ferrari is the only company that sues their customers for just doing non harmless

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  The only company yet.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  The only company yet. We need more of this.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  We need more aggressive entrepreneurs who are saying, you know what? Yeah, I do sell an AI wearable. And if you don't like it, I'm gonna sue you.

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you paint this thing, yeah, you put the wrong phone case on your iPhone, lawsuit.

• 1:12:32Jordi Hays?

  Lawsuit.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  We want this thing clean. No cases.

• 1:12:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we should test that. Every, every, every manager gets sued by Ferrari at one point in their life.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  Yes. And I think, I think if you listen to this show and you haven't left us a five star review, expect a lawsuit.

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  My father, father in law got in a nasty lawsuit.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:12:53Jordi Hays?

  Ferrari once. Story for another time.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  Okay, let's move on.

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's move on.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Oh, this is a, this is an interesting personal story. So disgraced propagandist says, staying at a formerly world-class hotel in Pasadena and thinking about how horrible the consulting class that, that's taken over is, everything here is a shell of its former self. Small things replaced with plastic, food boiled down to lowest bidder, deep fried items, prices jacked up, staff lazy and confused, best encompassed by the image of the harp player at the famous tea service squinting at an iPad, scratching out an appalling 60 second harp version, not of concertos, but of pop slash rap hits. The worst part is booking a reservation. Brain rot harp.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  Brain rot harp, just playing like, uh, what are those brain rot songs? Like the, the, the Sigma, Sigma male theme song, like, like the, the, the funk, you know, funk music? It's like those stuff like Russian, kids in Russia will be drifting to and like those like VHS edits. It's actually sick music. I like it.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  We need some edits like that.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Sigma male theme song on a harp, that would go hard. Um, the worst part is booking a reservation now impossible without calling centralized booking agency, which barely speaks English and has no answers because we're not connected with the property. Customer service staffs are the worst enemy of the consulting, consulting class, the massive costs, keep them up at night. It occurred to me that Their next trick will be to turn the lowest on the totem pole, the migrant worker gardening and cleaning into dual employees, the leaf blower slash customer service role, a futuristic sort of slave wielding both cleaning implements and a Bluetooth headset at the same time. That they'll call something like core team member or full service coordinator.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Perhaps then it'll stop coming. Do you know this hotel?

• 1:14:40Jordi Hays?

  I tried to stay there the last fire.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the Langham.

• 1:14:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  Now, it was formerly the Ritz Carlton. Everyone loved it when it was the Ritz and everyone was very upset. My mom is like, oh, it was so much better when it was the Ritz. I didn't understand the context at all because when I went as a kid, it was the Ritz and when I went as Langham, it all looked the same. It didn't really matter. But on Tuesday, when we got evacuated, I booked a room there.

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  And yeah, because I was like, oh, Emily was like, we want to get out of the house. We got to go somewhere. We're not sure where we're going to go. I was like, I'll just book a hotel there. Seems great. Booked it on Expedia. It was pretty cheap. They were starting to jack up their prices on the.

• 1:15:19Jordi Hays?

  Price gouging. Nice.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Fire evac.

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so I'm sure the, I don't want to put too much blame on them for the price gouging. I'm sure whatever like e-commerce software they're using to set prices just detects like, there's a lot of views on the website. Let's put it up. And 99.9% of the time, if Pasadena is booking a lot of hotels, it's like, there's a conference in town or it's the Rose Bowl or the Rose Parade or there's something else going on. It's not a natural disaster, but they should have a failsafe that says like, hey, like maybe it's a bad look to be price gouging. Anyway, I booked on Expedia. It's only 300 bucks or something. And but then, but then I'm like, this is a weird thing. I bet a lot of people are thinking about doing this. Let me call them and verify that they have my reservation.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  I actually got stuck in the central booking thing and they're like, we don't know if you have a reservation.

• 1:16:09Jordi Hays?

  I did that this morning. I was calling a bunch of hotels. The hotel we stayed at last night, HVAC, like HVAC system wasn't working. So we told them we were leaving. I started calling hotels.

• 1:16:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:19Jordi Hays?

  And trying to get through to somebody that's actually at the hotel is very hard.

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  Oh, it's really, really hard.

• 1:16:24Jordi Hays?

  Super annoying. So anyways, but my, going back to the original post, so I have, I feel like I'm qualified to have strong opinions on hotels, like service and just the general experience because I worked at a Ritz Carlton.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  In college and like I would work 40 hours a week at this hotel while I was in school. And, uh, and so anyways, I've seen the inside, working at a Ritz Carlton, delivering the actual service. And I think there's a number of issues with hotels today. The, the thing you can count on legacy hotel brands for is service. Like if you're having an issue on the property, they will typically go above and beyond to try to resolve it. The challenge is the, the actual interiors are for the most part falling apart. So they're no longer that nice. The menus and all the food items are just like Cisco slop. Like it's like no, the food's no longer enjoyable to eat at many of these properties, which is just tragic because you have these incredible properties and then terrible food.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  My, my business partner at his wedding, the day after, the night of his wedding, he stayed at the Langham and walked in to his room. There was a shattered glass, like champagne glass on the ground, wine glass. And he stepped and cut his foot like super bad and was like, can we do something about this? And I don't even think they comped him the room. It was like very rough.

• 1:17:40Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:17:42John Coogan?

  Bad.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, and then so you have like the, the, um, most of our listeners are already Aman-pilled.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, we need an Aman in LA.

• 1:17:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  We got the Aman New York.

• 1:17:53Jordi Hays?

  They're putting Aman residences in center of LA.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  But will that be a hotel too?

• 1:17:57Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if they're gonna have a hotel, but I get to live there. That's the best part.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but, but.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe just secure one just so you have it in case.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Ritz Carlton, you have the, um, Four Seasons, you have, uh, what, St. Regis, you have all these hotels, which are beautiful properties, very expensive properties, but actually mid experience.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:19Jordi Hays?

  And then you have the new hotel brands that are.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  The Caruso in there.

• 1:18:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Caruso would do it, but yeah, the Rosewood Miramar is pretty nice, but again, the food's still, I think, slop. And then you have like the one hotel, the proper hotel, these hotels where the interiors, like they paid, they paid for cool, contemporary interior designers. But then they're just not actually, they don't have like the service culture typically that you get at these legacy hotels. And so the, the solution is to basically stay at these like very like boutique hotels, like 20, 30 rooms that are still nice.

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Or you spend $5,000 a night at the Aman.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  And that's like, that's the state of hotels.

• 1:19:02John Coogan?

  Have you seen this, uh, hotel booking scam?

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Now, are you like fake?

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, so basically, the way it works is you go, you Google, this happened to me when I was booking a room at the Four Seasons. I Google like Four Seasons, San Francisco, I was staying up there. And, and the first result is like a sponsored post, because every post on Google's, every result's sponsored now. And it says like, Four Seasons official booking, and the website is fourseasands.guestreservations.com. And so you're just like, oh, this must be like the SaaS tool that they're using. They got a custom domain on it. Sure, I'll click there. It's not the Four Seasons.

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Dude, I was on guestreservations.com today, thinking it was legit.

• 1:19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no, no, it's fake. And so what happens is that they, they, they get you through the flow, and it's a really clean UI, like it all makes sense. So you're like, oh, this is great, this is easy. They quote you a price that feels about right, and then at the last second, they add like 200 bucks on. And, and, and it will be like $400 if you just went to actually the Four Seasons website, 700 on their website. And then they book it, and it's non-refundable. And if you call them, they'll be like, sorry, we can't do anything. And literally all they're doing is they just have someone there who books through Expedia at an even lower rate on your behalf. And so when you show up to the Four Seasons, they're like, yeah, we have you, but we don't have your information for some reason. Like, we just have your name down here. We didn't get your email. Because they didn't put that in.

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  Because they put in like, you know, some hash, like [email protected]. And then they'll forward that to you, clean it all up, so it feels like you booked, and a lot of people don't notice.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  I was on, so, I was on guestreservations.com today, looking at the hotel that I, the second hotel that I booked for a family. And I was like, why is this hotel like letting this other company own their customer?

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  It's so weird.

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  And I ended up just calling them because I didn't see the room that I wanted to get or whatever. And, um, but yeah, that makes sense where I thought you were saying scam where they just like take your money.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  No, no, no, they do book it. They just mark it up and then they don't let you refund. And it's this weird thing where, again, I called the Four Seasons.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  They try to make it look like it's.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And I called the Four Seasons because I was like, I like, like, okay, like I'm getting screwed for like 300 bucks. But at the very least, like I, and, and the reviews, if you search like guest reservations Reddit, it's all just like scam. They didn't even book me. I got screwed like, because of course, like the service is terrible. But if you, uh, so, so I called and I'm like, hey, I, I, I messed up and I booked through this scam website. Like, I just want to make sure that I actually have a room when I show up and I'm not just like hunting around for a different hotel. And, and if you call within the first like three hours, they'll say, no, we don't have you yet. And so, but then I showed up and I called later and they were like, we actually do have you now because they finally put it through.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  It is just, it's just such a mess. It's such a mess. Uh, and yeah, I mean, a bunch of different problems.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Class action against.

• 1:22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I do think the Four Seasons, like I, I, I talked to like the, you know, front desk person, but I was like seven layers from the CEO.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  What, what can you even do as Four Seasons because?

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  It's just showing up on X Media.

• 1:22:26Jordi Hays?

  To be a trap. They're basically a travel agency from a legal framework.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  And they're just arbitraging the Google ad cost of winning that auction and the fees that they can add. So they think, okay, it cost us $20 to acquire this customer. We'll add a hundred dollars of fees.

• 1:22:43Jordi Hays?

  I bet the CEO has a very extravagant explanation for why that there's a real high value market service, you know?

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  Which CEO?

• 1:22:53Jordi Hays?

  Guest reservations.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, actually, like, we're creating efficiency in the market.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, it's a total scam and they know it. They, they, they, they understand what they're doing. Uh, I've seen the inside of these scams before. Uh, this is an interesting one. This is not a post, uh, this is not a public post. It's actually from a private group chat I'm in, but I thought it was interesting based on the fire stuff. From a friend saying, I'm going to insist that everyone start picking up tangible skills like lockpicking. I'm so sad by what I'm hearing with regards to the fire. But in the event of serious emergencies, you need to know how to commandeer boats, hotwire cars, start motorcycles. These aren't jokes. I learned how to do this a long time ago. You never know. And with kids to take care of, being able to get out matters. Back in the day, we used to hold weekend sessions and teach each other skills all the time.

• 1:23:42John Coogan?

  You can download MIT's lockpicking guide and get a set of tools and starters from Amazon, uh, from Amazon and have a.

• 1:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Amazon.

• 1:23:50John Coogan?

  And have a fun weekend together.

• 1:23:52Jordi Hays?

  Always pronounce Amazon like that.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  Amazone.

• 1:23:54Jordi Hays?

  Amazone.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  Um, but, but I thought that was really cool. And, uh, uh, you know, as bad as these disasters are, they are great. Uh, you know, it's like, it's like, is starting a workout plan on January 1st kind of ridiculous and cringe? Like, sure, but.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Still do it.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  Better than not having a workout plan and not using that as the start. And I'm sure there's plenty of people that are in great shape now who are like, yeah, actually I did start working out on January 1st, five years ago. And now I'm jacked and it's the same thing for this. It's like, yeah, maybe the fire was like the thing that made you go buy a gun or buy a Starlink or, you know, learn how to lockpick or learn how to hotwire a car. But, um, you know, best time to start is now, so just go do it.

• 1:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I bought a, uh, gun for the first time during COVID.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:24:38Jordi Hays?

  It was just like, there's riots out of my, outside of my house.

• 1:24:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:42Jordi Hays?

  A lot of crime.

• 1:24:43John Coogan?

  You got the meteorite, nine, 1911s?

• 1:24:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Great choice.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Shark tooth trigger.

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  Let's skip.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  I can jump in with a promoted post from John. John's got that official X badge and we just wanted to call attention to John. He says, "At 300 followers, invest now. You'll never be this early." And this X badge does numbers on engagement. This guy, this got 2.3 thousand likes.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  No way. Oh, he must be way above 300 now.

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  So he's probably way over, but even if he's at a few thousand now, you're not gonna...

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Promoted post, future brother of the week, future reply guy potentially.

• 1:25:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so John, great work.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  Go give him a follow.

• 1:25:20Jordi Hays?

  And if you're, you know, if you're struggling on the follower side, go get a random job at X. Become like the maintenance guy at X.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Get the X badge and run it up to 50K, then quit and suddenly you have an asset now.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  Also, just that meme template of like, "Buy now, invest now, we're still small." Like, people want to get in on things early. And so I think that works generally. That's great.

• 1:25:47Jordi Hays?

  And the anime profile picture.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know there's gonna be some good content there. Great.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  Oh, let's do a bucket poll. What should we do? Zeeked up? Oh, I like this one. Zeke, been on the show before, but this time he's in the bucket pulls. He says, "Whoever makes this autonomous first has my vote at Waymo, at Zooks." And it's a 1840's horse and carriage. Looks very opulent, very loud opulence.

• 1:26:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  This would be a great daily.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  There was a bunch of horse and buggy setups in the Alps last week.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  It was good to see. I'm gonna do it next year.

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  You have to like box out all the tech journalists to get access to the horses?

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the lions' wait times are crazy.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  It's terrible. I'm sure, I'm sure.

• 1:26:33Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I think, I think, you know, I'm hearing reports from my neighbors that none of the gas stations around our neighborhood have gas.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  The great thing about a horse is if the horse gets tired, runs out of gas, you let them feast on your lawn and they're back in action.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  Back in action.

• 1:26:52Jordi Hays?

  You don't have to worry about, all you need is a little water, sunlight, and you got fuel. So, this is another reason that equestrianism is coming back in such a big way.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  It's just rational.

• 1:27:02Jordi Hays?

  Is it's just rational.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. I do think that there is a, although this is obviously a joke and a meme, I do think that there's an interesting insight here, which is that design of these autonomous vehicles is going to matter. And we saw this with the difference between the Waymo and the Tesla Cybercab, how they look wildly different. I mean, people were joking that like one looks left wing and one looks right wing. And you could imagine that people want to express themselves. People want different brands. Not everything needs to be perfectly monopolistic. And so, you could see someone coming out with some sort of like opulent robo taxi that's cleaned every single time and very high, like what is the Uber Black or the Cadillac Escalade?

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  Escalade V, hopefully.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  I just want to call a Waymo that has a humanoid robot in the driver's seat.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  That has AR-15s for arms.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I had to defend you.

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  It's great. This is a great throwback post from Technology Sista. Says, "This is one of the first Rune tweets I ever saw, all time banger." And it's Rune in 2021, saying, "You can either work for a liberal tech company that lifted its name off of a random concept in Hinduism, or you can work for a conservative tech company that lifted its name off a random concept in Tolkien. Those are your choices." And it's Samsara and Asana versus Anduril and Palantir. And everyone knows about the L O T R references, but I didn't know about the Hinduism trend and the left-wing tech companies. But it really is true because Dustin at Asana is a big Democratic donor. And obviously Palantir, I mean, Karp's actually Democrat, but Anduril, Palmer, it's kind of same thing.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  And, oh, this is actually all-

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Where does OpenAI slot in that?

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Just not open.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. It only, the analogy breaks down after four companies, but it looks, makes for a good screenshot.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI being the least open AI company is just great naming.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't even have planned that.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. There was something about the Anduril name where it was like, I think Peter was a riff on this.

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, the best, the best one.

• 1:29:11John Coogan?

  Where it was like, it was like Uber was too aggressive of a name, whereas Lyft was like this very like nice name. And so that's why the, the character assassination. Yeah, they had to counter position.

• 1:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Counter positioning with the pink mustache.

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  Like, I'm just getting a Lyft with a pink mustache.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  The best name recently is that.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  But the Uber mensch is like super aggressive. And so that led to like some easy character assassination. Like, we gotta go after this hardcore black company. Like, they're like black and white. They're super serious.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Travis was just too cool.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:38Jordi Hays?

  Good name in the Tolkien side of things. Soron.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  Soron, yeah.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  The home security from Tolkien.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this almost seemed like a subtweet of Soron a little bit, but this all started with Lulu saying, if you, if you, if your startup hasn't launched yet, it's not too late to make sure it doesn't have yet another Tolkien name. That name won't make you the next Anduril. But I guess Soron has launched. But yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there's going to be a little bit of like distance where it used to be like, Peter is a co-founder if it has a Tolkien name. And then it was like a founder's fund partner is involved and therefore it has a Tolkien name. And then it became like, you went to Peter's Christmas party and so you get to use a Tolkien name.

• 1:30:21Jordi Hays?

  If anybody wants some alpha, find every possible name in the Tolkien ecosystem and go buy the dot com.

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  The dot com.

• 1:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Start bidding, lowballing on it.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Cause, cause Anduril would, would have been a pretty probably, it's like a, Anduril.com was.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  $10?

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Not $10, but probably like five grand.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Funny. Well, let's stay on the topic of people who have founded Tolkien-based startups. And Delian says, "It's crazy that the Boeing astronauts are still stranded in space and no one is talking about it. And they're going to end up being up there for almost a full nine months longer than originally intended. Bums in seats. The world has prepared a number of crewed flights in the coming year. NASA's SpaceX Crew 10 mission on the ISS, which will finally bring Butch, Wellmore, and Sooney Williams home after a 10-month stay in space, has been delayed to NET March."

• 1:31:17Jordi Hays?

  Glad they brought enough food. They're probably having like Capri Suns at this point and rationing them. But like NASA Capri Suns, which are probably like way worse. I would say here's the interesting thing. So Varda's first mission, they took them a little bit of extra time to get the proper licenses to come back. And everybody, like all the, you know, Delians, like haters were trying to dunk on him for that. Yet there was no humans onboard the craft. It was literally just, so where are those same haters now hating on NASA being like, yo, your crew is stuck in space?

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  It is funny how much of a culture war issue when it first happened because on like day two of them being stuck, everyone was like, this is embarrassing for Boeing. Like, we're hating on Boeing. And a lot of people were like, oh, they're not technically stuck. They're just doing extra things. Like, it's gonna be fine. And like, nope, it wasn't fine, actually. Like, all of the crazy, like irrational, like jumping to conclusions in this case was correct. 100%. Let's do a promoted post.

• 1:32:21Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post. We haven't talked enough about watches on this episode. So we got a promoted post from the Luxury Watch Guy himself. This is the watch dealer for friends of the pod like Austin over at Morning Brew. Luxury Watch Guy has a Patek Philippe 5303R, which is a Grand Complications Minute Repeater, rose gold skeleton, coming in at only 1.3 million. Surprised Zuck hasn't picked this up yet, but yeah, Evan, Evan Spiegel, maybe, maybe go for this. Try to get some new hardware.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  And what was the rule again on watches? 2% of AUM?

• 1:33:03Jordi Hays?

  2% of AUM.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  So you need a $50 million fund to justify that? 60 mil, 70 mil?

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Okay, we know some people, we can recommend that too.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, jump on this quick.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Nicole Wistorf was asking for a recommendation.

• 1:33:13Jordi Hays?

  Nicole, honestly, kind of a perfect watch for Nicole. I like the rose gold.

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  Minute repeater.

• 1:33:18Jordi Hays?

  Rose gold with the skeleton. It's just, I mean, this is such a good looking watch.

• 1:33:21John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:33:22Jordi Hays?

  Nicole, go get this watch. It's a great option for you and sure to turn heads on either coast.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  When you're in that meeting and the minute repeater starts chiming the perfect time to the minute.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  So here's the play for Nicole.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  That's important, that's a power play.

• 1:33:37Jordi Hays?

  If she goes, so she, let's say she spends 1.3 million on this watch, right? It's a, it's a meeting, she, her last one is $50 million. It's 10 million in management fees over 10 years. Maybe she pulls a little bit of that forward to acquire this, but then she goes into a meeting with Zuck. He's got a family office. He probably raised $500 million just off of the conversation. This is a great conversation starter.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  Or, hey, look at what I got in my portfolio. This one company, maybe you want to buy it. That's liquidity. It's all going to come back to her.

• 1:34:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyways, I don't think she can lose buying this watch.

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  And I do think the, the minute repeater is underrated because of the fact that it makes noise at the end of the meeting. So, hey, I gotta run. Ding ding ding ding ding.

• 1:34:16Jordi Hays?

  Ding ding ding.

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  It's drawing attention to your watch. You don't have to show it to someone. They're going to hear it.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  They're going to hear it.

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  It speaks for itself.

• 1:34:22John Coogan?

  Let's do another bucket pull. Oh, this is a fun one. Prank for exits went mega viral, 7 million views with a video about Juicero. And he says, never forget that this was a Silicon Valley darling with over $120 million raised. And yeah, the Juicero was destroyed by Ellen Hewitt at Bloomberg, actually. She just wrote a piece about Zen that I was featured in. And...

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  You still gotta put that one in the truth set.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  We do, we do, because there are a lot of things that were taken out of context. A lot of things that were taken out of context. But overall, I mean, she does great reporting and, you know, no one loves tech journalists more than we do. So the downfall of Juicero was quite the Silicon Valley moment in the HBO TV sense. Very entertaining for everyone involved.

• 1:35:13Jordi Hays?

  I do have a good friend who did an SPV into Juicero.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  Did they get out? Did they secondary out in time?

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Knowing him, he probably did, but he's gone on to have a very illustrious career.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:35:26Jordi Hays?

  Billions of AUM.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  Doing just fine.

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  I mean, like, the basic thesis of like-

• 1:35:32Jordi Hays?

  If anybody wants to, if anybody invested in Juicero and wants to, we would have a guest on to talk about-

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  That'd be fun.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's break down the investment memo.

• 1:35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:39Jordi Hays?

  Why is little of these like-

• 1:35:40John Coogan?

  I mean, it actually wasn't that crazy. It's like, Keurig makes a ton of money. It's this razor blade model subscription. People like juices, so, you know, we're gonna do the same thing.

• 1:35:48Jordi Hays?

  Juice was also booming. Everybody, everybody was saying, you gotta get all, you should be getting-

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:53Jordi Hays?

  Having multiple juices a day, all this stuff. It is, I've gone through juicing arcs. Super annoying. Takes a ridiculous amount of prep. Makes a huge mess in the kitchen. You've got this juicer that's spewing out plant waste.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:10Jordi Hays?

  They were solving a real problem, so.

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  Have I told you our juicing story?

• 1:36:14Jordi Hays?

  The IP right now is, is, is like, who's, you could easily get, I think, 10,000 pre-orders for that thing if you just rebooted the Juicero IP.

• 1:36:26John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:36:27Jordi Hays?

  And somebody owns it out there.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  I mean, they rebooted the Enron IP. Maybe Juicero's next.

• 1:36:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe Juicero would do better as a meme coin now.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  Meme coin, or, yeah, just simplify it and just make it juices that they sell. Premade glass bottles. Have I told you my story about making fresh juice during YC in 2012? It's the best. So, we had a juicer. We were like, we need to stay healthy. Let's start juicing stuff. We'd go get produce, but it was always really expensive. So we'd always have to like, drink it all. Because we were like, can't let it go to waste. This is like, the highest value nutrition that we're getting. Most of the time, it's ramen and just like, garbage. And so-

• 1:37:05Jordi Hays?

  This is when you were living on 16K a year with four other guys.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, my business partner and I go over to his uncle's house. And they're like, oh, we know you guys are into juicing and we got some produce from our garden here. Take this stuff and you can make some juice with it. So we bring it home. It's got some good stuff in there.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  That meaningfully increased your runway.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, it was meaningful at the time. We were stoked.

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  Two days.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  So we start throwing it all in and we started juicing everything. We're like, okay, carrots, this. And we're like, what are these red things? We put them in. We're like, okay, I guess those radishes.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Ooh, spicy.

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  And we didn't realize that, like, it completely tainted, like, all of the juice. It was just the spiciest thing, but we were like, we can't let it go to waste. So we just had to drink this radish juice for like two days. It was miserable. Then we had to clean it all. It was disgusting, but it was a mess.

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Long Gisera.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, Gisera made a lot of sense. I like this one by Armand Domaluski. He says, uh, uh, the, uh, the polymarket on will the Palisades fire be contained by Friday? It's down at like 1%. It's apparently just impossible to do. And so he's suggesting that somebody makes a movie about a team of degenerate gamblers who single-handedly contain a massive fire in order to win a huge score on polymarket. And, uh, I mean, the volume's 22K. It's not exactly going to be a huge score, but it's, uh, it could be funny in a, in a, uh,

• 1:38:26Jordi Hays?

  Somebody doesn't check the volume, hires the most insane private. They're like, oh, the French guy bet 40 million. Like, if we just spend 5 million on the private fire brigade and ship them in from the East Coast, maybe $22,000.

• 1:38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And if you, if you poured 20, if you poured 20K into that market, it'd be 50/50. If you poured 100K, you'd be at 90%. Immediately, you could totally swing that market. Um, the, the interesting, a friend of mine sent me this, uh, that, that post, uh, just the polymarket. It was like, this is so dystopian. And I was like, I don't know. I think it's actually still valuable to know, okay, I shouldn't expect the fire to be put out. And there's this whole thing about like, okay, well, does this incentivize people to light fires?

• 1:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Value out of it. I've been planning my week.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, based on like, don't go, don't plan on going back before Friday.

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't want to go home.

• 1:39:16John Coogan?

  It's not going to be contained. Um, so I, I don't know. It seemed like it wasn't that good. And in this case, like, yeah, you could say that there's, you could win 1% of your money by keeping the fire going, which is illegal, or you could win 100X your money by putting it out. And so it's actually like the good ending here potentially, if there was like this team of degenerate gamblers.

• 1:39:36Jordi Hays?

  I only think it's, I only think it's sad for some of that $22,000 of people with crazy gambling addiction that are just saying.

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  Should we go to Paul Graham? He posted his office reveal. He says, "My flight was delayed, so I cleaned up my office." And he's got some wonderful bookshelves, desk right in the center. The problem, of course, is that he's not in the power position. This is a Feng Shui disaster. We posted about this.

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we compared that having success in business in this room is the equivalent to making it to the NBA with no likes.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's incredible that he's been able to have the career that he's had.

• 1:40:16Jordi Hays?

  It just shows like PG is PG.

• 1:40:18John Coogan?

  Power position. He really is a one of one. Fighting with one arm tied behind his back this entire time. And if we really knew the full layout of the house, we could understand more about whether or not this applies the principles of Feng Shui correctly. But I can tell you right now Feng Shui is very important. It's very real. And I very rarely do I meet really successful people who do not have their desks in the power position. This is kind of like Feng Shui 101. Basically, you want to have your desk facing the door. And so the opportunities can come to you and that energy can come to you and you're kind of ready to receive it. You don't want your back to windows. The Feng Shui reason is so that monkeys and ninjas can come break in through the windows and just, you know, take you out.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  But a lot of these, a lot of these ideas, there's other things like you shouldn't have your desk right next to an open bathroom. And it's like the, the negative energy from the bathroom will throw you off. But a lot of these Feng Shui things, they sound like kooky, like, you know, astrology. But they actually have like very reasonable scientific, you know, explanations, if you think about it like,

• 1:41:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  Why do you want your, why don't, why don't you want your back to the door where people come in your office? Well, it's because people are going to walk by and see what's on your monitor and you're going to be like, ah, like, am I, you know, messing around on Twitter? Does that look weird? Like, as opposed to if you're in the flips, flip flips.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  You can have, you can have X open on your monitor and your phone.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  It looks like you're doing important business.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's the same thing with like the windows.

• 1:41:42Jordi Hays?

  After I bought my, after I bought my house, I had a, I hired a,

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  Feng Shui consultant.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Feng Shui consultant, David Cho, who's based here in LA. And he taught me a lot about my house and how to make it nicer. But you don't even have to believe in Feng Shui. Just look at how, you know, if you're skeptic. Go around your house and there'll be areas of your home that you completely ignore that are perfectly good areas, like a living room or something like that, that you just never go in because they're, the Feng Shui is off, so you intuitively don't feel like, you just don't feel like spending any time there.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, I mean, you can abstract it into just like, you walk into a cluttered house that has a lot of hoarding going on. That's bad vibe. You're not going to be productive there. You're in a really clean, beautiful space where everything's laid out reasonably and you're not bumping into things. You're not stubbing your toes. Like, all these things add up to just a more pleasant, happy life. And you can explain it through ancient Chinese wisdom, or just like logic and reason, and both are equally valid. But the end result is that, yes, you should, in fact, follow the principles of Feng Shui.

• 1:42:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:42:48John Coogan?

  Promoted post.

• 1:42:50Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post. Caught me off guard here. We got a promoted post from Augustus Derico. He says, "Apply to work as a forward deployed engineer at rainmaker.com/careers." And he posted a picture of their truck stuck in the mud. So if you didn't see, Augustus had a little episode last week where he and his team got stuck in the mud, but they made it out. And yeah, I think this is a super important company. We've been, over the last 48 hours, 72 hours, we've been at the mercy of Mother Nature. Augustus is trying to, Rainmaker, lucky to be an investor.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  Was he the emerging poster of the year as well?

• 1:43:32Jordi Hays?

  He was. Award-winning poster and cigarette smoker.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Runner-up for hobbyist of the year.

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I mean, the team works really hard. They're doing something important. And yeah, every now and then I'll see a Rainmaker hater online, and I'm just like, "Pick a better hobby." Like, this company's very cool. And Augustus is very cool. And I don't think they'll be doing as many Gundo bonfires anymore. Sort of poor taste to light things on fire. But a cool opportunity. Go check it out.

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  Let's go to a bucket poll. We got $10 Danny here and he says, "Bro, you're fine. You just need an impossible sequence of events to play out in perfect order against all odds and you'll be fine." 200K likes. Banger.

• 1:44:23Jordi Hays?

  That is the mentality that you should be bringing in to the rest of your Thursday.

• 1:44:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Jordi Hays?

  By the time this episode gets up, you may only have a few hours left, but.

• 1:44:32John Coogan?

  The genetic lottery. It's real. Win it. No excuses.

• 1:44:35Jordi Hays?

  No excuses.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  Do we gotta close out?

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  I think we're getting there.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  Okay, let's do a couple more.

• 1:44:41Jordi Hays?

  Do a couple more.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  Uh, Chris, spare a.

• 1:44:44Jordi Hays?

  Guys, if you didn't, if you couldn't tell, John is deeply, deeply addicted to podcasting.

• 1:44:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  And uh.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  We gotta keep it going. We gotta.

• 1:44:53Jordi Hays?

  He's like, "Oh, I gotta leave it one. I got a lot of going on at home."

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  It's one time now. We're good.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  The guy's sitting there, they're scratching his wrist.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  This is interesting, though. We gotta, we gotta cover this. Chris says, "Bridger Aerospace owns six super scoopers, including the one you saw on your timeline today. These are the, these are the planes that put out the fires. It's a public company. The ticker is B A E R, Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings, and just today, they're up 10%, 11.6% to be.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  That was cool. I love when something.

• 1:45:26Jordi Hays?

  Where was Shkreli to tell people to go long Bridger Aerospace?

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  It's one of my favorite like autism hobbies is when something crazy happens. You go and you deep dive, like the businesses and the corporations that are behind, like, like Caruso, like when else would I really go and understand his full career? I'm really glad I understand it now because he actually is a fascinating business model. He's not like other real estate developers and it is really interesting. I learned a lot from that.

• 1:45:50Jordi Hays?

  Founder mode.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  And it's the same thing. I would love to know, you know, who's the founder of Bridger Aerospace? What's their stock trading at? How does the business work? How many of these things do they own? Do they make them? Who makes them? I want to know everything about this. Uh, you know, AI can help with this stuff, but you gotta know what questions to ask.

• 1:46:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  And uh, yeah, it's fun. And that's part of why we do the show. Let's go to Palmer Lucky. I love this post. He says. After spending a few days at CES 2025, it is clear that this vibe shift is real. Everyone wants to help our military. Everyone wants to build. Nobody is afraid. Fantastic vibe shift. And I liked the follow up here because someone was like, oh, like they're Johnny come latelys. Like they're just joining now when it's trendy. There's no political risk. There's no career risk to saying, yes, I support the military.

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  It's still important.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  And he says, yeah, this is exactly what Palmer replied. He said, we should have an open 10 for them. It's fine. Like, let's just forget about that. I'm not going to go and pull the receipts from, oh, you weren't on board five years ago, 10 years ago. And I was thinking about it, like when Androil launched, I thought the company was cool. I liked Palmer. And when Palmer got fired from Facebook, I was like, this is very anti-democratic and I'm not into it. But like, I wasn't out there like blogging about it or posting about it like, and it's not that I was like necessarily afraid to espouse that view. It's like, I didn't really have a platform back then. But ultimately, like, all that matters is like the end of the road. Like, get everyone on the right team for the right reasons. And it doesn't matter if it requires a vibe shift. And you see this all over the place.

• 1:47:17Jordi Hays?

  You know, credit to Palmer, the Androil seed round, obviously, they had a ridiculously stacked team. And it was a, you know, founders fund was involved, but the, the Androil seed round was done at like 97 posts or something like that. Talk about a mango. Talk about an absolute mango seed round.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  I know some people that-

• 1:47:37Jordi Hays?

  And that was, that was at a time that there was a very, very, very, very small group of people in Silicon Valley that, that even thought the category was investable at all. To be able to pull off a round like that.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  I know a big, a big hedge fund that passed because of price. Mistake.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Yikes.

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  That's great. Let's do this one. We'll do another promoted post. Esther Crawford, former ex-employee, former Twitter employee. Says, "Not enough people know that the person behind Community Notes is K. Coleman. It launched in January 2021 under the name Birdwatch. His product vision withstood the test of three CEOs, Jack Parag and Elon, and is expanding to Meta's massive user base. Absolutely legendary product sense." That is crazy. Like, it seems so obvious, the Community Notes feature, but it really is this.

• 1:48:27Jordi Hays?

  You're a noter.

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  I am, I am, and I enjoy it.

• 1:48:30Jordi Hays?

  Watch out, watch out, brothers.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  I'll put somebody in the truth zone.

• 1:48:33Jordi Hays?

  You'll put anybody in the truth zone. Because the truth for you is paramount.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  And it is crazy, like, there are so many posts that have Community Notes on them. Constantly, like, almost every single one of Elon's posts has a Community Note on it, and people are battling it out, but it always surfaces extra information, extra context.

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Really, Elon's are hyper-targeted?

• 1:48:52John Coogan?

  He's not out of the woods, for sure. It happens all the time, yeah. Yeah, a lot of times he'll quote tweet something that's like a little edgy or conspiratorial. It'll have a Community Note, and then Elon's post will have a Community Note too, and you just see two of these. But also, as someone who's in the program, I see more Community Notes than the average person. Because I see them as soon as one person even proposes it, before one wins in the battle of ideas, the free marketplace. You can see, okay, there's four different people, and then there'll also be people saying, "NNN, like, no note needed", and they'll put like why they don't think it's a note. Like, it's obvious satire, we don't need a note. Or somebody else will say, "Actually, we do need a note. We need to link to this Wikipedia article, or this Wall Street Journal article."

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  It's a really cool system, and then you can get in there, write stuff, upvote stuff, and see stuff before it goes out. And then, interestingly, like, they're really good with the push notifications. "Hey, you liked the post, and now it has Community Note, we're updating you." Just really, really great system, and just like, it's not censorship. It's just adding to the conversation, which I really, really like. So I can still see all the crazy conspiracy theories.

• 1:49:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because usually, once a post goes viral, people will correct it in the comments.

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  They may not get any attention.

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:50:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:05John Coogan?

  But you can just see. This is half a promoted post, but we're going to be tracking this. We're now, I guess, six days out until Varda's second mission. Delian is announcing Varda's going to space again. We're very excited for this.

• 1:50:20Jordi Hays?

  They're going back.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  We'll be covering it. We'll be live the day it happens, and you'll certainly hear about it here on the show. And this time, they're launching from Vandenberg, but they're landing down under in Australia. Very exciting.

• 1:50:33Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  Huge progress for that company. Very excited to see it. So, congrats to Delian and the team at Varda.

• 1:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Bad. Bad week to be a Delian hater.

• 1:50:43John Coogan?

  Bad week to be a Delian hater.

• 1:50:44Jordi Hays?

  It's been a bad few years.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  I mean, some of the dunks are funny. There was this one where he posted a picture of like the new factory floor, and it was just like empty because it's a new factory. And somebody was like, "A lot of space in the space factory." And I was like, "Okay, that's kind of funny." But it's like, of course, they filled it in. They filled it up so much that Andrew has to move out Dochfin. He doesn't have room for his old vacuum.

• 1:51:06Jordi Hays?

  But now it's going in my backyard.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So, it's all full cycle. And they've been growing a bunch. They hired a ton of people. I think Delian said they hired more people in the last like two weeks than they did in the first eight months of the company. Something like that. So, exciting. Love getting stuff to space. We'll definitely be sending some.

• 1:51:23Jordi Hays?

  We're going to send. We're sending podcasting equipment.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:51:26Jordi Hays?

  And Patek Philippe's to the moon.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  So that it's ready for us when we.

• 1:51:29John Coogan?

  When we get there. Just arrive, put on the watch.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  We're going to send a minute repeater.

• 1:51:33John Coogan?

  A minute repeater. It'll just be chiming. Yeah, we do it with a watchwinder.

• 1:51:37Jordi Hays?

  There's no sound.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  With a watchwinder. So it's wound the entire time.

• 1:51:40Jordi Hays?

  There's no sound. So maybe just like a chronograph.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:51:43Jordi Hays?

  More basic.

• 1:51:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something good. Got to keep the time. Speaking of keeping the time, what do we got there in that promoted post?

• 1:51:49Jordi Hays?

  We got the last promoted post of the day. A gorgeous Patek Philippe Reference 5270P with a pink dial available on windvintage.com. Eric Wind is a fantastic collector and dealer, and you can go check out this watch. I mean, this thing. Makes me emotional. Like, I'm gonna tear up looking at it. And it's just a very good looking watch.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  Chronograph, too. Fantastic. You were just mentioning it.

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  This could be.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  It's the daily driver.

• 1:52:18Jordi Hays?

  That could be your new daily.

• 1:52:19John Coogan?

  I want to keep track of how long the show's been going.

• 1:52:21Jordi Hays?

  You have basically.

• 1:52:22John Coogan?

  I think I need a chronograph. I can't run the show without it.

• 1:52:25Jordi Hays?

  You basically have three hours to buy this watch before the brothers are gonna be notified about it. And so.

• 1:52:31John Coogan?

  It's less now. We're getting this thing up in 30 minutes after we post.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Call your wife.

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, sorry. Canceling the promoted post we bought at our sex.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Canceling the family event.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:41Jordi Hays?

  Later.

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, Jordy texted me last night. He was like, you should get on Bezel and impulse buy a Patek Philippe and tell your wife that.

• 1:52:49Jordi Hays?

  It was an emotional reaction.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  It was an emotional reaction. Like, you're just really stressed out about the fires and like.

• 1:52:53Jordi Hays?

  Needed an outlet.

• 1:52:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I encourage anyone who's suffering with a natural disaster to, you know, treat yourself.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  Treat yourself.

• 1:53:02Jordi Hays?

  A little treat.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you should be able to put a lot of your net worth as a percentage on your wrist and get out of Dodge.

• 1:53:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:09John Coogan?

  And you should also have a car that goes 200 miles an hour in case the fires are traveling.

• 1:53:13Jordi Hays?

  You saw people posting, oh, think about how much Bitcoin just got taken off the map because everybody in the Palisades had their ledgers.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  I don't buy it at all.

• 1:53:21Jordi Hays?

  I don't buy it at all. I think that people that live in the Palisades that are not like, that are crypto like normies. They're keeping their Bitcoin in ETF, like ETFs.

• 1:53:33John Coogan?

  ETF for sure. Maybe Coinbase.

• 1:53:35Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Coinbase.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  Maybe self custody wallet for 1% of them.

• 1:53:39Jordi Hays?

  But even those, it's like, yeah, it's, you're, somebody was saying, oh, yeah, they have their, their.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  Ledgers in the walls.

• 1:53:47Jordi Hays?

  They, they, they used wallpaper and they had their, it's like, absolutely not. Like, if anything, i- if, if, you know, I was packing up in a relative hurry. And the handful of things that were small that I could bring and just brought them. And like, watches are not going up in flames. There were, for sure, supercars that went up in flames. You know, probably if it's a Palisades, it's.

• 1:54:12Jordi Hays?

  One of one Porsches and stuff like that. Um, and so those have been erased from the market.

• 1:54:18John Coogan?

  Some Kith M4 comps.

• 1:54:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of Kith M4 comps.

• 1:54:25Jordi Hays?

  But I don't know about ledger wallets. I don't think it was a, um.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  A lot of G wagons. We lost a lot of good G wagons out there.

• 1:54:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 1:54:35Jordi Hays?

  It's funny that the Palisades Village, every other car in the parking lot is a G wagon. If you want to stand out, don't get a G wagon.

• 1:54:44John Coogan?

  Unless it's convertible or a six by six.

• 1:54:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  Or four by four squared.

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  Then it wouldn't fit in the parking garage. That's a big issue of LA. There's, there's, there's still are parking garages that don't fit G wagon.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, you get the six by six and then you get it lowered.

• 1:54:58Jordi Hays?

  A lowered six by six.

• 1:54:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  With an F40.

• 1:55:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, but yeah, just swap all your engines all throughout your cars. Take the, take the V8 from that 40, put it in the six by six.

• 1:55:12Jordi Hays?

  Five six cars, swap all the equipments and all the transmissions.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  Put exhaust on all of them.

• 1:55:17Jordi Hays?

  Wide enough. Yeah.

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, stanced under lighting for sure.

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  Put your SF90 wheels on your.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  You already lost 300K on the SF90. You might as well, you might as well stance it and get some under lighting.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  We were laughing about that at F1. I was at F1 in Miami and we were laughing about like, so like all the different brands, like the Mercedes team before the race, they do, uh, like a parade and like, it'll be like Lewis Hamilton in like some beautiful like gullwing, you know, SLR. I forget what the car is called, but like, you know, some 60s car and then the Ferraris come out and they're like, these, these amazing, like one of the GTBs, the, the, the, the really expensive one. They're all riding in these like really heritage things. We were like, well, what's Red Bull gonna do? Like they don't, they don't have like a heritage car. We're like, they should just show up in, in like stanced JDMs.

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  Red Bull Honda, the Honda engine.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. S2000 wrapped, like a total Tokyo drift mode.

• 1:56:17Jordi Hays?

  Wing.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  With the wing. It'd be fantastic.

• 1:56:19Jordi Hays?

  LED under lighting.

• 1:56:20John Coogan?

  Just Max Verstappen, just like in the S2000, just drifting.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  We should actually get one of those, just.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:27Jordi Hays?

  And then take it up in the canyons.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be great. Fantastic. Well, let's close with this bucket poll, our last bucket poll. We're out of bucket polls. We gotta print some more for tomorrow. Last bucket polls from Grant and Grant says, this is a low TAM banger. Already follows us. Thank you, Grant. 32 likes, says a picture of Rick Rubin and says, the way that I speak to the AI has proven profitable to shareholders. And then Timothy Blumberg says, JFC, this is an underrated post. I respect it. Went out on Christmas or two days before. Great post. I love Rick Rubin.

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  I like that. I like that screenshot too. Wait, Lucy advertises on, so Rick Rubin is a nicotine salesman?

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, he, he reached out to us. He like, likes the brand.

• 1:57:15Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Yeah.

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's a cooler cosign to me than Rogan. I love Rogan.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a very cool moment for the company, for sure. It was awesome.

• 1:57:25Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I have no technical abilities. I just consume high volumes of yerba mate and nicotine.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. He's just like, he just kind of fucks with us.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  I just talk to the AI.

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so we, as we were like, yeah, we're happy to sport and run ads and stuff. And yeah, it's always great when he has, I mean, he's, he's become a great podcaster. Has great, great guests, always great conversations. The, if you're looking for an episode to listen to of the, of the Rick Rubin podcast, I recommend, it's called Tetragramaton. You can find it on all of your podcast players. I recommend the Travis Barker episode.

• 1:57:57Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:57:58John Coogan?

  Crazy. Talks about the dude got in plane crashes, like all the Blink 182 stuff, the breakup of the band and stuff.

• 1:58:05Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  Where everyone went. It's a, it's a fantastic episode. And obviously they, they, they like really, really mind meld because they're both in music and creatives and stuff. And, uh, you know, I, my experience with Blink 182 has not been listening to a lot of like highbrow interviews with them. It's like listening to the songs and the songs are kind of just like, you know, high school party mosh pit songs to me. But there's this whole other side of this like brilliant drummer who's done so many different things and had this wonderful career. And, uh, it's always fun when you go and, uh, see the other side. Uh, one of the other great music interviews that I listened to was, uh, the lead singer of Slipknot, I think his name's Cody something, was on Larry King. And it's this fascinating

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  dive into, he's like completely, he's insane when he's on stage, right? Slipknot's like the most hardcore metal band with like the faces and the masks and stuff. Corey Taylor, yeah. And, and then Larry King is like buttoned up in the suit, this like, this like one-on-one interview. And Corey just has this like, very thoughtful analysis of like, the politics of his music and the fans and are the fans crazy or deranged? Like, why do they even need this outlet? He's from Iowa. There's been a lot of displacement of jobs and a lot of, a lot of hollowed out communities and like, why this insane music from Slipknot resonates with them? And it's, it's just a fascinating watch. So, recommend that one,

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  too. Anyway, we gotta go. We gotta check on the houses. They're probably all burned down by now, but we will be podcasting tomorrow regardless.

• 1:59:38Jordi Hays?

  Whatever you're doing, go sign up for Ramp, unless you're already signed up for Ramp, which most of our listeners are.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  If you're already signed up, pitch Ramp to another company.

• 1:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  Friends company.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  Text your group chat, say, "Hey, you guys are stupid if you're not on Ramp."

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, next time you go do a dinner.

• 1:59:55Jordi Hays?

  Text your group chats and say, "Listen to Technology Brothers."

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:59Jordi Hays?

  Rate them five stars. You can always revise the rating after you listen if, if you disagree with your initial judgment. But start with five and then pare it back.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you go to a business dinner, you're, when you pay, when you split the check, it should look like the American Psycho scene, but only Ramp cards. And if someone doesn't have one, you gotta call them out.

• 2:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Call them out.

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  Call them out. Hold them to account. It's called accountability, folks. Call it accountability.

• 2:00:23Jordi Hays?

  That's the show. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Goodbye.