The LA Fires Continue, Rebuilding Market Map, PMF or DIE, Unpacking the "R" word, The End of Censorship

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  John, who was the doctor that you were going to for catheter?

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, we're alive. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We're still loosely on the topic of the fires, but today we're flipping to a little bit more of an optimistic frame. We're going to take you through the rebuilding process. Who's going to make money off of this disaster? There's always a lot of money changing hands, whether it's through insurance, private companies, rebuilding, all sorts of different things that are going to happen. So we're going to take you through a market map of what companies are going to be built.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're going to try to get into there. There's people that there's people that are taking advantage of the situation, but there's also a bunch of good people.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  And there's also a lot of chaos. So yeah, excited to dive in here. But we'll kick it off with some coverage by our boy.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Mike Solana.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  Mike Solana.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, journalist of the year.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Journalist of the year.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  2024 journalist of the year. So Mike Solana writes in Pirate Wires, a piece called Wildfire. He's, he does a very interesting thing in this piece. He kind of connects the wildfires to the Mark Zuckerberg announcement about the removal of fact checkers and the institution of community notes. It was pretty interesting, but it's a great overview of kind of where the chaos stands. Culturally, Mike always does a great job of blending technology and politics together in a really cool way. So I'll just read through some of this. Last Wednesday, America woke up to footage of Los Angeles, once Los Angeles's once idyllic Pacific Palisades in black and smoldering ruins, as the city began to grapple with the worst fire in its history.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Almost immediately, the remaining vestiges of our de facto state press lifted their hands to the sky in despair and blamed global warming.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Also not just the worst fire in LA history, it's the worst fire in American history from the lens of economic damage.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder if it's going to be the worst fire in human history.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Ever.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  If you measure it that way.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  It's it's it's up there. It's massive. We are recording in a different city because of this. We've both been loosely displaced.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  A fire could rip through two or three Western European countries and not cause the same amount of economic damage as one neighborhood of LA.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  And so the Democratic politicians echoed the charge and demanded action, decarbonizing our entire planet, from Donald Trump, who would not be president for another two weeks. But on X, there was no hiding from the truth, and there will be no forgetting what we saw. LA was a portrait of madness, as hundreds of thousands of people evacuated the city while suspected arsonists shuffled through the haunted hills and empty streets, spreading fire, and roving gangs of looters picked apart abandoned homes. From the first deadly blaze, questions from the front lines quickly rocketed back to social media and spread. And and he lists out all of these great questions that people were asking, some, you know, conspiracy theories and some things that were proven true. And it's very, very interesting to, because it happened so fast, I didn't remember all of these. We talked about a few of these.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  But why were the fire hydrants running dry, something that's been really hotly debated? Why did the LA water chief, Janice Quinones, empty the San Andres reservoir? And why was she making $750,000 a year?

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw an interview with her where she repeatedly said that equity was her primary motive in taking the job, like over and over and over. That was like the most important thing to her.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  Which, you know, it's fine for her to have that belief, but you would imagine that you'd want the person running our water infrastructure to just make sure that it was a well-run.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, well-run, you know, sort of system.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, the priority should be like your job first.

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Other stuff comes after.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  Also, also unbelievable comp for a public servant, you know.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  I mean, we love big comp packages here. Should we ring the size gong for her? Seven fifty K.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to really give it too much, you know, just.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  But not, not bad. It's not bad for a day's work doing apparently nothing. The, the, the next question is, why was LA Mayor Karen Bass at a presidential inauguration in Ghana? Um, and then actually, why was the mayor of LA on a diplomatic mission to Africa at all?

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  The Ghana thing's interesting. I, I think so. A lot of, th- this got kind of blown over a little bit, but Malibu had bad fires.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Less than a month ago.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  And the town was really damaged. There was, if you drive through Malibu today, you, you would think that the fires had really gotten into the, the sort of central area of Malibu, but it was actually the last fire, which was in December and same exact thing, high wind warning. Fires started up almost immediately. In that situation, the fire fighting teams were just able to be a lot more effective and save a lot of structures. So it wasn't, it was like fifteen structures were taken out or damaged. Um, and so Malibu and, and sort of Santa Monica Mountain residents are basically trained to, at this point where if there's a high wind warning, there will be fires, right? And so that's why this week, everybody's still on super high alert because there's high winds today.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  They shut off power again and all this stuff. Um, so, so Bass was getting briefed on the high wind warning while she was on her trip, knowing that this was like the, the, the most significant fire risk. Uh, and still decided I'm going to stay on this trip that at this point, nobody even knows what the purpose of the trip is, but it seems like one of those. Kind of like relationship building, sort of more like photo opportunity.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  It does. I mean, I was thinking about this because like at the first read, it's like very bizarre. Like, why is a mayor going to a country so far away? Like, you think about the mayor, like, their business is in the city. They should always be in the city.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:00John Coogan?

  Governor should be always be in the state, and then the federal employees and, you know, the president should be traveling, doing like the geopolitics stuff.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  And there was an early story about like Bernie Sanders being one of the first congressmen or governors to do like foreign policy as a local politician. It was very odd. It was criticized.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  But, but I was trying to steel man it. Like, is there a reason why I would want my mayor to be in a foreign country? And, I mean, we can use like the Swiss watch industry as a joke, but there are reasons why if, if there's a country that's doing a lot of business in your city, it might actually make sense to go visit that and say, "Hey, you know, you are, you are a constituent in the, in some way. You are selling a lot of products in our city, or you are, you know, so I'm going there to make sure that our business relationship with my city is great, and, and I might want my mayor to go and do that." Again, it's a little odd because I don't think we have a really amazing business relationship with them.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Karen has a history of, of, of, you know, foreign, you know, policy missions. She, in the seventies, her favorite trip was to Cuba, where she would go and she would coordinate, I'm forgetting the exact name of the group, the extremist group that she was a part of, but she would coordinate with the Cuban government to sort of strategize on bringing communism back to Southern California. And it sounds like, it sounds like a joke, but look it up. It's factually true.

• 7:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, maybe she just likes to travel. Maybe that's just part of her thing.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Regardless, she, she had posts like a few years ago saying, calling out other politicians in disaster scenarios, being like, "Why aren't you, you know, it's embarrassing that you're not at home with your..." So the whole thing is, you know, she has been completely melting down, but let's get back to the...

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Uh, more questions. Why in a city constantly on fire did the mayor cut the fire department's budget? It's a very good question. And if you look at the, the, the breakdown of the budgets, it's not like the budget of everything was cut and the fire department was just cut less than everything else. It's like the fire department was uniquely cut, one of the, one of the hardest hit departments. And then a lot of other things increased in budget. So it's kind of odd why we were allocating away from that.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the fire, so the, the fire chief who's been getting just, you know, memed and, and, and kind of unnecessary ways in many ways, it seems. But she had put together a report telling the mayor's office, we need, we don't need our budgets cuts. We need 50 more fire stations in LA county. So she was, you know,

• 8:33John Coogan?

  Asking for the right thing.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Bang in the size gong, asking for more budget.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  Getting.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Size gong. Everyone needs a size gong. It's like, look, I need my budget increased. I need to ring the size gong.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  We didn't, we couldn't bring much from the studio, but we brought the flag. We brought the flag and the size gong.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  And some money.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  And why, uh, the last question is, and why had the state prohibited insurers from increasing rates as the risk of wildfire increased, which catalyzed a drop in coverage just before one of the worst fires in its history? California is a one-party state, so failure in California is perceived as an indictment of democratic governance. This means wildfire discourse is pretty much toxic at the national level. Republicans are incentivized to highlight disaster in the state. Democrats are incentivized to obscure it, and nobody is incentivized to chart a course toward safety for the people of California. While inevitable, the discourse stalemate has nonetheless been frustrating. And this is something that I covered in that solo episode was like, I, I, I wasn't even trying to take like a political stance.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  I was more just trying to like, lay down like, what will the narrative be? And what, where, where is, where are the battle lines being drawn right now? And it's the question of like, you know, was this a man-made fire? Was this, uh, can you pin this on the, a lot of times these fires get pinned on like the electrical companies for not doing maintenance on their transformers.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  That's why now every time there's any

• 9:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  Fire risk, they shut off the power completely.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Which makes sense to them there because there were, were landmark court cases where they were proven to be at fault. And there's these billion dollar payouts or whatever. So they're like, well,

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Startup idea. How about a transformer that just doesn't fucking explode?

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  I cannot believe how many transformers just explode when something goes wrong. Like, that just seems like an engineering flaw, right?

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Transform into a more structurally sound.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  No, but the real solution is to bury, the real solution is to bury the lines.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  And I don't think the utility companies want to pay for that. So now they're hoping for bailout.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  There is, there is an interesting question. I don't know if we talked about this before, but there's this massive move in, in LA. Everyone's saying like, oh, look at the houses that survived. They, you know, they use like steel and brick or whatever. And you see the, the burned down homes and the chimney is always still there because it's made out of brick. And so it's like, oh, maybe just rebuild with brick. But you forget that like earthquakes are huge here. And like, if you just focus for fire prevention, well, then when an earthquake comes, you're going to get screwed. And, and, and, and like, it's easy in this, in the, in these kinds of like immediate disasters to just refocus on like the current issue and be like, fire prevention is the number one thing, but it's like, maybe the time is to also think about earthquake prevention and fire prevention and all the different things.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  I think the, you know, in, in some ways focusing on making, you know, built, developing houses so inexpensive through stuff like cover.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  And my buddy Alex, a company, has a company that Packyback that's focused on building, you know, building homes in a, in a, in a much more inexpensive way. Part of it's like, if you could build a home 10 times faster for 10 times less money, then there wouldn't even be the same issues around insurance because you could

• 11:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  lose your home and just rebuild it fairly quickly.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which is sort of dark, but um, maybe that's a part of the solution here.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, Solana takes a little bit of a victory lap for having called a lot of this. Uh, he says he first wrote about California's wildfires in the fall of 2020, and then again in 2021 in a piece called global warming ate my homework. Great catchphrase. He quote tweeted Bernie Sanders with that and got a lot of attention because it's it's a great way to, you know, focus on the key issue of like, you can't just always blame global warming when like, if you had done the wildfire prevention, it would be easily solved.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  My dad, during his teaching career, his his website where you would go to get the homework?

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  Was dog ate my homework dot com.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Oh, really? That's amazing. Good domain, runs through the blood.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  He let it expire. I was like, Dad, like, come on.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  That's a great name.

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, again, the whole like, at a certain point, the excuses just stop working. And and when Bernie was tweeting blaming this all on climate change, I was, I don't get triggered.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  But I was.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Upset.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Generally, like, I was like, okay, like, come on, dude. Like, this is, like, this is not the time. And also, you're in Vermont, so why don't you focus on Vermont, which is a disaster in many ways, too.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Solana breaks down like a little bit of what's going on here. Wildfires, including mega fires, have burned through California for thousands of years. But about 100 years ago, Gold Rush times, the population of California exploded, which led to the prevention of natural wider scale burns as humans fought back against the regional phenomenon. Fuel has built up for decades because of this, and today's the state, the state's at constant risk of burning. There's no easy solution to this problem, the problem, let's call it, of living in a place that tends to be on fire.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  I love any thrust in these jokes. Although there are many strategies we should consider, from housing policy that encourages greater urban density, I talked about that, away from the winds to better, or from the wilds, to better resource management, to reservoirs, to new equipment. We are also living in the future, I'm told, and I wonder what new tech, what new strategies and technology might be possible from tracking to fighting fire. Probably someone literally paid to pursue such things should do a little digging.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  But decarbonizing our entire planet is not a serious suggestion, not only because it's never gonna happen, but because if it does happen, California will still be at constant risk of massive deadly wildfire. We need a plan. I argued this for years. And so, goes a little bit into, you know, how the discourse has shifted on X because there's much less fact checking. This is a really interesting anecdote. Now, there really is an art to good fact checking, one of the most popular and useful weapons in our sprawling information war. Generally, what you want to focus on is something categorically wrong, which by relation seems to disprove an entire class of thing you find uncomfortable.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  CNN produced a great example of the tactic early morning, early Monday morning. Meta fact checkers, they reported, debunked a post on looting. And from what I can tell, they were correct. The narrow example they fact checked was indeed wrong, but was looting a problem barely discussed in the early days of the fire while widely, while widely discussed online, a problem or not? And then he says, as, as, as, at the time of my writing, 29 looters have been arrested with hundreds of looters reported. Generally speaking, it was and remains a huge obvious problem.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  And, and they had to create a 24 hour curfew effectively where you were not, in Malibu specifically, you were not allowed to move around, walk around, et cetera. We were, my neighborhood was looking at beefing up our security, and the only place the security was going to be able to sit was at the guard tower or in, in the community.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  So it was effectively not going to be worthwhile because we already had security there.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  And so, they weren't even letting private security come into the area. So imagine the number of people that would have been arrested if. And that were arrested.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Just as a media strategy, I find this section so fascinating because it's like, like, you know, you're, you're running some like SaaS company and people are complaining about your website being slow or something. But instead of addressing like the, the median complainer, you find like the most extreme person who has some like insane avatar and you're like, I'm being targeted by the far left or the far right. And then it's like, oh, well, like, you know, he debunked that person. So, you know, he debunked the entire class of complaint. But I, I, I, I feel like this has been used all over the place to great effect. This idea of just like honing in on one thing.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what Newsom has been doing too. And he's hyper fixated on maintaining his image right now. And so anything that anyone says, he's, he's a master manipulator and, and media personality. And so, yeah, it's a good strategy to just focus in on the one thing. But in my, you know, going through this, the last couple, you know, last week or so, it's been eye opening to me because so much of the information that I, I was getting from people that, that they were speaking factually, like Nobu burned down. It did not

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  burn down. It was saved. Yeah, apparently two, so Larry Ellison has seven homes on PCH, two out of the seven burned down. And apparently the firefighters just decided to make a final stand at Ellison's houses. I wouldn't be surprised if he was like carrying like, this is a Bitcoin, you know, hard, hardware wallet, like, don't let it go any farther. But, but yeah, there, there was just a lot of, a lot of people were saying the Palisades Village burned down. In fact, it was the only area of the Palisades, basically, that didn't burn down. So there was a lot of stuff that ended up, wasn't intentionally misinformation.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  How bad do you think the, the Palisades Village is gonna be in for it? Post fire because Caruso had private firefighters there and water tanks and was very set up to defend it. He defended it successfully. You know, people are criticizing him. Oh, like he prioritized his buildings over people's homes, but clearly the guy was prepared and planned effectively and was effective in like protecting.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  I think it'll ultimately be.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  But the question is just like, who's going to go to these businesses when it's all just construction.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  So here's, here's, here's what I think happens. Just my opinion. I think it was actually very positive that one small area was untouched.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  Because that is going to be the community center for people to rebuild.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of these stores, you know, the stores there, Bottega Veneta, St. Laurent, you know, like these stores like not really useless.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Replace them with Home Depot.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  They should be like construction, you know, hardware stores, gas stations, you know, restaurants for food. Cause like, there's gonna need, the homeowners will be spending and the residents will not be spending much time there.

• 18:52John Coogan?

  No.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  But there's going to be for every home, let's say the average home has a crew of 10 people working on it. You know, that, that's tens of thousands of people that need to eat and, you know, buy supplies and get gas and stuff like that. So I think it will ultimately be a beacon of hope and some, it's not going to be normalcy.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  But, um, but it will be.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Hopefully Caruso can kind of blend the losses across.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  It'll be interesting, like, does, is it makes sense for Arowan to still be there when it should probably be a smart and final now?

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Because like people should, you know, they don't, we don't need, we don't need $20, you know, grain bowls when, when the average person buying will be like, you know, day labor.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe he, uh, maybe just does short-term leases and just swaps out the.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. I think he'll be strategic. I think he'll be strategic with it.

• 19:40John Coogan?

  And then brings in the high-end stuff later.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Cause he's being worth $6 billion. He could have that and he owns his properties. Like he could basically zero it out.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  But if he goes into, we need a hardware tenant, we need, you know, this, this, this. Um, and, uh, maybe get a slop cavabos in there.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Some barnyard, barnyard, barnyard bowls.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  So in typical Solana fashion, he bridges the two major stories of the year of the week together into one kind of thesis. And he shifts from the wildfires and all the fact checking that's going on on X to Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that he will be removing fact checkers for Meta properties and implementing an X-like community notes system, which we talked on the show before. But Solana has a bunch of good stuff in here. He says, "On Blue Sky, Zuckerberg's changes were, of course, likened to white supremacy by the sort of mental patients once uncritically cited as experts by our tech press. And sure, we love to throw eggs at the crazy people who held us prisoner over the last few years.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  It's funny when they claim their lives are in danger because people are shitposting on a platform where they do not themselves post, and it's good to laugh at them. But Meta's changes really are significant, and they were announced in a manner meant to make that clear. Mark didn't only change course on speech, he denounced fact checkers both specifically in the case of their work at Meta and conceptually. This was returned to the company's founding values, he argued."

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  One more point on that. I do think I have been generally, everybody can say these, "I posted yesterday."

• 21:19John Coogan?

  Have you been testing the limits on Instagram, going really, really extreme, seeing if Mark's, you know, really putting his money where his mouth is?

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, I just posted yesterday, just because you can say, there was this Egan Robot says, "It's morning again in America," and there's a quote from a banker, "I feel liberated." We can say the R-word and the P-word without fear of getting canceled. It's a new dawn. And so my point was, just because you can say the R-word now doesn't mean you should.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  And I think that the people are taking this as an opportunity to be mean and hateful.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  And it's low-class and vulgar. We joke about this, but it's true. Don't use free speech.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  To be mean.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Just, just, just, there's no, there's no, um, more or less, you don't see, um, you don't see successful people being mean online.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  Even Palmer, when he uses some of these words, is using them in response to Jason, who's an internet bully.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  So he's standing up to an internet bully.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  But even with Palmer, as he said, the third and fourth iteration of the R word, it started to get old.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  But again, Jason is like trying to bully him.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  Which is hilarious to try to bully.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  A billionaire who's 10 times more successful than you. Um, but that's what's happening. So. But yeah, I would just say to, to our audience, um, just try, you know, there's no, there's no ROI, there's no long-term ROI in being mean.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  It's sort of these short-term.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  So I remember literally where I was when I first heard the term, the R word. Obviously I grew up with like, you know, guys calling each other retarded all the time. Um, in, in the pejorative sense, which I don't think you should use. I think it's okay to use it in the descriptive sense. Uh, if you're quoting something or using it in like fire retardant, essentially like to slow the process down. But I remember being at South by Southwest at this like Spotify activation and my business partner was on the phone with someone and he used the R word as in a pejorative sense. And his buddy was like, hey, we don't use the R word anymore. It was kind of like, you know, uh, like, like free speech policing him.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  And he was like, oh, I don't know how I feel about that, but like, I kind of get it. Like it is kind of vulgar. Like maybe I shouldn't use it. And then over the following years, it became like, okay, no one ever uses that.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Which like people were already, there was, there was already a sense of like.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, it was still being used heavily online.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  And in many male circles.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  Totally. But, but, but if you just had like a normie job at like a Fortune 500 company, like you wouldn't use any foul language in the office at all.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  Basically, your mom was right.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Speak how your, your mother.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  Wanted you to speak when you were 10 years old.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  But then what happened was it became such an inflated word to the point where if someone caught you using it, even descriptively.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  And the famous example is Ben Horowitz using it in that Clubhouse chat and Taylor Lorenz putting it out on Twitter saying, and she misattributed it to Marc Andreessen, but Ben Horowitz was quoting some Wall Street Bets, kind of gambler, D Gen guys who used the R word to describe themselves. So they weren't being pejorative because they were using it to describe themselves. They were still using the uncensored R word. He was quoting them. And so it was like three degrees of separation away from like actually calling someone the R word pejoratively.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm just.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  And so it became like this weapon of like, if I caught you using it, if I have evidence of you using it, I can get you fired. I can get you punished. I can hurt you. And so that's why I do think it was important to cross the Rubicon for people like Palmer and Delian to use the word and say, hey, we're not afraid anymore. You can't control our speech.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  But it's funny now, coming back, I would not, I would not be inclined to hire somebody that was freely using the R word.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  In any, in any like online, you know, consistent setting, just because I don't, I don't think it's generally kind. So I think.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  Part of it is having the power and the freedom to do it and having the restraint to say, there's better words, nimrod, communist, mouth breather, venture capitalist. So next time, repeat this, next time you want to use the R word, call someone a VC.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  John, you sound like a VC right now.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so I think like Palmer, at one point, he actually broke down his logic and kind of explained why the, why the word shouldn't be removed from the language and censored. And, and I agree with all of that. I think it's, I think it's good to, to, to say, this is something that should not be this weapon of cancellation. But then there's a second aesthetic question.

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  The aesthetic question.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  I was debating with someone.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  Are terrible.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. There's, there's the, there's like the utilitarian question of the word. Like, should you be fired for using this word? Maybe not. Should you be shamed and should your free speech be impinged? No. But is it an aesthetically beautiful word? No.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  And so that's why it's safe to remove from your language.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  Weird thing where I do think, sound like, you know, again, this is like almost getting into territory that's. This is almost more of like a man, like a business, like management thing. But if I had an employee who is going around using the R word online.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  I would tell them to stop.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  And then if they kept doing it, I do feel like that's grounds for termination because you're representing the company in a way. And you've been asked to not do something. And if you want to go around using your real identity while being employed at a company. It's the same thing to me as somebody going around being racist online.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Especially like, I mean, it's very context dependent.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  It's different if somebody wants to have an anon profile and go on Reddit and be in Wall Street Bets.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  There is a very different thing now, especially with the, with the company badges on X. Like everyone with that badge is an extension of the brand. And, and I mean, we talk about Ramp all the time.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  Warp got into a lot of trouble with this because they gave the badge to everyone.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  It made everyone a brand ambassador. When you look at the way Ramp's done it, it's a lot of people who are on X and are posting about literally just their job. But it helps build the brand because they're posting about software development or Fax Herbert is posting about corporate finance. And he works in corporate finance at Ramp. And so he is an extension of that brand. They don't want their brand to be represented by vulgar terminology. And so it wouldn't make sense for a Ramp employee with the badge to use that word and represent the brand that way. And so it is this weird, it is this weird dance because, because obviously I'm extremely pro free speech. I'm extremely anti cancellation, but aesthetics matter.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  Free speech is also different in the context when you're representing. If a pro, it's totally fair.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  If a pro sports team, it's one thing, okay, a guy, an athlete should be able to give an interview and thank their religion for, you know, whatever, right? That should, you know, nobody should be able to get in the way of that, right?

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  Like that's their part of their identity. Using specific words that negatively impact the brand that you're participating in.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  Is to, is to me a totally different thing. And you can go to another team and do that. You can go work for yourself and do that. You can be, you know, terminally online, unemployed, you know, and use it, you know.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Also, it's like, I mean, it's like good comedy. Like there are, like certain words can be used in very funny and novel ways. And the first few times the R word came out online, it was like, whoa, like, okay, in this context, this is extra funny. I mean, we were joking about it in that Taylor Lorenz piece, how, how he said like her career had been. R word.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  And because it's slowed because that's that's actually the

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Proper.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  The non pejorative definition. So it's like this play on words and that's kind of, I think it's funny. But but if you're just like throwing out the R word everywhere because you just don't, you just don't know any other words and you can't express yourself anyway, it just gets boring. And so it's low class and vulgar and what would your mother say?

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  What would your mother say?

• 29:26John Coogan?

  So that that wraps up our our word rant for the day. Well, you'll probably be able to use it on Meta. They list out a bunch of examples.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Again, I think you should be able to use it on social media platforms.

• 29:40John Coogan?

  They're not the arbiter of this. We're the arbiter of it because we decide what is aesthetically

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Correct in terms of taste.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  And there's going to be teams that decide that that aesthetic aligns with their brand.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  And they're free to use that. But.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  It's very like monster energy word.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  I had, I had a young member of the party around team that there was a period where me and another person on the team would have post notifications on for said person. We would be like, we would have like twice a week, we'd have to be like, delete this right now. And it became this thing.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Some people will be able to guess who that was.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  But, okay, so basically, Solana breaks down some of the reaction at Meta, like the, there's been this big story in the Intercept and formerly Gawker and 404 Media, talking about how like Zuck's announcement has caused chaos at the company. And there was a post on the internal Meta platform called Workplace that said this person's like upset about it and they're taking time off.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Solana then talked to a couple Meta employees himself and and said that there were a couple hundred comments on internal post, but not a single person had quit because of it and Meta employs 25,000 people. So it does seem like a muted reaction internally. People are just kind of like, yeah, cool, fine. No fact checkers, community notes. Awesome. But there's a great anecdote in here from tech history, which I was not familiar with. And he says that. One executive that Solana spoke with reminded him of what Facebook culture used to mean. In 2018, when Justice Kavanaugh was elected to the Supreme Court, a Meta employee and one of Kavanaugh's good friends went to Washington to support him amid the controversies surrounding his confirmation. This, according to the executive I spoke with, led to a full week of what might more be,

• 31:30John Coogan?

  more properly be termed chaos, as thousands of comments lit up Meta's internal message boards, which concluded in an employee walkout. That executive's name was Joel Kaplan. Mark just gave him a promotion. He is now the company's president of global affairs, and nobody at the company seems to care, which is kind of confusing at this point, as it's starting to seem like Zuckerberg is actually trying to piss these people off, which I love. And so, after a few, a few days after his Instagram post, Meta ended its DEI program, and Mark appeared on Rogan to basically apologize for all the censorship.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  Meta in some way benefited from, I think Meta and Sam have benefited from the fires in some ways, because they both had somewhat controversial moves that were just completely drowned out. Like, last week, people really didn't care too much about technology. This was a story, but it had 10 times less interest, because there just was these raging fires.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was hard to post like anything non-fire related, just because it's overwhelming, the timeline. But this is a very interesting debate point. I mean, you, you've kind of called the top on Mark's, you know, rebrand.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  I called the top. I should have posted about it, but I called the top on Mark's personal, the local top.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  Not bearish forever.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  As soon as he throws on a suit, it's a new, it's a new bull market.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, new bull market. No, but, but about six, about six, yeah, yeah. About six months ago, I felt like Mark had been very emboldened by a lot of the positive reactions. He went through the worst negative period. Everybody hated him.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  He was called a robot for like four years straight.

• 33:13Jordi Hays?

  He would go in front of Congress and be gone. And just, he was, he was in a bad spot. Then he started training MMA, working out, got jacked.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  Meta like started ripping, started doing the, the wakeboarding with the American flag, positive response. Moving all the way to the minivan stuff, like flaunting his wealth, like kind of playing into the average Meta user and things that they would find interesting. And I felt, I felt like there's this dynamic where if you get too much positive, the more positive attention you get, the more of a target you're putting on your back front by the internet, right? And anyways, that seems to have been, there now is like a much more, there's a bunch of positive people like, yeah, pros up. And then now there's starting to be people being like, you don't get credit for this decision.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  You're doing it right at the new administration.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  You're very late, you're doing it at the most convenient time.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  And there's always been this theory of like, the PR firm behind his rebrand is genius. And like, I never really bought that because I do think he's just going back to, you, you can literally find all videos.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  I think he's also, he's also always just had like anyone goes through periods with different interests. He got into smoking meats.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  He did that in a very robotic way.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  But then he's now into MMA and likes Dana White and likes, you know?

• 34:35John Coogan?

  And, and he's more confident about it and he's more, he's posting about it.

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  So I'm generally, I'm generally, I'm, I'm in the camp where I'm, I'm glad.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  But I've literally talked to like the, the head of PR at Meta and like, and like, she's always like, yeah, he had to explain to us what MMA was like, they, they didn't know. Like, I'm, I'm like, I'm very, very sure that like, that like, there's no slide deck out there with like, get an FPJorn zuck, like that's what'll work.

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  No, he's, he's, he has agency.

• 35:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and you can see it because if you go back and look at like the first interview he did with like the solo cup on the couch, it's like, that's kind of, he's always kind of been a bro. And then he like, the, the.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you look at even the language he used in the college era is almost the same as what you would expect a guy that looks like he does now.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe these people trust me with their data lol.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  He looks kind of, he looks.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Clearly the robot era was the PR firm makeover. It was like, this guy's too much of a crazy bro. We gotta wrap him in something really tight and like quiet. So like, don't say anything. And now he's kind of unleashed. But, uh, but people are definitely saying like, oh, this is the top and now it's like, oh, this is late and I'm, I'm sick of this shtick. Uh, I think he needs to switch it up. I've argued that he should throw on a suit. Um, there's other things that he could do. He needs to get into long range rifle shooting.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I wish Tim Cook would follow. Tim Cook can't really afford it.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  But if he had the level of wealth that Mark had, he might be able to spice up his personality a bit.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  Tim Cook, you think of Tim Cook, you're like, okay, he drives a Lexus.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  He drives a Lexus?

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm assuming so.

• 36:13Jordi Hays?

  Wears an Apple Watch.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  Wears Lululemon.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:18Jordi Hays?

  Maybe spices his up.

• 36:19John Coogan?

  I think he wears Nikes.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  Some Brunello. Some Brunello now and then. Uh, but Tim Cook, I think, could take Apple from a three to a four trillion dollar market cap just by being a little more personable and being like, yeah, the Photos app is terrible. I'm sorry. The alarm app is terrible. I'm sorry. Battery life is terrible. I'm sorry. We're gonna make it better.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. He is, he is like the most media trained person in the world. Have you seen his interview with MKBHD?

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't do live stuff, right?

• 36:46John Coogan?

  No, well, not anymore, but that's just because of like the COVID stuff and the live stuff's coming back in and stuff. He's not like afraid of that.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  We'll see. We'll be heckling.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, heckling, yeah.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  You bricked my phone.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  No, he did, he did an interview with MKBHD about the Magic Mouse, which is the mouse that you have to plug in this way. So you can't use the mouse while it's plugged in. Like, it would be so obvious just to have the charger in the front. So then you can use the mouse while you're plugging it in. But this, you have to flip it over, plug it into the bottom. It's like one of the worst designs ever. Apple, they have a lot of great designs, but this one was a huge mess.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  So my, my phone.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  MKBHD asked him like, like, uh, what do you think of the Magic Mouse? And he's just like, well, it's one of our best products. And just zero awareness that like people in the Apple community hate that. And he should have easily just been like, yeah, I mean, obviously like we kind of messed up the port. I'm excited to revise that. We have all these timelines. We'll work through it. Like, you know, you, you miss stuff sometimes.

• 37:37Jordi Hays?

  So yes, uh, my phone's about a year old. I might go, uh, I don't think we're gonna have time today, but tomorrow I'm definitely gonna go upgrade it. Um, sorry, I didn't, sorry to Apple. I didn't get it in for Q4, but, but I'll try to buy some other stuff this quarter and really get my, you know, uh, LTV up. But, um, my phone went, yes, I go on, I leave, uh, the house. I go on a beach walk.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:00Jordi Hays?

  I was like listening to something, not even using my phone. In 15 minutes, my phone went from 20% battery life to 1% and then died.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  I was like 20 to one in 15, like a 15 minute walk. I was like, this is basically like a landline now. Like I actually should be charging.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  I, we need the tinfoil hat because I don't believe in this conspiracy, this conspiracy theory at all. I think it's a skill issue. I think.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my battery is a skill issue.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  It is. You have some crazy apps running in the background.

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  No, it's X. Actually, I think X, when you have like, if you're posting.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly. Because you're getting notifications. Boom. Exactly, exactly. And you know, whatever optimization engineer was like, let's worry about the battery. Elon's like, no. Don't care. Fry the battery. Just get the, just get the engagement up. Keep the people on.

• 38:46Jordi Hays?

  We'll get the test. Elon would launch a phone at some point.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  With a week-long battery life, using all of Tesla's like battery technology. Like that would actually, you know, people would be like, oh, that's pretty cool.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  The, the Starlink is like the size of an iPad. You could just have that and then iPad on the front and then it's just like always satellite internet connected.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  I saw a satellite, I saw a Starlink battery, like new product. It's like built like basically like a.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  Oh, right in.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  Long battery that you can put your Starlink in.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Okay, I need that.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  But it costs like five times as much as the.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  As the Starlink. Batteries are expensive. They still are. Apple needs to have some sort of like limited allocation like the, like Ferrari does. So, you know, it's like, look, we're gonna need you to take a bath on this Apple Vision Pro. You're gonna need to get, because these things are losing. You can buy an Apple Vision Pro for 4K and go on eBay and sell it for 2K the next day. Like the depreciation is insane on the, on this product. But you do that a couple of times, your, your, you know, your AD starts liking you, gets you the allocation of the new diamond iced out Apple Watch when it goes live.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, iced it out. With, with a, you know, 72 hour battery life.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  It would be, it would be really funny if they were just like, yeah, we launched the new iPhone, has the, has the best like M4 chip in it. It's super fast.

• 40:03Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting though.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  And, and you're, you're gonna need to get on a list to get it. You can't just buy it.

• 40:08Jordi Hays?

  It is fascinating that Apple has seemingly shifted away from this multi iPhone strategy and basically wanting everybody to get, in theory, get the next iPhone.

• 40:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  When I do believe there's a huge number of people that if they made a $10,000 iPhone that that had a just ultra ridiculous battery life, that they would get it.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  I would, if I had a phone that I just never had to really worry about charging, throw it on every now and then, I, the, the, the sort of my willingness to spend would be.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  It is crazy because like there's that terrible camera bump on the top, which like, you know, was never on the Steve Jobs iPhones. The wobble is wild and it seems like if you just raise the rest of the phone to the thickness of the camera bump, you would get double the battery life with the extra space. They must have run the numbers and been like, people don't care. I, I think that it's like a state versus revealed preference thing. I think that for most people, it's like, yeah, just subscribe to the iPhone, new one every year. It dies at the end of the day. You're good. And then we sure your power user on X, so you're going to get screwed. But for most people, their phone lasts the full day, at least for a year, and then they move on to the next one.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  It would be, if they had any vision, they would do a landline version of the iPhone that's has one of those stretchy cords. That would actually.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  We gotta get that.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  Tim, when you listen to this, reach out to us.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Printer too. We want an Apple printer.

• 41:35Jordi Hays?

  We, we, we got this incredible market map. So John, John is, John, John did this. And if anybody, yeah, if anybody, any, any venture capital firms out there that need a market map made, John made this in like 10 minutes. I'm very, very impressed. But yeah, so we.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  Key question, who's going to make money? Obviously, it's a terrible tragedy, but

• 41:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And who are the, who are the players?

• 42:00John Coogan?

  A lot of business ramifications. So we tried to divide up, what are the categories of industries that will be affected? And then within those, what are the subcategories? And then give you a couple of examples of each company.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the categories.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Let's take us through some, maybe list out all the categories and then go through one at a time.

• 42:15Jordi Hays?

  High level categories. So we have building materials and supplies, thousands and thousands of homes and structures and stores and all these things burned to the ground, tons of damage that wasn't even necessarily structural. So that's a big one. Community and government support.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  So that's everything from FEMA to the Red Cross who are coming in. Some, you know, some activity on the nonprofit side, government side. Neither of those groups are going to be making money, but they're going to be spending a lot of money. And so people are going to be making money from those budgets.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  Construction and infrastructure. So there's big home builders and, you know, and groups that will build a, you know, a,

• 42:56Jordi Hays?

  not a, not a, not a.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of unclear if those big home builders like Lennar will come in because they, they do more like track homes and specific developments. We can talk more about that when we go into the deep dive on that company, but.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the Palisades is not an area where people are going to say, hey, let's just take, you could see that potentially happening where one block is like, let's all work with this one builder and just build them out. But anyway, so construction and infrastructure, environmental remediation, restoration. So that's everything on the cleanup side.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  You know, so much, there's so much toxic waste all over LA that needs to be cleaned up. And then landscaping and erosion control. So one thing that happens post-fire is when all the fuel that fueled the fire burns off, then, then the mudslides become a huge risk.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  Do you remember those in Santa Barbara?

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Santa Barbara, really, really sad. So I was in college when those were happening. And Montecito had had some fires and then there was heavy rains and there was so much mud coming through the hills of Montecito that entire houses were just taken off. Like.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Huge boulders.

• 44:05Jordi Hays?

  And carried, so imagine a house, a house traveling twen- 200 feet.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  The death toll was like 20.

• 44:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I know. I, I had a family friend who not, not super close or anything, but who decided that they felt they were safe in their home, even though there was a lot of rain and, and sort of activity. And the, the home was just taken out, just completely destroyed. So. Very dark, but that's going to be super important now because all over LA and in the hills, people want to rebuild, but there's going to be like huge mud risk. So. Financial and insurance services. So there's going to be a lot of, a ton of lending, you know, activity for people that need construction loans to rebuild and.

• 44:46John Coogan?

  And huge fights. I was, I was listening to something about this where like. We're like, there's like the, what do they call it, a claims adjustment?

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Big question about like, oh, like your house burned down and you're claiming that we need to like, rebuild the foundation, but we think that the foundation was cracked before the fire happened. And so we're adjusting you down.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  And like, if you don't have perfect data on exactly all the materials, everything that went in, like you're just going to get pennies on the dollar, just huge fights and then lawyers get involved.

• 45:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so it's interesting. So there's going to be, the banks are going to make money on the new activity.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  But they're also going to lose money on mortgages where, you know, maybe somebody didn't have insurance. And so there's bankruptcy.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  And then there's just going to be obviously a bunch of policies shifting around as people realize, oh, I need to get off the fare plan because.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  It was interesting. I, I think it was Monday, was it Monday's episode? I reached out to kin.com just to, just as like a market research thing. And they called me like six times in the last few days. I finally picked up while we were at the grocery store earlier.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  That's who you were talking about.

• 45:55Jordi Hays?

  And they were like, yeah, we're issuing new policies in California. So kin.com is still issuing policies. Q E D, I think is their biggest investor.

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  So the next category, security and safety, you have alarm monitoring services. And then there's a bunch of new upstart companies like Sauron that are in that space as well. And then physical security providers. So in Palisades and Malibu area, there's like a specific security company called IPS that everybody uses. And so they've been on overdrive.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  They're probably really important in the short term.

• 46:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And think about, think about, so LA has had huge issues forever with squatters. So if you, I know people who have had a house in LA that was empty, that would repeatedly get broken into and the police just say, we can't do anything about it. Like there's weird laws around, like if they just chill out in there for enough time, then like suddenly like they're, they have some rights, which is crazy. So.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Do you want to hear a crazy story? Two weeks ago, a friend of mine was flying back into LAX, gets off the plane, goes to baggage claim.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Luggage has been stolen. There's an air tag in the luggage. Can see, uh, so she can see exactly where the luggage is going. It goes to this house. She takes a screenshot. It's stable. She knows exactly where it is. Calls nine one one or calls the police, police department, tells them, hey, my bag was stolen. It has an air tag. I know exactly where it is. Like, can you help me with this? And they were like, no. Just no.

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  Just no?

• 47:32John Coogan?

  Just no.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  That's so dark.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  I know.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  That's total, that's collapse right there.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  And I was just like, I almost like, I, I wanted to like tweet about it, but it felt like very like culturally.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  So, so yeah, that's, that's like, it feel, it feels like a sci fi movie where you're like, okay, I'm hiring my own private special ops team. To basically go break.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  I was saying that, I was like, do you need me to go?

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Oh, I'm ready to tool up.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Steiman, I'd call Steiman.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  Call Steiman, the door kicker, our door kicker.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  He's got like.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Oh, he's ready, he's ready to go.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  No, but I had, I mean, I, I had.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Shocked. I was like, you have all the evidence here. It's like so clear. All you need to do is just have.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  Committed in LA county.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Just, just, just send someone to knock on the door and say, hey, give us that back.

• 48:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  And instead she just bought all this stuff.

• 48:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Never got it. Just wrote it off.

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  Next, uh, technology and data services. So there's a ton of disaster assessment, planning tech. You know, drones being used, aerial photography, um, satellite imagery. Uh, and then smart building and construct, construction tech. So, you know, there's going to be companies like Procore, which is actually here in Santa Barbara County. Um, they make a platform for construction management. So like, they'll probably see a huge uptick in Southern California sales as builders sort of descend. Um, and, uh, yeah, one thing that, you know, let, let's, let's get into it. Let's start breaking down each individual category.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  Um, so why don't we start at the top? So manufacturers of core materials. So, um, there's, uh, to make a house takes a few different parts. Um, so we have.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  Semex is the first one. They're multinational that we're highlighting. Multinational producer of cement, concrete and aggregates. They're a key supplier for roads, bridges and foundations post-disaster. They are publicly traded, eight to 10 billion dollar market cap and operating in 50-plus countries already. So massive, massive country, or sorry, massive company already. And the other one that we have listed is Owens Corning. They do roofing, insulation, fiberglass composites. They're already been emphasizing like fire resistant and energy efficient products. Also publicly traded, similar range, nine to 10 billion actually in annual revenue.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  I wonder with some of these like construction materials companies, if this will actually move the needle for the stock. We were talking about maybe looking up some of the market caps on this. But because like although the LA fires like hugely impactful in this area, like it is at the end of the day, just like 10,000 homes. And some of these home builders are putting out 100,000 homes in a year.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but from a construction standpoint, if you think about the demand. So if there was 150 billion dollars worth of damage and it's, and everybody's projecting it to actually be higher than that. And you're the number one producer of cement and concrete.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, that could be.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  And then that 150 billion of damage is not going to cost 150 billion dollars to replace, right? The replacement cost is actually lower.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  Because you build a house for 2 million dollars and then it's worth 4 million, right? Because the land didn't get destroyed or whatever.

• 50:34John Coogan?

  But I think that's calculated in the losses. I think when they say 150 billion dollars losses.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  It's the replacement cost.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they're not talking about the land value for sure.

• 50:42Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I figured it's more, but the thing, a house that's built is worth more than the raw materials sitting around and the construction.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, I think that like, I mean, we discussed this in that Bloomberg Odd Lots interview where it's like the, there's the insurance claims and then there's the, there's like the other disaster database. And so they're not just saying, oh, a 4 million dollar house burned down. That's 4 million dollar loss. They're like, they're saying the insurance will pay out 2 million.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  Got it. So they're taking the lower.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Because, because truthfully, like the land was not destroyed. Like you still own the land and even if you didn't have insurance and you had a 4 million dollar home in the Palisades and it burned to the ground, you, your net worth, if you own that free and clear, is still 2 million probably, right?

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  Something around that.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe it's 1 million, maybe it's 3. I don't know, but. But yeah, I mean, the, the losses are truly like the, the, the burned losses.

• 51:37Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting if you owned lots, if you owned lots around LA that were in these fire affected areas. And then now a bunch of red tape gets removed, your property value actually ticked up in some ways because now it's easier to build. And you can build it faster. So you're not carrying that construction.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  I, I was actually thinking about this, like, uh, there's that, there's that funny Newsom announcement where he was like, we're removing the red tape for all the fire victims and.

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  Dude, did you see the video?

• 52:03John Coogan?

  You seen Nat Friedman quote tweet him and he was like, but we're leaving the red tape for everyone else.

• 52:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you see the, did you see the video of him? Everybody was saying he was on a bunch of stimulants because he has these like weird tics where he was going.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Hand motions.

• 52:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So we, he literally was going like this, yeah, we're really afraid of these property developers that, uh, we're really afraid of these property developers that are going to come in and make lowball offers on these properties. You know, I talked to the Maui guy, you know, the Maui governor and he was afraid of the same thing. So we're, we're, we're working on, he's just such a slime ball.

• 52:38John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder like, uh, like there, there's going to be like payouts to people that are affected. Uh, I wonder.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  Seven hundred and seventy dollars from, from, from Joe.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like seven, it's like seven, seven hundred bucks or something.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Seven hundred and seventy dollars.

• 52:52John Coogan?

  Oh, so yeah, seven, seven. I thought you just said seventy dollars. That would be really low.

• 52:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, what's the difference if you just lost your home?

• 52:57John Coogan?

  But, um, but, but there's also the question about like, if the regulations change, like, will it be all of Malibu? Like, will it be easier for you to build? Will it be like Altadena burned? I'm in Pasadena. My water was affected because I'm on the same water line, which is why I'm here in Santa Barbara now. But my house didn't burn down, but there was ash that fell on my house. Like we have ashes.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  The thing is, it's just all this stuff is.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  Do I benefit from this or not? I'm, I'm still unclear.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Malibu Coastal Commission.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:26Jordi Hays?

  Lo, you have local groups, other environmental groups. There's so many different levels of permits.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  I, I think it's great that Gavin Newsom can go out and say, we're going to make it easier than ever to build.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  But it will.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  What does that actually mean?

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  But, but okay, you've removed red tape, but then you have a thousand times more people trying to do the thing. So what is the net effect? Are they going to get?

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  You know, a hundred times more, you know, employees that are processing sort of these like permitting, stuff like that. Everything's gonna still be permitted. You talked about how

• 53:58John Coogan?

  The permitted needs to be automated.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  You talked about how you were just trying to rebuild a room in your house and they were like, well, if you want to do that, you have to put in a stove.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, you have to add a kitchen.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  You have to add a kitchen. You're like, I already have a kitchen.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  To the studio?

• 54:11Jordi Hays?

  I already have a kitchen. I, you just really want me to cook? I get all my food from Kava, I guess. I'm barnyard coated.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  It really is. So I would say that it's like, yeah, your house needs two kitchens.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, all of this is exposing that, that every single level is broken, right?

• 54:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 54:29Jordi Hays?

  And we talked about this on Monday's episode. The, they had just introduced new regulations to solve the insurance crisis that was already unfolding. And then it, there was a week delay between when it went into effect and when the fires hit. So no, no change was able to happen.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  And it's so easy to just be like, the branding is, we're removing red tape. And then the law is like, we're gonna make it sure that your house can never be built unless it's to the most environmental fire code possible. And it's like,

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so now LA, now LA has, I, I think we're gonna want to cover this, but the, the, the, the business of Super Bowl prep, the business of Olympic prep. So we're, we have these huge international events coming to LA by 2028. And that just adds a whole other level to it. But let's keep going. So we have separately, um, these tend to be the companies. So Semex and, or Chemex, I don't actually know how you say it, and Owens Corning, get way less attention because they're, they're much more on the industry side, B2B, than Lowe's and Home Depot, which still have a huge B2B component to their business, but are the more high profile sort of consumer retail

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  businesses. So Lowe's, uh, I think everybody should know, second largest hardware building supply retailer in the US, provides community support and emergency supplies post disaster, which is great. Uh, they do 90 to 100 billion in revenue. They're based in North Carolina where they just had obviously a big hurricane. And then you have Home Depot, which is the largest US home improvement retailer. Critical supplier of rebuilding materials after disasters, 2,300 stores, they have 150 billion of annual revenue. And so, um, so yeah, the, the average, you know, for every one person that walks into a Home Depot, one of them is a, you know, contractor.

• 56:14John Coogan?

  For every two people that walk in, one is. It's 50/50 at Home Depot contractors versus DIY prosumers.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  At Lowe's, it's about 70% DIYers.

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's more of a, it's more of, Lowe's is where you go as a consumer, the contractors lean towards Home Depot. And there's some interesting design choices that they've actually made in the history of Home Depot where one, they were building one of the first stores, I believe, and they, and the, the, the builder on the actual store had like polished the floors and made it look all nice. And they came in there and they were like, this is not, this is not going to be friendly to a contractor. Like a contractor wants to see like

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  grit. And so like, throw some sawdust down on the ground.

• 56:58Jordi Hays?

  That is funny because whenever I'm in a Home Depot, you, you know, I feel like a lost golden retriever.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm over here golden retriever math.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and the idea is to, you know, put the contractor first. You show up, you go in, you just get your stuff and you go. Whereas Lowe's, there's going to be more people walking around kind of, oh, oh, you want to, you know, like, you know, DIY your own deck or just get some furniture, get a new fridge, like we'll, we'll walk you through that.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  You could, in many ways, I would imagine that Home Depot is a bigger beneficiary here because

• 57:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:31Jordi Hays?

  there's been so much destruction.

• 57:32John Coogan?

  DIY build your house.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  Doing the foundation yourself.

• 57:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 57:36Jordi Hays?

  That is almost a meme online of like, you know, you can just build a house. Like people that can, you know, you know, left wing people will complain about the cost of housing. And then these sort of like homesteader right wing people will be like, you can just build, you can just go and buy the supplies and build your house, you know? Um, so I'm sure we'll see some of that.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Home Depot went through some crazy shocks during COVID. Everyone was worried that like, you know, the, the housing market would collapse because the stock market was down, the economy was really rough during the early days of COVID, unemployment was really high. But then once people realized that they were going to be at home for a year, they were like, let's do some home improvement projects. And I think they pulled forward something like five years of growth in one year. During COVID and the stock like mooned and did really well because everyone was doing renovations and stuff because they're like, if I'm going to be here and the interest rates are really low and I'm getting massive checks from the government and and you know, I'm not moving and the and the stock and the price of my house is going way up. I should be renovating. I should be and they were just like

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  Stuff everywhere. So yeah, Home Depot grew a ton. A lot of flipping during that time. So again, Home Depot is a national company.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna, we're covering Brad Jacobs on Friday, but he has a new private equity firm.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Private equity roll up firm. They're going to try and buy a couple of companies that do construction supplies.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  So they presumably would

• 58:56John Coogan?

  B to B.

• 58:57Jordi Hays?

  Some more like SEMEX or Chemex.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  Owens, but the smaller, smaller

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  Mid, mid-market companies.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. He wants to bring in technology and automation to all the stuff that he's done at XPO and the other logistics companies that he's run, but focused on, on construction supply chain.

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. All right. Let's jump into, we're going to cover more of that.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  Kind of like McMaster Car, if you're familiar with that. He wants to be, you know, McMaster Car level.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  Margarita.

• 59:24John Coogan?

  For, for construction supplies.

• 59:26Jordi Hays?

  Who is posting about the McMaster Margarita?

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. The ITAR Gatorade.

• 59:30Jordi Hays?

  The ITAR Gatorade. Yeah.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 59:33Jordi Hays?

  So next category, community and government support. Subcategory, we have emergency management and coordination. So first up, we have Cal OES. They oversee the emergency response specifically for the state of California. They coordinate the wildfire evacuations and statewide resource deployment. It's interesting because I don't know anybody that was using Cal OES for this. Everybody was using WatchDuty, but I'm sure Cal OES data feeds into that somehow.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:00:00Jordi Hays?

  But WatchDuty.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  Because WatchDuty is a nonprofit, but it's, but it's like a company. So it's like startup almost.

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  And I'm all, it wasn't, it wasn't perfect.

• 1:00:08John Coogan?

  Nonprofit now might be for profit conversion if they want to start printing.

• 1:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take, take private.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  Get those units. Stack those units if you're on WatchDuty.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Giffon and Company. Take private a WatchDuty. WatchDuty just jacks it up to a hundred, hundred dollars.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  A hundred dollar. Yeah. Get Nikita in there.

• 1:00:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Get some dark patterns.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  Get some dark patterns.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Dark.

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  And start, start printing.

• 1:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Dark.

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  In-app purchases.

• 1:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so Cal OES coordinates with local like city, LA and FEMA for disaster strategies. And yeah, it was wild. I think Wednesday night.

• 1:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Watch duty just stopped updating. The fire didn't spread all night. So I remember everybody's watching it being like, what's going on? That's like the only way to get anything close to information. FEMA is a more interesting one to me here. So FEMA is, everybody knows, kind of a controversial agency because they deal with a lot of the immigration stuff, but federal agency coordinating major disaster response across the US. They provide grants, temporary housing and public infrastructure repair funding. So they're funding, you know, if a freeway gets damaged, they're going to help fund that. They oversee $20 billion annually in disaster relief.

• 1:01:24Jordi Hays?

  So what's interesting about this is people, yeah, and I'm sure that that's more of like an average. And I'm sure it massively ticks up.

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  Katrina, I'm sure was higher.

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  But what's interesting about this is there's a whole subcategory of contractors that that are already looped in, you know, that do work with FEMA because there's always stuff happening. Right. So it's think of it as like a FEMA SMB type, you know, operator where FEMA is now going to be funding a lot of the cleanup from the fire where everything from, okay, there's, we have these 20 cars on the street that burned out and we need to bring a bulldozer. And so there's.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  Probably DOD contracting, but just.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so there's a subcategory of contractors right now that are buying, that are buying or renting every available bulldozer in this surrounding area or shipping them in just to operate them to basically take on these like individual, you know, FEMA contracts. And could probably do a whole deep dive there, but it's a lot of like people that have good intentions. A lot of people that are just trying to make a quick buck. A lot of that money gets spent pretty poorly because there's like this crisis situation. And if you need to clean up. You know, hundreds of square, you know, miles or thousands and thousands of acres of just like chaos than like you just need to spend money.

• 1:02:46Jordi Hays?

  It's like a startup, right? Where if you need to do something super, super fast, sometimes the best way to do it is just to like overspend. Um, the local agencies and nonprofits, American Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, uh, everybody knows the Red Cross. They

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  Not many injuries or blood donations going on right now because the death toll is so low, but I'm sure they come out with like, you know, just general relief.

• 1:03:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So they, the Red Cross works at local agencies. They're trying to, you know, provide support for displaced residents. They operate on two to three billion dollars annually from donations and grants. So, you know, big organization, but maybe not even as big as some might think. Habitat for Humanity, they build and repair affordable homes with volunteer labor. And they offer zero interest mortgages for disaster affected families. So that's cool. They're active globally, uh, but they're based in Atlanta.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  I built a house with Habitat for Humanity in high school and it was like the slowest process in the world. It took like months for them to do like anything.

• 1:03:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah. Cause it's like, now we're going to do the

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  Because it's like American, uh, like there's all the regulations and stuff.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Just takes forever. Uh, and then I did one where I went to Mexico and did it, built the house in a day. It was the most satisfying thing in the world.

• 1:04:01Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  I mean, they poured the foundation before, but you get there and, and it's just like, okay, frame this out, put this up. It's like very minimal, but you finish the house in a single day. It's so sick.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  And that's how it should be. Hopefully, I mean, that's not going to happen here, but hopefully even a hundred days, right?

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Jordi Hays?

  Um, I have a friend.

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  Bring in the Amish.

• 1:04:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20John Coogan?

  Bring the Amish to LA.

• 1:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Throw up.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  Just throw up barns. Need to import the Amish.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  I have a buddy in Malibu who did an internal remodel. So the structure didn't change at all. Took him. Over three.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  And, and it wasn't, and it, and it was the kind of thing that could have been done in four months.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, but just massive delays constantly.

• 1:04:41Jordi Hays?

  So, all right, next, construction and infrastructure, commercial and infrastructure construction. So there's AECOM, A E C O M E.

• 1:04:49John Coogan?

  ACOM, yeah.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  ACOM, global engineering construction firm for handling civil and commercial projects.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's more for like, if the water plant or power plant like burned down, like they're going to come in and build like a bespoke, like, you know, massive power plant or some like piece of huge infrastructure, like the water mains, stuff like that.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have to imagine a lot of that stuff didn't burn to the ground because it's like concrete buildings, but the machinery inside and, and right now we're, we have a water crisis in, in LA just because, you know.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  When you think about like, who builds the reservoir, like that type of thing, like, do we need an extra reservoir after this? Is that the resolution? Well, then you're going to call in one of these massive engineering firms.

• 1:05:30Jordi Hays?

  Their comp should be structured based on making sure the reservoir actually has water, you know, like it should be like a, you know, we need some accountability.

• 1:05:36John Coogan?

  You don't get paid unless it's full.

• 1:05:39Jordi Hays?

  And then there's Bechtel, one of the largest privately held engineering companies renowned for massive infrastructure projects worldwide, 17 to 20 billion in annual revenue, international operations. So.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Very similar companies, Halliburton, famous for Dick Cheney, Halliburton, very old company, but does these huge infrastructure projects. The famous story is in Iraq, like you need to put in oil well, they would engineer that and build that. And then, and then, are you familiar with Parsons in Pasadena?

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh, the design school, right?

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  There is a design school. I think the design school was endowed by the founder of the engineering firm.

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh, crazy.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  I think his name's Bill Parsons and he, he does, yeah, he designed like all these weapons during, he was like a DOD contractor during like maybe World War II, maybe a little bit after, but built like a whole bunch of like tanks and stuff. And then eventually did more and more engineering projects bigger. And now it's like this big, big engineering firm.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Okay. On the residential side, we have KB Home and Lennar. KB Home, customizable, energy efficient homes in major US markets. Built to order model simplifies adaptation to local codes. Based in LA, so I'm sure they're gonna, you know, I actually talked to a guy who does a bunch of.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  Can I have the other three pages, by the way?

• 1:06:58Jordi Hays?

  Did we get the printer working?

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  I haven't set it up.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  We can trade back at some point. I talked to a guy in Santa Barbara the other day. I was like, are you gonna go try to do any development work in Santa Barbara? Or, sorry, in LA? And he's like, I'm good. You know, I don't want to go basically get involved in someone's backyard. So I think a lot of this stuff will go to local builders.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  And that's who I'd want. You know, if my house burned down, I'd want somebody local that's not just like coming in for a few years to like make a quick buck and get out.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  And then Lennar, one of the largest US home builders, they focus on scalability. And they do have post-disaster rebuilding sort of products. Based in Miami, $35 billion market cap.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  Also an investor in Cover.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, so Cover's a friends company who builds modular homes, mostly backyard homes right now.

• 1:07:58Jordi Hays?

  Cover's revenue will 10x.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  You would imagine if people are doing stuff, their core market has been ADUs and backyard homes, a very quick build.

• 1:08:09Jordi Hays?

  No, but here's, here's, here's one angle, and this is what people have done even historically, is if you need to remodel or rebuild your primary home, throw an ADU in the backyard.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Start with the ADU, live there, and then you can build the full house.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Cause there's people that don't, you know, if your house didn't burn down, but it was badly damaged. And then, okay, so you're not, you're gonna get paid to get it remodeled.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  But insurance payouts kind of work where they're like, well, we'll fund it for two years. But then it takes three, four years to rebuild. And then you have to then carry the cost of two properties just for your primary residence.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I certainly hope that they can step up and help. They, they, they have this whole modular, like, you know, they, they, they basically manufacture panels. There's a lot of manufactured homes where they build the whole home in a huge warehouse. And they put it on the back of a truck. You've probably seen these driving down like the 5.

• 1:09:00Jordi Hays?

  It's always so ridiculous.

• 1:09:02John Coogan?

  And then, and then they, and then they, sometimes they split the home in half, and then they just piece it together, bolt it to the foundation.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  And those homes feel really bad when you're in them.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and they're, and they're built using traditional manufacturing techniques. Like, it's a guy with hammer and nails, like, nailing like two by fours together to make the home, and then putting up drywall. The cover model is like make these modular panels that then can click together and they're perfectly engineered so that even like the, you know, the, the power outlets are like built into the whole system.

• 1:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  But they, long-term, they want to have all those panels click together. So you could make a three-story house out of them. But they just aren't quite there yet. And there's always a question of when these, when these big events happen, like the Ukraine war, like there's a lot of, there's a lot of drone companies where it's like, yeah, they'd want to jump into that business, but they don't have a manufacturing plant. They have like a demo product and they're just not really going to move the needle. But it can be a catalyst for a next funding round or a next product or something like that. There's this interesting, deep dive on D R Horton from Business Breakdowns. They're very similar to Lennar in the sense that they're a massive home builder. I think they build a hundred thousand, yeah, 90,000 homes annually now. The founder started with $3,000 in 1978 and

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  a $30,000 loan from the bank, built one home and then five homes and then 10 homes and then 100 homes. And then

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  So crazy.

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  In 1992, he built 1,200 homes and now he's building 90,000 annually and

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So one, one

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  But these are focused on like tract homes.

• 1:10:31Jordi Hays?

  One thing to note, if, if

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  there, if you're somebody who is obsessed with construction and home building, which there are many people and this, and you want to go and build a major construction company or home building company, there's nothing wrong with coming to LA and setting up shop and trying to rebuild a bunch of homes here. And that can be your, the catalyst to building a big business. It's not, you're not taking advantage of anyone. You're providing a service. Nobody's going to give you money unless you're providing them value in exchange. So I would imagine that there will be some, there will be many people that make an incredible You know, catalyze their career and go from a $2 million revenue business to a,

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  You know, 20 plus.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. One of the interesting things about these, uh, these large home builders that came out of this deep dive that I listened to was, uh, a lot of them have transitioned to being asset light, meaning that they don't typically own the land and they're less in the real estate business. And they've said the business is transformed from being a real estate business to being a manufacturing business. So they really just focus on making the homes. 75% of the land is optioned versus 25% a decade ago, and that has increased the return on equity for this business from 10% to 22%. So much more asset light and, uh, and it's really just about getting those homes out as fast as possible. Now, I don't think any of those prefab manufactured homes are going into the Palisades. There's a question about Altadena.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Uh, you know, the, the average home price there was probably a third to a fifth as much as the Palisades.

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, like a, uh, 800K to a million.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  Something like that. Yeah. But there's a, but there's a big question about like, uh, what will that, uh, what will that community want in terms of style and design?

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  I think the, what, what, uh, what, there's a pending gentrification crisis almost in Altadena where so many of the people there had owned their homes for so long that if you own your home free and clear, you do not have to have insurance, I don't believe. You can just, you can just.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  It's a free country.

• 1:12:38Jordi Hays?

  Raw dog it basically, but, um, um, but, uh, the, what's going to happen is Altadena is in close proximity to LA.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  People will look at that very opportunistically and say, we can create $3 million homes here.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Jordi Hays?

  You know, and $3 million gated communities by going out.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  Or more, or more mixed use you could mix in. So Pasadena has been going through a little bit of a transition where, um, in the downtown core, there's been more apartment buildings going up, still not. Ten stories, you're talking about like four story buildings and you and El Tadena historically really had none of those. So maybe you put in some of those, the there's these zero lot line homes that are very popular in LA right now, especially in kind of the Echo Park area. It's a full house, you own the house, but there's no lot, like, like your house bumps up against your neighbor's house. And it's basically just like this ultimate optimized, like, check the box for what a house is.

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Place to be golden retriever maxing.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's rough.

• 1:13:41Jordi Hays?

  There's no place to sun your.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  Well, the roof deck usually, so they're they're designed to be like hyper optimized. I know a guy who moved into one and he has a golf simulator.

• 1:13:49Jordi Hays?

  Sunning on.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  You better hope you're the highest rooftop.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  So like, it'll be like a two car garage, but they're like stacked and then you go upstairs and there's like a kitchen, open floor plan, living room. Then you go upstairs, there's some bedrooms and there's a roof deck and it kind of like checks the boxes for like you have one of everything. And they look nice, but they're just like really, really condensed to be able to to fit them all in. So you can you can wind up building like a 3,000 square foot, four bedroom home on like a 6,000 square foot plot of land or something. Instead of like a quarter acre or whatever, I probably have those numbers wrong, but it's a small plot of land because it's just stacked up. And so I could see some of those going in. I could see some of the, I I wonder how many people will say, hey, we want, we want El Tadena to look like it did before.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  So let's build in kind of, there's the Spanish style. There was a lot of like tiled roofs and stuff. And there was just a lot, I mean, it was a very slow growth community, like it grew for 100 years without a real reset.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Historically, there was a large community of like African Americans.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, Latinos.

• 1:14:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  And and so there's a question about like, yeah, what what will, what will the style demands of that community be going forward? How much displacement that will there be from wealthier people moving there?

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be, I mean.

• 1:15:10John Coogan?

  It'll be.

• 1:15:11Jordi Hays?

  It's a interesting.

• 1:15:14Jordi Hays?

  Experiment to see what the Palisades look like.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Jordi Hays?

  Just because.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  I could see the Palisades rebuilding like exactly like it looked.

• 1:15:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, similar. I mean, there were still in the Palisades, there were still homes from the sixties.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  You know, a lot of stuff like that.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  But let's keep it rolling because there's a lot here. So environmental remediation and restoration, cleanup and remediation is a big one. We covered some of this in the emergency management section, but you have Belfour Global Property Restoration Firm for fire, water and storm damage. They offer complete services. They do cleanup and reconstruction, also privately held. Clean Harbors specializes in hazardous waste management and industrial services. They remove toxic debris and manage environmental risk post disaster. Publicly traded for four to five billion annual revenue. The one interesting thing here is like, okay, you have a gas station that just burned to the ground. It was on fire. Okay, now is that what happened to the tanks?

• 1:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Like, is it leaking oil everywhere? A lot of the gas would have been siphoned out just by nature of the demand and the exit to the fire. But, but yeah, there's, there's just so many levels to the crisis. That's not just the homes, right? There's, it's like simple stuff like, oh, this hardware store had 200 batteries in this back room that just burned, right? And so now that's all just leaking everywhere.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  Refrigerators, all the stoves, all the stuff's just melted.

• 1:16:49Jordi Hays?

  Landscaping and erosion control. So Bartlett Tree Experts is one. They have 150 offices. So that goes to show you can get, you can build a big company pretty much in any niche. Family owned still, they do like basically just any work around these sort of, I mean, for as many homes as LA has, it has as many trees. The trees, weirdly, a lot of them are left standing, which is just a proof point for. I think going forward, a lot of these homes are going to add these complex sprinkler systems. There's this guy who runs an SMB and like does a lot of stuff with the homes in Malibu called, I think it's like brush fire battle systems, like kind of a cool name.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  It's a sick name.

• 1:17:29Jordi Hays?

  But he creates these, um, I actually meant to, when I was originally looking into that idea around doing a drone, uh, fire response business, I, I was meant to talk to him, but then we had a bunch of fires and the meeting never happened. Um, but, but he builds these sprinkler systems to just make homes damp when fires are breaking out. And the trees, it was interesting, a lot of conspiracy theorists were saying like, how did all the homes burn down and not the trees and this car, but, but trees are very moist.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Literally filled with water.

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Filled with water. They're like humans. They're like, what, 70% water.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  Whereas the

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  So it's much harder to burn.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Houses are like the driest wood possible.

• 1:18:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you've ever tried to burn down a, you know, burn, you know, start a fire with like wet wood, it just doesn't work.

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  That's why you have to like kill the tree and then you burn it out.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  And it's an interesting thing where, where homes in California and, you know, buildings everywhere have fire sprinklers because it's a way to protect.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  But it's like, why don't we have systems that just completely irrigate every home as these fires are starting? Because if not, the firefighters are going to have to come put them out. So that to me seems like a startup opportunity. That's maybe not a venture backed business, but just create these sprinkler systems for homes.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:43Jordi Hays?

  That are set up where when somebody evacuates, they turn it on and it just like sprays water everywhere and makes the place damp. So Davy Tree, employee owned company, very cool. Better than, uh, much better than being a, a nonprofit, uh, for tree care and environmental consulting, stabilizes landscapes post-fire by removing hazardous trees. One and a half to two billion of annual revenue. They're based in Ohio.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:19:08Jordi Hays?

  So like, there's a lot of trees.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  I have no idea if those companies have presences in LA, but it gives you a shape of the industry.

• 1:19:15Jordi Hays?

  No, but they should be being like, okay, we have 200 employees, we're sending them to LA. Cause even around my neighborhood, just from the wind alone, walking around my neighborhood, there's all these trees that have fallen down. And so anyways, they'll, they'll be making some money out of this. Banks and mortgage lenders, you know, I don't think we have to explain Bank of America, Wells Fargo to our highly sophisticated audience of wealthy technologists, but um, uh, so maybe we skip over that. But property and casualty insurance, Allstate, State Farm. Yeah, we already talked about. We already talked about insurance. I say we like skip over this. I mean, Allstate. But I'm sure there were policies in the Palisades. They're saying they're, they, they, Allstate's focused on like rapid. Yeah.

• 1:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Claims. Um, and, uh, but you can imagine so much of this stuff is just going to be slogged and. Yeah. It's like any, anytime you experience a business experiences a hundred X like comms around something, it's going to be slow. Um, alarm and monitor, in a lot of areas right now, people still can't get to their homes. Yeah. Like they're just literally blocked by National Guard and even if you own a home, you can't get through. Yeah. Um, security and safety, alarm and monitoring services. Um, it's kind of interesting because like some of these businesses just lost a bunch of customers because people are not going to like pay to secure, pay ADT in the long run to secure a lot. Yep.

• 1:20:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, and they're not going to pay for, uh, whatever, what's the, like camera. Yeah. Uh, ring or whatever, like nobody's paying for ring if their cameras don't exist anymore. That'll be a quick unsubscribe. Um, and then the physical security providers I think will be bigger because people have very little trust in the government right now. And even though there's a National Guard presence, um, the one thing that, that is positive on the security side in LA is Nathan Hockman, who was the, is the new DA for LA, who, um, just started and he was Caruso's pick. I saw Caruso talk and endorse Hockman at a fundraiser in the Palisades, um, back in Q4.

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Um, he's already like throwing the book at leaders and people, criminals that are, you know, uh, have been taking advantage of the situation. Uh, support services and ancillary industries, you have architecture and engineering. These design firms, engineering firms that are just figuring out how do we rebuild this home?

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:41Jordi Hays?

  There was the home in succession, the hundred and twenty five million dollar home in the Palisades that burned to the ground.

• 1:21:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:46Jordi Hays?

  That rebuilding a hundred and twenty five million dollar home on a slope is like a very complex engineering undertaking.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  So that by itself is probably like, just imagine the architecture and engineering bill for rebuilding a home like that has to be in the millions of dollars. So like, there's going to be some big beneficiaries there.

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Professional services, Deloitte, McKinsey, these companies that are doing like consulting, audits, tax, all this advisory work. There's just anytime you have massive amounts of money changing hands, these companies benefit. McKinsey always finds a way to make money in a, um.

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  That's why we love to support them here.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gotta get the, we gotta get the McKinsey sponsorship and then get like pre-seed companies working with McKinsey and they're like, look, like you've got a hundred K of annualized revenue, like you're paying, you're paying yourself a hundred K a year. Like their only person to cut is you.

• 1:22:44Jordi Hays?

  McKinsey's gonna be like, cut yourself.

• 1:22:47Jordi Hays?

  They're like, but sir, like, who, who will run the company? And they're like, well, we have our AI agent practice for a million dollars. We can create a program for you to

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  But I only cost a hundred K.

• 1:22:57Jordi Hays?

  Run your business with AI agents. And they're like, well, spend the money on us. Don't spend it on yourself. Everybody will win in the long run.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  Disaster assessment and planning tech. So we talked about this a little bit before, but these drone deploy, they, they use, um, they deploy drones and they have software for aerial mapping and inspection. I, I was recommending to somebody the other day, they were like, I couldn't get to their house. And I was like, go find, buy satellite imagery. Cause you can buy it now.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  You can actually pay Planet Labs to task a satellite. I'm sure a bunch of satellites were tasked over LA this last week. I think that's the other, that's the other company that's mentioned.

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Drone Deploy has raised a hundred and forty million. You can hit the size gong for that. Uh, they do quick damage assessments over, uh, large fire areas. So like they'll, they'll, I'm sure make, you know, this is the kind of thing where insurance companies are now like probably like sitting around the table being like, oh my God, you know?

• 1:23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Jordi Hays?

  And, and, you know, publicly they're like, We're very devastated, but then internally, you can imagine they're just freaking out. And so I'm sure they're tasking drone deploy with various projects and then

• 1:24:12Jordi Hays?

  smart building and construction tech. This is just more like SAS, Autodesk, creators of AutoCAD and a bunch of other design engineering tools.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  What's interesting is like, you know that when, whenever something like crazy national news story happens, like there are startups that are pivoting and looking for their next idea. And some of them might pivot into something related to fire prevention. I think the fear, and I've seen this play out before, I knew a guy who, after the San Francisco fires, remember the ones that turned the sky orange?

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  He, he decided to start a fire, wildlife prevention, what wildfire prevention.

• 1:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Said he decided to start a fire.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, he said a fire prevention company, right? And was using all this data and peeling all and pulling all this stuff together. But selling into the government was so hard that he pivoted. And I was telling him like, like, okay, you have all these vanity metrics and like contracts that you're working on. But like, really like the catalyst for your company being huge will be like what happened with the Watchfire app. Like when you save, Watchduty, when you save your first home, like that should be your main KPI that you have on the wall of your company. It's just like.

• 1:25:25Jordi Hays?

  That guy Brushfire Battle Systems, literally.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Saved a home?

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Saved a home. And so he's like, here's the proof.

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Exactly. So I was like, you just need to write a zero on the wall, zero homes saved. You need to just work backwards from saving a home. And as soon as you save a home, there will be a national news story about your company.

• 1:25:42Jordi Hays?

  Like you're really smart about like one of those inflection points.

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But he pivoted out before the next fire. And so like, there was never a moment when it was like the tech could demonstrate like what it was powerful for.

• 1:25:53Jordi Hays?

  Probably a Flock Safety style business that makes consumer apps for cities and state and local governments to manage disasters because. Right now, like when the disaster broke out, everybody's on WhatsApp, iMessage, you know, coordinating, using WatchDuty, but WatchDuty wasn't working. And I don't really want to be reliant on a nonprofit during, you know, a fire, like fire realistically, because it's like, okay, they went down for 12 hours.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  And was that because like they hit their cloud bill? They didn't have like the basically, like, who knows, right? Well, we probably will never know. But I think there's a consumer business to be like, cities, states, get every one of your citizens like on this app. So they're not online on the press release.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  I think of Flux Safety as like the hardware company, like Andorol for

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  For local governments.

• 1:26:44Jordi Hays?

  Citizen app is I guess this, but it's not around coordination.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  For local governments, something like that makes more sense, yeah.

• 1:26:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, more around communications because the government being like, I was getting my information from group chats, my HOA.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  And then the city was, the HOA was getting going and like tuning into the live events, broadcasts that the city was doing.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  There's always this question about like, oh, like can the technology save us in this situation? And I always worry that it's not, it's not a matter of technology. It's a matter of like willpower or like do you desire? Like, is there even a desire to solve some of these problems? Like, it's very unclear.

• 1:27:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you kind of need to rely on people. Like my neighbors were great. I got, um.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  It's tricky. Well, should we move on to the timeline?

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  We need to jump into the timeline.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  That's great. Take a break. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, still the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, you have an exciting announcement to make. Let's hear about PMF or Die, the latest project from the Technology Brothers.

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so yesterday I sent out.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Inspiration struck.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't exactly yesterday morning, but the inspiration for some of this, for some of the language that I used in the post definitely struck in the morning.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:28:05Jordi Hays?

  A while back, John and I, we're always thinking of new formats and concepts and stuff like that. Our goal is to entertain and elevate technology, brother, voices and movements. And so we were thinking about, well, what if we found a founder, gave him 25K and just basically locked them in a studio apartment for 90 days and then used-

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  Was that the word you used? Studio apartment?

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Studio apartment?

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Or did you refer to it as a cage?

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  A cage. Well, it's now called the cage.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  Okay, break down the tweet. Read your post.

• 1:28:36Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just giving some of the history of it. So the idea was like, well, if we have a founder, we'll talk about them on the show, we'll support them, we'll get them a bunch of attention. And if they can't hit a million dollars of ARR in that 90 days with all of the attention of us telling people, "Go buy this product today," then they're never going to succeed. And we do some type of deal where they literally have to quit startups if they can't make it work.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Go get a job somewhere.

• 1:28:59Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go work in big tech if you can't make it in the cage. But I posted yesterday, "So we're working on a new show called PMF or Die. We will lock a small founding team in a studio, AKA The Cage, with 25K in funding and only enough food, caffeine and nicotine to last for 90 days. The team will only be released if, when they achieve a million in ARR and the whole process will be documented and shared daily. While in The Cage, you will get millions of eyeballs and be coached by some of the most accomplished founders in the world. So if you can't find PMF in The Cage, you just won't find it anywhere. Please reach out if you're interested in being locked up."

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  Locked up.

• 1:29:38Jordi Hays?

  And I will share the application. And it's so funny-

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  You go 2,000 likes, right?

• 1:29:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 2,300-

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  2,300?

• 1:29:45Jordi Hays?

  2,300 likes, still climbing. Lots of, yeah, and I had to quickly follow it up and say like, "No, this is not a joke. Here's the application." So, yeah, and I'll say it again now, like, "I want as many of our listeners to be a part of this as possible. You'll all be in-" The ride as viewers and.

• 1:30:03John Coogan?

  You described it as Mr. Beast meets Paul Graham.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I said if Mr. Beast and Paul Graham were to make sweet love and have a nice and give birth to a baby accelerator, it would look a lot like PMF or Die. And it's so funny because I've maybe watched five minutes of Mr. Beast's content. I just never got into it. I didn't watch Squid Games. I just was never big into that whole world. I've never watched Survivor or anything, any of these other shows. But this is in that vein, I think it's going to be extremely entertaining and it's one of the issues. So we've talked a lot about different concepts and shows and

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  one of the issues with Shark Tank is because they're putting this out on TV, which is not a tech startup audience generally. They need to only basically, they only can work with founders that are that are creating sort of gimmicky CPG products. Like I made, I made this cooler that also has a grill built into it. So you can like cool your steaks and then.

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  Pavlok, one of the greatest Shark Tank companies ever. It's a wristband that shocks you when you do something that you're trying to quit. So if you're trying to quit smoking, it will shock you when you smoke. It's the Pavlovian response. It's like total meme tech.

• 1:31:16Jordi Hays?

  And so there's a bunch of meme tech and I think it's great. And if you're building a product that, you know, and founders go on that because they don't go on that to get the money because the terms aren't generally good. They go on to get the attention and there's reruns and stuff like that. So it's really a customer acquisition.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Do you know the whole gimmick on Shark Tank?

• 1:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's go, let's, yeah, yeah, go for it, go for it.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  Oh, this is such a good story. So they film you for like an hour. The actual segment on TV will be like 15 minutes max. And so what happens is they wind up, uh, am I good? Okay. What happens is that, is that there's during that, there's a bunch of really good quotes from you. And there's also a bunch of really bad quotes of things you stumbled over. Yeah, yeah. And they ask you hard questions. They ask you easy questions and then depending on if you take the deal, they will edit it to make you look great. And if you don't take the deal, they will make you look bad. And so I. A friend who went on and and just tied them up in legal negotiation for so long that they had to run it.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  And they're and they were like, we're doing the deal, make us look good. We're doing the deal, make us look good. And then as soon as it went live, it was like, I'm not doing that deal. No way.

• 1:32:26Jordi Hays?

  Worst deal I've ever seen.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then it's it's locked.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:30Jordi Hays?

  You just have to run.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  But I mean, that just gives you an idea of like the problem with Shark Tank.

• 1:32:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  It's purely entertainment.

• 1:32:34Jordi Hays?

  So so it's cut out a lot of founders that don't care to get in front of that audience, that don't want that funding. And so one thing that's really interesting, we've seen this recently, is so many companies can can get to that one million of ARR mark faster than ever. Right? You're seeing it in Y C. The best Y C companies are getting out with like millions of ARR.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  And you're seeing teenagers on X go from nothing to doing hundreds of thousands a month.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  And part of that is like these new AI, this new like these L L M's that are enabling new experiences. But part of it's just faster to build.

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  It's just faster to program.

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  And so we want to create the, you know, basically the cage, which is like the best place to build a software company. And so like specifically for this kind of corner of the internet, one of my favorite responses was Shkreli responded and said, it's too close to home. And I shared that and got a good response.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  We gotta get him as one of the coaches.

• 1:33:30Jordi Hays?

  He would. Yeah. So I actually messaged him to become a coach already. And I think it's funny because if he was actually a player, he would get out in a day.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:38Jordi Hays?

  I guarantee you he would figure out a way to get out in a day. And so there's so many fun ways that you can gamify this. The point is not to create the next, you know, I I hope that people create world changing startups out of it. But it's totally cool to come in the cage and just have.

• 1:33:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a sprint and have fun.

• 1:33:52Jordi Hays?

  Have fun, right? I I was telling, I think something that people could do is make the next like I am rich app. And call it the jailbreak app and be like, I am stuck in a in a prison right now. I can only get out if I get a million of ARR, subscribe to my app, I will donate all the profits to fire relief, right?

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  And somebody would get out in a day, right? If they know how to work TikTok. And so the the players will have access to the TV audience and the X audience.

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  I posted a follow up to just make sure that people understand that this is real. I'm very happy to see the incredible response to PMF or Die. We are clearly making something people want. The show is guaranteed to be life-changing for the players. They will either leave the cage with a million-dollar ARR business as a niche internet micro-celebrity, or they will die. Either way, it's a big change. We have received 10x more applications than we anticipated, and we will be processing them as fast as we can. The demand has been insane. Like, there's so many talented builders reaching out. It's kind of the perfect opportunity if you're just like in the middle of something, or you want to start something new, or you want to quit.

• 1:34:54John Coogan?

  What information did you put on the form? Just email, name?

• 1:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Just name, email, profile.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  You gotta put mailing address, because like, it's always good to be able to send people stuff.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, that'd be good. So yeah, we're just trying to process the applications at this point. We already have, you know, people that we've accepted. We're going to be sharing a lot more information, location, dates. And there's tons of opportunities for people to get involved. You can be a player, you can be a coach, you can be an antagonist, you can be a trainer, right? We're going to have weightlifting equipment there.

• 1:35:24John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:35:25Jordi Hays?

  We're going to have treadmills. You're not going to be getting sloppy in the cage. And so if you want to sponsor the show, there's going to be a bunch of opportunities. We're going to have to get a bunch of these in there. And it's just going to be super fun.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  The response was really incredible. I saw that DM you got from someone who said, "Put me in the cage, I yearn for the cage."

• 1:35:45Jordi Hays?

  I yearn for the cage. There's something primal about being in the cage and just wanting to break out.

• 1:35:50John Coogan?

  It's a cure for loneliness.

• 1:35:53Jordi Hays?

  It's great. We're going to figure out how to structure the 25K. It'll be an investment. Maybe it'll be like, you know, debt.

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  Lots of debt covenants. We're going to wind up owning 100% of the business.

• 1:36:04Jordi Hays?

  The debt covenants are the real, like, you know. Maybe it's more like venture debt, right?

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:36:10Jordi Hays?

  But no, we don't want to scare anyone off. Like, the point is not to really own a lot of these businesses. The point is to just like, create some really great entertainment and create some great companies out of it, so.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  So go apply.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  Is there a website yet?

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  So you can just go to X and go to PMF@PMFRDIE or PMF... The application link is in the bio. It's apply.pmfrdie.com/s1.

• 1:36:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's gonna be a lot of fun. As I like to say, if you can't find PMF in the cage, you won't find it anywhere. War is peace, freedom is slavery, PMF is strength.

• 1:36:46John Coogan?

  There you go. Fantastic. I'm excited.

• 1:36:49Jordi Hays?

  We will talk a lot more about the show coming up.

• 1:36:52John Coogan?

  You'll be hearing about it.

• 1:36:53Jordi Hays?

  You'll be, you'll be hearing about it relentlessly. And some of the locations we're looking at are pretty insane. Uh, we're looking all over the country for the right spot.

• 1:37:05Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, you know, we're gonna be, you know, assuming season one goes well, we'll be going more and more exotic. We're gonna do Epstein Island. Season two, season two. We take back.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  Moon.

• 1:37:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  Greenland.

• 1:37:18Jordi Hays?

  We could have, we'd have Reid Hoffman come, uh, come back to the island.

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  Like Reid judge.

• 1:37:23Jordi Hays?

  Back to the island, Reid.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Back to the island.

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a lot of fun and, uh, everybody will be able to be involved. We're gonna have, they'll, I'm sure there'll be some like betting markets on Polly market.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  For sure. That's great. Yeah.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's a cool one.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:40Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I just, it's gonna be a really great time. So, um, without further ado, let's talk protein.

• 1:37:49John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, protein. Okay. So you have mentioned this founder many times on the show, founder of RX Bar. Does he go by Pete or Peter?

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Peter.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  Peter Rahal.

• 1:38:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:02John Coogan?

  Founded RX Bar, did not raise a lot of venture capital. I don't know if he raised any. He sold the business for hundreds of millions of dollars, became very wealthy, and then decided to run it all back and build another protein bar company. And I have been surviving off of these exclusively for the last 30 days and it's been fantastic.

• 1:38:21Jordi Hays?

  You've been doing like roughly 10 a day?

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  10 a day. So it has 28 grams of protein, 150 calories. So 10 a day, I get, I get one and a half grams of protein per pound of body weight roughly, and only 1,500 calories.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  1500 calories. So I'm in a major caloric deficit.

• 1:38:42Jordi Hays?

  Lean, lean, but a mass.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  And just, yeah, going down to 5% body fat, getting absolutely peeled while maintaining all the muscle mass.

• 1:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Question for the audience, should John try to get his IFBB pro card?

• 1:38:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  Because that's like all the, there's gonna hit a point this year where the, the natural next step is to get your card.

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Jordi Hays?

  And do a show.

• 1:39:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:02Jordi Hays?

  Because some of the greatest ever do it. Chesky.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Jordi Hays?

  You know, had his run in the amateur bodybuilding circuit.

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, uh, these are fantastic. I've, I've been really enjoying these, uh, just in really, really insane macros. The, the rule of thumb.

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  And, and Ryan, our, our dear friend, Ryan Harmon at Day Job did all the branding.

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  Oh, he did the branding. Fantastic. It is great. The David Barr after, uh, Michelangelo's David, correct?

• 1:39:28Jordi Hays?

  I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. That is how you need to be thinking about yourself.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  Does it say that on here?

• 1:39:35Jordi Hays?

  On the side.

• 1:39:36John Coogan?

  That's sick. Oh, that's amazing. These quotes, biblical quotes. Uh, yeah, it's fantastic. Um, the, the, the macros really feel too good to be true. The, the rule of thumb that a buddy of mine, uh, gave me was, uh, if you're trying to eat healthy and get a lot of protein, you should be looking for one gram of protein for every 10 calories. So you pull out a protein bar that's 200 calories, it should have 20 grams of protein.

• 1:40:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:00John Coogan?

  This has almost twice the ratio. It's, it's uncanny.

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  It ratios the other bars.

• 1:40:06John Coogan?

  It ratios the other bars. And I thought it was gonna taste absolutely terrible because of the insane, I thought it was a, you know, Faustian bargain. But, uh, I think they taste great and I, I could easily survive off these for years and just, and just walk around IFBB pro status, ready to step on stage at 6% body fat at any, at any moment.

• 1:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. It really is, it really is fantastic. I, I'm a huge fan of these.

• 1:40:31Jordi Hays?

  No, it's great.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  We might have different palates, but, uh, but I'm into this. Uh, and so thank you for sending these.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  That, this tastes like, almost like a Rice Krispie treat.

• 1:40:40John Coogan?

  It, it really, it, it doesn't taste like you think. You'd think it'd be really, really dry, right? And like inedible. And it's just like, it just goes.

• 1:40:47Jordi Hays?

  So much better than RX Bar.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Which is evidence of why repeat founders.

• 1:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Oftentimes do really well.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:57Jordi Hays?

  Cause they're a better founder than they were with their last company. But then with, uh, with this, he didn't just, he's, it's, he's still in the bar game. So he's like making a 10x better bar.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  I, I would eat RX bars quite a lot. I just liked the fact that it was so simple.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:14Jordi Hays?

  And it's funny because this is on the other end of the spectrum of simple, but, but much more of, of a science project in a way. Right. Where it's not a, um, so anyways, shout out to David. Shout out to Peter. Uh, thank you for getting us stocked up.

• 1:41:31John Coogan?

  They're fantastic. They will definitely be present in the cage.

• 1:41:33Jordi Hays?

  Into the, um, into the timeline.

• 1:41:35John Coogan?

  Definitely present in the cage. You'll be surviving off of those.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The cage, by the way, uh, one thing I want to clarify, it's not meant to be, um, the cage is not meant to be, uh, a unenjoyable experience. I, I predict that many people, I've been talking to some of the applicants. I predict that many people will get to the end of the 90 days and, and actually have like sort of a Mexican standoff, you know? Uh, like, I don't want to leave the cage. Like, I'm like, I'm like, you know, sta- like I'm staying.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  They're calling the sponsors on our behalf. It's like, let's run season two right now. Keep me on the show.

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  The chef is too good. The steaks are too good. I'm too diced. I'm, my company's ripping. If I have to move, it's going to disrupt my company.

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  Throw everything off.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  Like, let me stay. Um.

• 1:42:25John Coogan?

  I hope they can just speed run everything. I want to see a, an acquisition of one company into another.

• 1:42:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We're going to see large scale M and A, uh, mango seed rounds getting done in the cage.

• 1:42:36John Coogan?

  What is private equity guys doing in the cage today? Oh, they're doing a LBO on one of the companies.

• 1:42:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I would like to see a roll. I'd like to see a roll up.

• 1:42:43John Coogan?

  Roll up of some of the cage companies.

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  The, the, the good strategy is come in with a search fund.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:48Jordi Hays?

  Acquire a business over that 90 days. Get to the one million mark.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  Seller financing. You only have 25K. That's enough.

• 1:42:54Jordi Hays?

  Coin, the meme coin idea is good too, right?

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Meme coin's obvious, but I mean, the, the, the seller finance buyout of a business that's already doing a million ARR, that's. Very doable.

• 1:43:04Jordi Hays?

  That's the beauty of this. There's no rule.

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  You can get out in a day.

• 1:43:08Jordi Hays?

  The only rule, the rules are very simple.

• 1:43:10John Coogan?

  Creativity.

• 1:43:10Jordi Hays?

  Twenty five K, ninety days.

• 1:43:13John Coogan?

  Or you die.

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  One million, or you die. Somebody, so Nate, Nate Eliason, you know him? He said that, that, that the death should be waterboarding with Dom Perignon.

• 1:43:25Jordi Hays?

  I was like, I don't know.

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  I don't think that this is the way to go, but it's rough.

• 1:43:30Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if you were gonna go.

• 1:43:31John Coogan?

  There'll be lots of Dom Perignon regardless.

• 1:43:32Jordi Hays?

  If you had to be tortured to death slowly, you'd choose Dom Perignon.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I've been doing Dry January, so only drinking dry champagnes, uh, basically every day. And it's been fantastic. I mean, uh, your body just changes after a couple of weeks of, of not drinking sweet wines and focusing on the dry ones during Dry January. So highly recommend doing Dry January, sticking to Dom. I have a fantastic story about cages and Paul Graham. First time I heard him speak, Silicon Valley, twenty, twenty twelve.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  First company went, or second company.

• 1:44:07Jordi Hays?

  Crazy that I wasn't even born yet.

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were in, uh, what, third grade?

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  First company's going through Y C and, uh, P G comes to talk and gives this, uh, talk about like what red flags exist for, uh, founders of companies these days. And so P G famously really loves technical teams. He likes, you know, oh, these three guys were at MIT together. They all can program roughly and they all come out and then over time, you know, the C E O does a lot less programming. Eventually the C T O becomes just a manager, but is very technical still. And this is a common pattern we see where it's like, if it's a tech company, like the, the, the C E O is still pretty technical, even if they're not coding.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  With Party Around, that was a huge, uh.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, people were like.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  I didn't, we didn't, we didn't get into Y C because.

• 1:44:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  Because of that.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  You were a non-technical founder.

• 1:44:59Jordi Hays?

  And, um, well, not, I can't say it was just because of that, but that was a primary reason they gave. We were already funded by Google.

• 1:45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:05Jordi Hays?

  Like Google's. Um, early stage fund, um, but, uh, I do feel like it was the biggest detriment to our success. Because in terms of, imagine it's a Friday night and you are CEO.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:22Jordi Hays?

  And you want to have the most impact on your business. And maybe shipping that next feature is the most way to, the best way to have an impact.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:30Jordi Hays?

  If you're non-technical, you're just sitting there.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:33Jordi Hays?

  And you can't, you just simply can't have the impact.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  And if you are technical, you can evaluate technical talent very well. You can rally the troops, inspire them. And you just know, hey, like this bug that I, that, that somebody, a customer came to me. I'm the CEO, told me to, to, to fix this bug. You can, if you, if you're at least a little bit technical, you can clock, okay, this is a week long project. I'm not going to try and give this to somebody on Friday night. I'm going to actually set ourselves up for success next week and build this feature properly. Or this should take one, this should take 15 minutes. If I give it to my team and they take a week, there's a problem. Like something weird's going on. Um, and so PG's been super bullish on, on, on technical teams, technical founders for a long time. But he comes in and he says, like, one pattern that he sees is the, the like, the business guy, the MBA guy that comes in and is like,

• 1:46:18John Coogan?

  I got this business idea and I have my technical like code monkey who's going to build it for me. And he, and he, the, the term that he used for the programmers who, cause he's like, usually it's like some shy programmer who's been like, lightly bullied into like, joining this like startup for this business guy who has no idea how to build this technology. Is, uh, is cager.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  Cager, because he's like, he's like, the way it feels in a YC pitch is that they pull out their code monkey in the cage. And they're like, then this is the guy who's going to build it. Look at my quant, that type of thing. And so we, we would always joke about like, oh, you're, you're, you're a cager, like, you know, we need a cager, that type of stuff. And so the cage is well established in the YC canon.

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  It's so real. I mean, every, every one of those business guys that hasn't built a software company before. Software is pretty tangible because like, everybody's used a bunch of software and they've used, oh, I've used Salesforce, I can build a CRM. Oh, I've used Airbnb, I can build a sharing economy app. And then you just realize that it's the building great software. It's maybe getting easier to build great software, but it is not easy at all.

• 1:47:28John Coogan?

  There's definitely art.

• 1:47:29Jordi Hays?

  And the, the toughest thing and, and the reason that I think. I was not accepted to YC and even raised, you know, didn't stop me from raising, you know, YC has their religion almost, right? Like it's very firmly like they have their criteria and that's what they need to follow in order to accept hundreds of companies a year. But I feel like their general framework, I've used it for my own angel investing and it's been the best, like it's, it is the best framework for me for evaluating early-stage technology companies because it's just so much data has gone into that. That I now, you know, well, if I talk to

• 1:48:08Jordi Hays?

  a founder that doesn't even look too dissimilar to myself, that, that I'm like, no, I won't invest in your company unless you have somebody who is, is equal to you, that is as good as you at what you do, at engineering and they're as bought into the mission.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  And they're also like a brother to you.

• 1:48:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, because that's the other thing. Because the real risk is having a CTO that you don't know that well is usually a disaster too, because you can't trust them in the same way that you can somebody you've worked any amount of time with. So that's why-

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  So you ask those questions and then if it's a no, you ask them, well, what's your bench press? And then that's kind of the final hurdle.

• 1:48:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. That's the final hurdle.

• 1:48:48John Coogan?

  As long as they're repping two plates or benching more than-

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Thousand pound club. It could be 800 pound squat.

• 1:48:53John Coogan?

  Or just bench a Brian Johnson club, just benching more than Brian Johnson. That'll get you pretty far in life.

• 1:48:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which most, most people can do.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Anyway, get in the cage, folks. Sign up today. Let's go to Brian Graham. He says, Zuck's, Zuck says Meta is putting in cubicles. It's bringing back Scotch at lunch and smoking in the office. Zuck says the company's Amex cards work at the strip clubs again. He says it's back to suit and tie dress code. Zuck says they're reinstalling the asbestos. Zuck says there's no Irish allowed. And then Santiago tags us and says, this is a Tech Bros Pod worthy banger right here. 38K likes, like people really like this, but it is funny.

• 1:49:31Jordi Hays?

  This, this is why, this is why, this is why we're doing PMF or Die, because 38K likes just shows how mainstream this stuff has become.

• 1:49:38John Coogan?

  People are into this.

• 1:49:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, um-

• 1:49:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny, Zuck kind of is at this point where he's basically kind of understands that he's, he always wants to be at the edge of doing what people like and what is acceptable, right? So he's just kind of like crawling to the edge, coming up to a new spot, being like, okay, I can go a little farther.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  Take the tampons out of the male restroom, let's see what happens then.

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  Okay, I haven't gotten canceled.

• 1:50:03Jordi Hays?

  Apparently Palmer, Palmer said, he posted, he said he had some crazy story about the tam-. It probably was like some crazy company that was charging like $20 a tampon. You know, like just like abusing it, being like, well, you need to buy this.

• 1:50:17John Coogan?

  Really tampons as a service. I mean, that is hilarious that it's like, if you're trying to sell more urinals, logically you'd be like, they need to be in both bathrooms.

• 1:50:25Jordi Hays?

  No, that was an issue. That was an issue. I remember the plate, the library that I would study at in college. I had my little zone.

• 1:50:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:32Jordi Hays?

  And I remember when the DEI wave hit and they ripped out all the urinals and, and made the, our main bathroom for that section.

• 1:50:39John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:50:40Jordi Hays?

  So the, the walk to go to the ba- you know, when you're studying and you're just like grinding for like 10 hours and you're, and you just sort of like at your desk, walking, you know, my, my peer group would walk outside, smoke cigarette, walk, you know, back to the desk, go to the bathroom and just like alternate there. And then it just became like a super long walk to get to a, a urinal. Um, it's always devastating, but I'm sure they're putting it back, uh, now, which is also good for the urinal companies, right?

• 1:51:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. I, I love the, the suit and tie dress code. Obviously we, we love a suit. We don't wear ties yet, but stay tuned.

• 1:51:14Jordi Hays?

  Zuck's bringing back martinis in the cafeteria.

• 1:51:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, he said Scotch and, uh, smoking in the office, which I support as well.

• 1:51:22Jordi Hays?

  If, if you combine, if you combine big tech profits with the, with the power lunch.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  And bring back the power lunch.

• 1:51:29John Coogan?

  Unstoppable.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  People, all you can drink.

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  I, I told you about my, my buddy who, his dad worked at Goldman Sachs and on the prop desk and, uh, their whole team wore tuxedos every day.

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Every day?

• 1:51:41John Coogan?

  Every day. That was like the dress code in their office. And I was like, dude, that's so sick. Like the eighties were probably so tight. He was like, oh no, this was in 2007.

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  Right before the

• 1:51:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, the crash. And I was like, 2007, like, people were wearing tuxedos all the time. And like, I have a feeling that like, the MD on that team just thought it was funny.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:02John Coogan?

  And it was just like, okay, this is like, what our culture will be in this pod.

• 1:52:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:06John Coogan?

  Because like, when you're in Goldman, like, it's a huge organization, you need to differentiate your team a little bit.

• 1:52:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  Um, and I was like, that's an amazing thing. So

• 1:52:13Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  If you're, if you're, you know, a manager at, at Meta, make your team wear suit and tie every day. Just lean into that one. Because that's, that's not offensive, you know, the, the smoking in the office, that's going to set off the fire alarms. There's a lot of other things here that are a little bit more risky. Don't recommend the asbestos, but you can't go wrong with a nice suit and tie. Um, let's go to the next one. Forward Thinking Founders says, Monday's pod is going to be lit. In this conversation, Matt Sherman interviews Sim4 Satoshi of Truffle. Topics covered include the discussion of Truffle, a device for local inference tied to humanoid robotics and personal intelligence, insights from a unique upbringing

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  in the Middle East, future of AI agents, criticism of Sam Altman, um, critique of Y Combinator. Yeah, Sim4 Satoshi's been spicy on the timeline for a while. And Forward Thinking Founder says, can you print this one out, please? This episode is going to be epic. So I guess, I guess it's Forward Thinking

• 1:53:10Jordi Hays?

  Did he tag us?

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, he tagged us.

• 1:53:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  Uh, is Forward Thinking Founder's a podcast?

• 1:53:13Jordi Hays?

  It must, it must be.

• 1:53:14John Coogan?

  This must be an interview with

• 1:53:15Jordi Hays?

  All right, so we, we are running, this is officially now a promoted post for

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  Matt Sherman's podcast with Sim4 Satoshi.

• 1:53:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so anyways.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  So go listen.

• 1:53:24Jordi Hays?

  Sim4 Satoshi's got a lot going on right now. He, I saw him posting that he's potentially launching a token for the Truffle. Uh, and there's, there's a thesis around

• 1:53:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. That's not that crazy, because there's a render token. Are you familiar with this?

• 1:53:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  Where you can render 3D, like, some 4D files.

• 1:53:39Jordi Hays?

  And he's, he's trying to figure out the right way to do it.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Jordi Hays?

  Super long lockups, stuff like that. I think, um, well, let's see how, uh, I, I would, I would imagine that, that Sam Altman would, would open just like a colossal short position against it. So, dangerous game, once you're in the public, uh, public crypto markets, but, um, but we'll, we'll see how it plays out.

• 1:53:59John Coogan?

  Let's go to Will Monitis, uh, Obscure Hobbyist of the Year last year. Uh, he says, everyone in tech 100x underestimates how important official capital formation is for building the future. Inventing the safe and making it so you could sell equity with a one-page agreement probably created greater than a hundred billion dollars in equity value. There's dozens of these unlocks left to discover. I agree with that. There's a very interesting story where when LLMs first popped off and all the AI companies were like the hottest thing and it was like, this is the future technology and everything else is just like zero-sum reshuffling, like B2B SaaS, cringe, all that stuff. It was like, go build the real stuff. Build the Tesla, the rockets, the AI.

• 1:54:44John Coogan?

  That was like the real tech. Then everything else was just like, you know, busy work, basically. And what was interesting was like, I was thinking about it, I was like, is this, is this a legitimate critique? And if you look at how did the LLMs actually get built? Efficient capital formation is a huge part of that story. And it's the same thing for rockets. Like, without the financing structures that go into the rocket.

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  Into the SPV, into the SPV, into the SPV with this 10% management fee and all this.

• 1:55:11John Coogan?

  I mean, it's a joke, but like, it, it, like, like, the, even just the credit lines on all the different materials in the supply chain that go into a rocket, that is actually important and that financial innovation does speed up the rate at which we get to Mars, which is crazy to think about. And, and it's absolutely true for AI, where, you know, you have this like nonprofit that's able to do a whole bunch of, you know, fundamental research and then get super creative with the, with the capital formation later stage with these like, all these Nvidia credits that are going into AI startups right now. So, oh, you need to train or fine tune a model, we will figure out how to do that. And a lot of those deals are very, like, they face a lot of criticism because during the dot-com boom, a lot of telecom companies did these crazy deals with, with dot-coms,

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  web startups, where they would, where they would basically invest in the company with, like, in-kind credits for their, like, the fiber optic cables that they were laying out and it led to a lot of dark fiber. But that type of like creative capital formation is actually extremely important. And the safe is like, obviously, the, the best possible example because it sped up how quickly startups could move and it shortened financing timelines from a month of due diligence to a few days.

• 1:56:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  What's your take on this? What are you looking up?

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'll tell you in a second, but yeah, I mean, the people don't really realize because my generation at least never built companies in a world without the safe. So the safe was just the default method to raise capital.

• 1:56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  And people don't realize that if you wanted to take even a $25,000 investment, however many years ago, it really was like a lot of Silicon Valley was high trust. So it'd be like, I'm just going to give you money and we'll figure it out. But then, and here's like literally a napkin kind of thing like, you know, here's the general terms. Well, it'll take a while to get done, but we've been really blessed to only know that sort of frictionless capital raising. And I even with Party Around was taking it a step further with safe automation where you could come on the app KYC and then generate around, generate, you know, send it. And it was like using Cash App. It was the same amount of time to sign up with Party Around to raise as it was to like sign up for Cash App.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Do you remember the convertible note era at all?

• 1:57:29Jordi Hays?

  I never, I never even.

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  So the convertible notes.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  And maybe I invested in, I've invested in like one or two convertible notes.

• 1:57:35John Coogan?

  I mean, it's pretty, it was pretty like a crazy dance because you do this round and there's a cap on the convertible note, but there's no floor.

• 1:57:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Typically, there's a famous example of a company that did one and it was disaster for the, for the investors. But, but typically it's like, you know, you raise $2 million on a convertible note, or if it's a big round, you do like $10 million on a convertible note. And that all sounds great, but if you wind up raising money at $10 million, they own 100% of your business or 50% of your business or something. And it's kind of like this default recap. Now in practice, it doesn't happen that much because if you're a startup and things are going bad, like usually you're acquiring the company or just shutting down. There aren't that many places where like your crown jewel gets like stolen by some convertible note investor. But it was a little bit more nerve wracking than the, than the safe and certainly the safe is much, much faster. Should we do a bucket poll?

• 1:58:26Jordi Hays?

  I gotta, I gotta do a promoted post. So we were meant to get on the phone with Wander, the team at Wander.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Right now?

• 1:58:34Jordi Hays?

  No, we're, we're, we're late. So we, we had a 2:30 call.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  Should they just call into the podcast right now?

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I think we're, I'm gonna try to talk with them. We'll try to set it up for like 30 minutes from now, but um, yeah, so we, uh, when, when I posted about some issues I was having with Airbnb over the weekend, Kyle Tibbetts over at Wander reached out and was like, hey, let us get you set up.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:58:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so anyways, Wander, if you don't know, Wander is a technology provider and they own, they own some real estate, but it's their, they've shifted to, I think, a more asset light model where they go and uh, get the best homes like in the world, period.

• 1:59:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, homes that would have maybe been on Airbnb, but then they operate them almost like a hotel. So you know the sheets are gonna be good. You know the wifi is gonna be fast. You know the soaps are gonna be nice. There's like snacks when you arrive. And so it's, and, and you know that you're not gonna, you know, book a place and then 10 minutes before they're like, oh, I can't host you and cancel.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  It's the Aman Giri of couch surfing.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  It's the Aman, that's Aman Giri of the, of the vacation rentals.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:59:37Jordi Hays?

  So, um, so yeah, I, I've known John for a while, uh, and, and his dad, they're both, they're both fantastic. And um, the company's great. They have hundreds of properties now.

• 1:59:46John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:59:47Jordi Hays?

  Um, and uh, yeah, just really, really cool business. So we are definitely gonna be staying in Wander's this year.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think it's a great solution if you're um, a startup founder that is uh, wanting to book like a retreat for your team.

• 2:00:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  And post up somewhere nice for four days and just get a bunch of work done. Much better, I think, solution than just relying on some Airbnb and you show up and I've, I've had this happen before where you show up, you get your team on the wifi and everybody's like, uh, it doesn't work. Like it's devastating, right?

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  The Starlink.

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  You mentioned good for startup retreats. If you, somebody wanted to like do a DIY cage situation, that makes sense? John, John says a tech bros pod shout out will make my month. That's the CEO of Wander. Well, John, we did something better. We ran an ad. Go to every technology brother listener. Go to wander.com.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  Tell them the technology brother sent you.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Tell, tell John and Kyle. So yeah, we're now, we're now talking with them. In 30 minutes. So we got to get the pod.

• 2:00:48John Coogan?

  Okay, let's, let's wrap up. But yes, if you wind up buying a product from somebody we advertise, just throw a little post on X, a little at, at the CEO, tell them the technology brother sent you. Don't even worry about coupon codes. Coupon codes, I'm sure we'll do them at some point. They're a little gauche. What you want to be doing is sending a DM to the CEO or tagging them in a public X post saying that the technology brother sent you.

• 2:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  This is the real way to get attribution.

• 2:01:16Jordi Hays?

  All right. So we're going to be talking to them tomorrow now. Let's get into the next bucket.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Let's do a bucket poll from Eric. He says, when a software engineer says that's not necessarily true, it means someone just said something incredibly stupid. Yeah, that's rough. The software engineers, they're polite.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  But brutal.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  They can be cold.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, it's a very, it's a very strict discipline, right? A very strict discipline. The facts are the facts. Everything compiles. And if your logic doesn't compile,

• 2:01:48John Coogan?

  you probably just said something very stupid.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Not too much to say about that. But I'm sure, you know, plenty of software engineers have told you that's not necessarily true since, you know, non-technical and all.

• 2:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:02John Coogan?

  Should we move on to daily drivers?

• 2:02:04Jordi Hays?

  How, how, how, in the world of Devon AI, is everyone technical? If I sick an army of Devon AI agents on somebody and say, you know?

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  I think, I mean, the gradient to becoming technical.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  I would say I'm technically technical.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  The, the gradient to, it used to be that if you, if you understood Excel, learning Visual Basic, which does a little bit, it's a programming language and it, and it can automate Excel and, and it works in the background. It runs scripts, which is very, very helpful. If you ever open up like a really big investment banking model, there'll be a whole bunch of Visual Basic behind the, behind the scenes that buttons you can actually click that do stuff. You can build, I built a whole CRM in Excel at one point using VBA and.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  And then from there, you know, you could teach yourself like Python in like a weekend, or you could do like a coding bootcamp. So like, the definition of like, what is technical? Is like, a huge gradient from like, okay, I, I know like-

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Technical, I was DDoSing my father's website as a kid.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  That is pretty technical. It's not, it's not super technical. It's just like, it's enough to understand how software works a little bit. You learn a programming language, you write some scripts. But that gradient is just getting so much smoother. Like, like just last night, I needed to pull together some data and I went in ChatGPT, asked it to write a script, and then ChatGPT just throw up like, here's the script, press this button to just run it. So it didn't even need to like install Python on this computer, on this laptop and like set up an environment. And then you get a cursor and that's more advanced, and then you get Devon and that's even more advanced and it's just running continuously on your repo. And so, the, the gradient, so I think, I think the big question is like, if you're intimidated by the idea of software engineering or code

• 2:03:45John Coogan?

  in general, like, you should probably spend a weekend just having ChatGPT explain stuff to you and learn how to write like the most basic Python program. Because once you, once you actually solve a problem, even if it's just like, I want to scrape some website and pull it into a spreadsheet. Like, I did that with the, like, like, we wanted to see like every economist article that's ever been written about technologists. Like, that's just a really easy scraping problem. It's a code that's kind of like pretty easy to write. You can just have an AI help you. But you get to a point where you're like, okay, I achieved the goal. I have used code to do my bidding. Therefore, I can understand

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  This is the advice I always give. AI is not going to take your job. A technical person using AI while in a cold plunge is going to take your job.

• 2:04:31John Coogan?

  In a cage.

• 2:04:32Jordi Hays?

  In a cage. It's going to take your job.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  Let's move on to daily drivers.

• 2:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  Good day, Sarah says, good daily driver for defense tech founders. And it's a beautiful Mercedes G-Wagon six by six.

• 2:04:45Jordi Hays?

  They need to make more of those.

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  They do.

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  They should just, they should just kill the, the regular 550 and G63 and just switch over all production to these.

• 2:04:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Because the road presence is just on another level.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Incredible. I mean, they just launched the, the, the G, G580 with EQ technology. Have you seen that one? It's the electric G-Wagon. They can do a tank turn.

• 2:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Ah.

• 2:05:07John Coogan?

  You don't like it?

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  I think those, I think those are gonna, um.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Depreciate it.

• 2:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate it incredibly fast and I think it will only make the, the gas power more valuable. That said, is Sarah a partner at Point 72 yet? Because if not, she should be.

• 2:05:23John Coogan?

  She is.

• 2:05:23Jordi Hays?

  I don't know anyone else at Point 72, but.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  You don't know Steve Cohen?

• 2:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, is he like in base, is he in the baseball world?

• 2:05:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Okay, baseball guy. Um, but yeah, I think, uh, if I was building a defense tech company right now, uh, I'd be pitching, you know, Sarah.

• 2:05:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, this is a controversy for Post, because a lot of defense tech founders are quote tweeting this and saying, wrong. It's the Toyota Hilux.

• 2:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  Or the Ford Raptor.

• 2:05:47Jordi Hays?

  We gotta be, we should get into the Hilux importation business. We should go into some of these areas and make cash offers.

• 2:05:54John Coogan?

  Bring them in on show and display.

• 2:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  Can you imagine?

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  I like, uh, yeah, I think, I think, uh, the Hilux.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  Hilux 6x6.

• 2:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Toyota, Toyota, what, what's the meme where Toyota's like, we don't know how all these Hiluxes ended up in the desert in the Middle East. Like, we don't even know where the money, you know, the money came in, in, uh, you know.

• 2:06:16John Coogan?

  I mean, you know, there are some, uh, there are a lot of G-Wagons that get lifted and people do a four by four squared conversion with portal axles. So they are higher up. And I think there's been a six by six conversion that someone did, which is insane. Um, the amount of engineering that went into that is like crazy. Um, but, uh, yeah, the Toyota, the Toyota Hilux 6x6.

• 2:06:38John Coogan?

  Beats both of these, I think.

• 2:06:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Pull up in that, you're good. Any other, any other recommendations for daily drivers for Defense Tech founders? What would you go for?

• 2:06:45Jordi Hays?

  I would just go for, I would go for a, go get an old, uh, uh, NASCAR.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  That's a good one.

• 2:06:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's quite a bit cheaper than the average Tesla right now.

• 2:06:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:57Jordi Hays?

  You can go pick one up for thirty, forty grand.

• 2:06:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:59Jordi Hays?

  And, um, make it, you know, convert it, get it street legal. And, uh, drive that. Slap all of your, uh, venture investors logos on the car, because they're your sponsors.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  You've given up too much Alphabets, you're giving me my car.

• 2:07:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, slap the, uh, slap your, your, your cap table on, uh, because those are your sponsors and just hit the roads.

• 2:07:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, we're, I mean, we're trying to move on from the fires, but there's still so many posts. We gotta cover one of them. Uh, this is real technology brother behavior. Tryndamere Mark Merrill, uh, the founder of Riot Games says, Been off the grid fighting to save my house and neighborhood for days. It burned a house two doors down, two above us on a hill, and two on the other side of us went all around. We are staying vigilant because we are not out of the woods with embers falling ash and putting out spot fires around and at our neighbors. Got a Starlink up and solar powered rechargeable battery, which has been a game changer to coordinate and get info. My brother lost his house, our kids lost their school, and ninety percent of the families at their school lost their houses. Wow.

• 2:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:01John Coogan?

  And the Palisades. Grateful to all the first responders and everyone working to help support each other and save lives and neighborhoods. Reminder to everyone, be prepared for emergencies. Our water, food supplies, horse hoses, and landscape fire hygiene has been critical for us. Sending love to everyone affected. And he posted this photo of him just like covered in soot, like just dealing with it. And, uh, there's like a cyber truck in the background. Uh, fascinating. Um, I mean, yeah, real, real heroic behavior there.

• 2:08:29Jordi Hays?

  It does seem that a, you know, a significant number of people that stayed behind and fought and basically ignored the evacuation warnings were successful in saving their homes. But, you know, obviously, you know, some, some even, I'm sure a larger amount weren't successful. So it's a miracle. Glad his house made it and I'm sure it'll be like a, end up being a community outpost almost for his neighbors that are as, you know, his neighborhood burned to the ground and I'm sure he'll open it up to, to people as they rebuild. So, bravo.

• 2:09:05John Coogan?

  Uh, here's another good one from Word Grammar. Been on the show before. Word Grammar says, "In Mario Kart, the racers in place eight through 12 get really good items. First place gets banana peels and blue shells thrown at them. This is how I expect LLM research to work. As time goes on, it will get easier and easier to train new frontier models." A third of this, uh, is that more research papers get published as time goes on. A third of this is that more open source models get released as time goes on. A third of this is that Nvidia chips get faster, better and easier to program as time goes on. Super interesting.

• 2:09:42Jordi Hays?

  Great analogy.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we're seeing this with the China, the Chinese LLMs.

• 2:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, deep, deep sink. I mean,

• 2:09:48John Coogan?

  Deep seek.

• 2:09:49Jordi Hays?

  Deep seek. Uh, deep sink it into the ocean. I'm gonna put this LLM, tie some weights to it, throw it in the SFB, let it sink, let the sharks feed on it.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just don't, I, I think, I think everybody letting them, everybody letting, everybody giving them this like crazy victory lap.

• 2:10:10John Coogan?

  Model from two years ago, got open source. Okay. Yeah, it's not crazy. It's been two years of research.

• 2:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Boo. Don't give them, don't give them, uh, don't even give them any chats.

• 2:10:19John Coogan?

  Let's do a, let's do a promoted post.

• 2:10:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I got a promoted post from Jacob Rintamaki.

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  Rintamaki, yeah.

• 2:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Jacob Rintamaki. Uh, he says, "I'm looking for work. Please reach out." And then he's got this awesome post, uh, that I'll, I'll cover a little bit. And I would say this is, this is very smart. Instead of throwing up the open to work thing on his LinkedIn, he's actually saying what he wants to work on and what's, what's interesting about his point of view. He says, according to my iPhone, I walked for approximately 12.6 miles yesterday, mostly because I didn't want to pay for non-serve Ubers in the Bay Area. However, all that walking made me do a lot of thinking, so I'm ready to announce that I am looking for work. This piece includes the first two things I would do if hired at each of the three organizations I'm particularly, but not exclusively interested in Doge, Renaissance, philanthropy and Future House.

• 2:11:10Jordi Hays?

  And so he just goes on to share quite a lot about his experience experimenting with AI, what he would do at Doge and some of these other organizations. So anyways, this is just a one, this is so smart because you don't have to be at these three organizations to be like, this guy clearly has agency, knows what he's interested in. I should reach out to him and you know, this makes me want to talk to him about roles at.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  I met him in some random group chat and always liked what he was saying. And I think I referred him to Patrick O'Shaughnessy for like one of those O'Shaughnessy Venture OSV.

• 2:11:46Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:11:46John Coogan?

  Program. And I don't know if that panned out, but then a couple of days later, Will Monitis was asking for someone to help him with some project.

• 2:11:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:54John Coogan?

  And I tagged Jacob and was like, hey, you should, you guys should talk. And Will texted me like, where are you finding these boys? Like, how did you, how did you find this man?

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  It's like the brothers.

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the brothers, Will. Like, get used to it.

• 2:12:06Jordi Hays?

  This is the most powerful online fraternity in the world.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  It really is. It's great. But yeah, I mean, would be a great pickup for the right organization. So put them to work.

• 2:12:16Jordi Hays?

  We look forward to doing, we look doing the personnel news. Jacob, the only other thing I would say, join the cage.

• 2:12:21John Coogan?

  Join the cage.

• 2:12:23Jordi Hays?

  You'll find yourself in the cage and you might find product market fit.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, or you'll die.

• 2:12:29Jordi Hays?

  The stakes are high.

• 2:12:30John Coogan?

  Let's do a bucket pull. I love this one. James Hawkins says, oh, this is such a low TAM banger. 36 likes. I love when we find a low TAM banger. Jordy, you gotta pay attention to this, man. He's a good one.

• 2:12:42Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry.

• 2:12:43John Coogan?

  You gotta lock in.

• 2:12:44Jordi Hays?

  The notifications.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  So James says, your dream life isn't that expensive. San Francisco apartment, $7,500 per month. Rivian R1S, $1,000 per month. Can think of a lot of better cars. Ski home in Aspen, $49,000 a month. Yacht that's one meter longer than Jeff Bezos' yacht, $30 million a month.

• 2:13:05John Coogan?

  Thirty million.

• 2:13:06Jordi Hays?

  Thirty million a month? No way.

• 2:13:09John Coogan?

  I think it's like a billion dollar yacht, right?

• 2:13:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but still, you're not paying three hundred and sixty thousand, three hundred and sixty million a year to rent that yacht. I'm sorry.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  Okay, anyway, uh, maybe you're going ten billion dollars, who knows? Uh, but he says, it's the, it's the spirit of the post that matters here with the bucket pool. Uh, he says thirty million, fifty seven thousand and five hundred dollars per month. That's your dream life. You just need to get.

• 2:13:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Let's go.

• 2:13:37John Coogan?

  You just need to get one client paying you thirty million, fifty seven thousand and five hundred dollars. And you're there. Ring that gong, baby. Ring that gong. Oh, it's so good. Okay, um.

• 2:13:54Jordi Hays?

  See, that's the kind of thing. People need motivation.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  People need something to.

• 2:13:58John Coogan?

  Just one client.

• 2:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not about, oh, you need, you just need ten clients paying you eight thousand, three hundred and thirty-three dollars a month. You know, to get one millionaire. Just get one that pays you thirty.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  Thirty.

• 2:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Simple.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:14:11Jordi Hays?

  It's not the number like.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Stop making excuses.

• 2:14:13Jordi Hays?

  You don't even need a calculator.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  The genetic lottery. It exists. Win it. No excuses.

• 2:14:18Jordi Hays?

  Win it.

• 2:14:20John Coogan?

  Let's go to another deranged bro.

• 2:14:25John Coogan?

  Banger from, uh, weapon outfitters.com. I love this account. I don't know if this is actually true, but hey, if you already own night vision goggles, nods, might as well give it a try. I think my baby is more disturbed by the sensation of temperature shift than light, but I'm going to experiment. And it's a post from a guy who says, uh, I have a, like, I have a thirteen month old kid, a baby, and, and I don't want to turn on the light when I go in and check on him. So I put on my night vision goggles. The dude clearly just has like, you know, a scope for his gun, night vision goggles.

• 2:15:01John Coogan?

  With night, I have, when you're, when you're thirty-three M size thirteen, stay at home, thirty-three year old male, size thirteen, I don't know why you're saying that.

• 2:15:13John Coogan?

  Stay at home dad slash veteran with night vision and a child, you realize by using ICW, you can disturb the child less, thus allowing us to sleep more. So he'll go in and change the diaper and it's just pitch black for the baby. I thought it was genius.

• 2:15:28Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  That was genius. More tactical gear in, in the, in the bedroom.

• 2:15:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I.

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  In the baby's room.

• 2:15:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm inclined, I mean, there's so, so many moments as a parent where it's dark, you want to keep the lights off and you gotta do stuff, oh, diaper change. I do think it'd be, you know, potentially traumatizing for the child to see you fully get it up.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  You know the sound and when it turns on like in Call of Duty.

• 2:15:53Jordi Hays?

  But maybe just let your kid watch Zero Dark Thirty, so they get more familiar with adults and night vision.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  There are like tactical baby gear companies for like, they're like kind of joke gag gifts and it's like a bulletproof vest, but it like has room for like diapers and stuff. So it's very, very cute. I, I, I also think like, uh, nurseries, sometimes like if there's flat walls and there's echo, the baby's cry can just be so much louder because it's reverberating. So selling sound panels that are, that, that are, that have like images that are appealing to babies. So like a cute photo that's printed onto a sound panel. Exactly. Like nice wallpapers.

• 2:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Nursery sound panels.

• 2:16:32John Coogan?

  Looks like a, you know, safari park or like giraffes and elephants, but it's sound panels, so it's dampening the cries.

• 2:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Maps that are three D.

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, anything, you can throw a tapestry on the wall.

• 2:16:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How about some fine art?

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  Fine art.

• 2:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Fine art actually does the same thing.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, totally. Especially if it's like a nice canvas.

• 2:16:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So throw, throw on a priceless work.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Even, it's just, it's just a failure of like modern home design that like, we no longer use tapestries and floor, like carpets. Like you should have thick lush carpets, tapestries on the wall. Like, you know, exposed beams in the ceiling and, and what, what are those called? Like, uh, you know, it should look like the Sistine Chapel when you look up.

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:17:11Jordi Hays?

  A modern wonder.

• 2:17:12John Coogan?

  You want to do a promoted post?

• 2:17:14Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to do a promoted post because this 1954 Bentley R-Type Continental Fastback Sports Saloon by H.J. Mulliner is considered one of the most beautiful cars ever produced, featuring a hand-formed aluminum body on a high-performance chassis. And this thing is just fantastic. I mean, look at this, John. This screams SF daily. You could do an engine swap and throw your, you know, if you have a Tesla Model 3 right now, swap that engine into here. And, you know, it's gonna be a little bit annoying to charge it, but there's more and more of these, you know, supercharger stations. And this thing is just fantastic. I mean, I can

• 2:17:57John Coogan?

  That does look amazing.

• 2:17:58Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine hearing that, you know, you, you know, picture this, you're driving down the 101, and you, you, you know, you're in bumper-to-bumper traffic in this car that presumably is, you know, multiple, you know, millions of dollars. And you get this notification, push notification that says, you know, we're in for the deal, like, send over the contract, we'll sign. Five million A.R. deal. And you're like, that just paid for this car.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:18:26Jordi Hays?

  So like, picture that, visualize that, go buy this, and tell R.M. Sotheby's that the technology brothers sent you.

• 2:18:32John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's go to Grimes, throw in some shade on the timeline from a 20VC clip with the founder of Suno. Founder of Suno says, "It's not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of time they spend making music." And Grimes comes with some heat, says, "This guy is a weak fuckboy and wants all of us to be weak too. This POV in the AI community is literal poison and cope. People who want to destroy your dopamine receptors and make you intolerant to challenges hate humans,

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  and they are legitimately dangerous." Wow. Nuclear bomb going off on the timeline. You hate to see it, you love to see it. It happens every day. We gotta recover, we gotta cover what happens.

• 2:19:27Jordi Hays?

  I see, I see both, I think both points of view are correct in their own ways. I think that it's awesome that a bunch of people are gonna make music now that never made music before. When I think about growing up, you know, I had the benefit of parents that were insistent on Piano lessons, guitar lessons, I had to, you know, singing lessons, I had to be

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Making music weekly, daily. I was forced to practice. I went through periods where I didn't like it. Went through periods where I loved it and that was all I wanted to do.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  So.

• 2:19:56Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I, I, I don't remember, I, I remember as a kid being, you know, thinking to myself, I don't want to practice piano right now.

• 2:20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:05Jordi Hays?

  But that was more so because I wasn't, I, I just was like seven years old and I wanted to, I don't know, like throw rocks at the house or something like that. Um, so I think that, uh, but it, but it's the same thing. I, I saw other people making the comparison of, of a marathon runner doesn't go, oh, I'm so annoyed that I have this blister. That's so annoying. I, I, I wish that I just never had any like adverse situations. They're not thinking in that way, right? So a musician who's like, I've trained my whole, I had to train for two decades to get this good at violin. That's so annoying. I wish I could have gotten here in, in a day, right? Nobody, I, I really don't think that's how people think.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:47Jordi Hays?

  But simultaneously, it's great that there's new tools that will make it simple for people to create beautiful art, right? Even though it's ju- definitely machine oriented. And so the same type of pushback against DG, DJs and electronic music of you don't have a full orchestra. Why are you, you know, this isn't real music. So I think there will be this separation, a continuing separation of artisanal,

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  handcrafted music and then music that sounds very similar that was created by machines.

• 2:21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's some DJs that like they're EDM, but they have like almost a live band when they perform and everything's like live drumming. Um, there, there's kind of like a, the good ending, I think here looks like, uh, there's an, there's an app, I think it's called Synthesia that you can run on your laptop above the piano and it, it turns, it tur- it's a real piano that you're playing, but as you're playing. It moves the notes down visually. So instead of reading sheet music, you can just see like it's the key to the left.

• 2:21:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:46John Coogan?

  And, and that makes piano like way easier to.

• 2:21:49Jordi Hays?

  Like Guitar Hero.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  It's like Guitar Hero.

• 2:21:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:51John Coogan?

  But you're playing the actual instrument, which is cool. So it's like kind of cheating. And then a lot of music production in hip hop and rap specifically is just like, almost just assembling other stems. So there's like, you know, there's like these famous beats from like vinyl records that like Kanye will sample and then put that. And then it's like, he's not really writing that particular melody. He's just kind of rearranging it. And I could see Suno being useful for like blocking out tracks. I know people are.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And Mike's argument would be that Suno is going to be a gateway drug for people to fall in love with making music and get addicted to making music. And then as they get more into it.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:29Jordi Hays?

  They will, well, maybe I should learn this instrument, or maybe I should do this live, or maybe I should sing this myself, right? So presumably if you make it much easier to do something, it will introduce more people to it. But I don't think, I, I, I think, I think Grimes is also right in that saying, oh, we should only do things that are easy.

• 2:22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:48Jordi Hays?

  Is, is, is.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's just the most controversial framing possible on this, but.

• 2:22:53Jordi Hays?

  But he's clearly trying to piss off traditional music.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  And we already went through all this with the AI art stuff where it's like, yeah, the, the AI art that actually goes viral or is stuff that's like inspired, like the Harry Potter Balenciaga thing where that was. Yeah, it was all AI generated, but the prompt wasn't make something viral. The prompt was clearly from a human thinking about, okay, it's interesting to combine Harry Potter and Balenciaga, these two things on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

• 2:23:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:22John Coogan?

  And then I'm going to do all the puppeteering of this and put it all together and have this song in there. And like Suno will be a tool in that toolkit in the same way that content aware fill is a tool in the Photoshop toolkit or generative fill is. I mean, just yesterday I was mapping out that like, that like spec ad that we're working on for the next video. And I was using a lot of movie B roll and then using some, some, some audio and I was looking for different songs. And it was like, I was really having to shuffle through all the different songs that we could possibly fit in there. And it would have been. I probably could have prompted something for like, I just need generically dramatic music right here and then I just want higher energy music during this section and I just want to have it paced out a little bit. And some of the, some of the stock music sites

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  allow you to filter for that stuff, but you still have to listen to a lot of it and clearly, you know.

• 2:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The one thing is that electronic music has not killed live music.

• 2:24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Seems in many ways.

• 2:24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Just as loved and enjoyed as ever.

• 2:24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Should we go to Sean Frank? He says, "Do you want more domestic manufacturing? Current consensus is to court multinationals with tax breaks, tariffs and tens of billions in funding. I suggest a different plan. What makes China so powerful isn't Foxconn. It's the literal tens of thousands of solo factories making everything from buttons to springs to toys. We should build up, build the small mom and pop factories because they train people, make the parts, that make the parts that make the part, that make the things we buy. One giant automated mega factory is awesome, but if you want a hundred good factories, you need about 10,000 shitty ones, barely figuring it out. The CHIPS Act is great, but we need a shit act.

• 2:25:03John Coogan?

  Seriously, hire, invent and train, invest and train, S-H-I-T. 10 billion in zero interest loans, I love the sound of that, to start new factories at 10 million blocks only, start paying back when you get to 10 million revenue."

• 2:25:16Jordi Hays?

  So Sean is, Sean is goaded in so many ways, not just as an operator running the most profitable wallet company in history, but he just is hilarious and, you know, his ability to coin is phenomenal. I think he's really leaning into Kugan's Law on this one and claiming the shit act. But I got a, you know, front row seat to Ridge's operations in the early days and they developed a really strong relationship with a specific factory that they built up over time and many visits and I think eventually they just took over all their production capacity. And every consumer product and hardware company today will tell

• 2:26:00Jordi Hays?

  you that everybody goes out and they look at the whole world, where can we make this thing? And they always end up in China because China's half the cost and the products and the output's better and it's more consistent. And yeah, you have to deal with Chinese New Year and longer shipping times, but it's just so much better. And so. Carrie No Interest is also talking about this as well, like, we need massive, if we want to take this seriously, we need massive, massive, massive subsidies. And so, both these legendary posters are right, and I do, I support the shit act.

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  Well, we were talking about this with the American Toy Company, just this idea of like, there's a, I mean, you buy toys for kids and they're all just made in China and they're all these cheap plastic and they're clearly designed to be used for three months and thrown away. And they're, they're not something that will be passed down, whereas if you look at like your grandparents, they have toys that were passed down to your parents probably, right? It's sad, it's emotional, and that emotion can drive consumer behavior. And so, if you start a company that their whole brand is like, these toys are made in America, they still do all the cool things, they entertain, they have LEDs and music and all this stuff.

• 2:27:04Jordi Hays?

  They're four to five times the cost.

• 2:27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they are more expensive, it's a luxury good, it's more expensive, but then, when you build, I, I had this, I was talking to Trey about this, like, like, you know, maybe to, to, to, you know, we get the missile factory after we get like the Happy Meal factory. And it's like, yeah, let's just, let's just have, you know, like, Hadrian's obviously doing incredibly important stuff right now with like very key defense companies that need products right now, and that's important. But maybe we also need a Happy Meal startup that's just like, yeah, we do injection molded plastic and we just do it pretty well, and we do it as well as we possibly can in America, and maybe the tariffs will help with that, maybe the consumer choices will help with that, but we're dedicated to this for the long term, and over the long term, we think we will be able to get at parity with, with robotics.

• 2:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a request, that's a request for startups, by the way, American Toy Company, please, somebody build it, I think you could sell items that currently, go into a toy store, look at all the stuff that currently is made, twenty dollars, make those items for fifty to a hundred dollars here in America, make them really, really good. And, and I'll just tell you, this is more of like a request for dinos, because I buy an obscene, an obscene amount of dinosaur toys, and I like buying the ones that are these heavy rubber, because I'm like, well, I'm gonna be able to re, I'm gonna be able to donate this, and it'll still be in really good condition, I don't want this cheap stuff.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  Like nine times out of ten.

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Slap an L L M in it. Put an L L M in it.

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  I mean, nine times out of ten, you're so much better off getting a small child, like one really amazing toy than like twenty toys. Where they just cause a lot of clutter. Like the clutter builds up no matter what with toys. And so like if you came to me and you're like, there's this amazing toy that's really popular and it's three grand or something, I'd be like, hell yeah, like that sounds amazing. Whereas like instead of it's like, oh, like you go to the toy store, it's like, everything's like twenty bucks, which is like great because everyone can have toys, but like, there's definitely this market.

• 2:28:52Jordi Hays?

  It was the first time in my adult life, there was, as an adult, there gets to a point where all the stuff you want costs five grand and up. And, and so it's great walking into a toy store and being, you know, like, I'm gonna buy the whole store. But at the same time, I'd much rather buy and, and you want to.

• 2:29:12John Coogan?

  Something that's like an Italian suit, something that you need one of.

• 2:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just, I want something that's wooden, cool materials, you know?

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  Boston Dynamics, like that type of stuff. They, they, they're making these like transformer toys that a couple of them went, went viral.

• 2:29:27Jordi Hays?

  I actually do wanna, I wanna get, I wanna get a, I wanna, somebody make a Boston Dynamics kids toy dog. Because I'd like a dog, but I wanna be able to turn it off. I don't want it to poop in the house. And, but I still want it to be fluffy and loving and conscientious. And I think that L L M's can do that. So.

• 2:29:44John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:29:45Jordi Hays?

  Toy dogs, that, toy dogs for kids, five hundred bucks to a thousand dollars. You could probably charge more because like a dog is pretty expensive. Don't have to feed it. Just gotta plug it into the wall. It barks, it, you know, develops a relationship with your child and you never have to take it to the woodshed.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  And it has an AR fifteen inside in case it needs to do some home defense.

• 2:30:07Jordi Hays?

  All right, we're, we're, we should just keep going with this.

• 2:30:10John Coogan?

  Let's do a bucket pull. Luxury watch guy, first time on the show, but I've been a follower of his for a while. He says, twenty twenty five prediction, Zuck is gonna end the Apple Watch. This is not satire. I have had a few big boys from Silicon Valley DM me that they wanna start building collections. And so I think this is, this is right. Obviously, we have been big on this and we're pushing. For the, uh, for everyone in Silicon Valley to start building watch collections. But I don't think it'll be the end of the Apple Watch because it's just, they're like, they're, they don't make enough FPJorns. To satisfy demand. It's just impossible.

• 2:30:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just recommend if you're obsessed with your Apple Watch, you got two wrists for a reason. God gave you two wrists, put them to use.

• 2:30:55John Coogan?

  Throw the Apple Watch on your ankle.

• 2:30:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's more of like, that's more of like a longhouse technology. So throw it on, throw it on the ankle.

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  Throw it on the ankle.

• 2:31:05Jordi Hays?

  You got exposed, I got exposed ankles here slapping. It's much more of a, you know, you're.

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  No, I mean, if Zuck wanted to really kill the Apple Watch, he would need to launch a competitive product, something.

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  I want, here's what I want. I want the Meta watch and it's just the reels feed.

• 2:31:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:19Jordi Hays?

  And you can just watch.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  Swipe constantly.

• 2:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Swipe all day.

• 2:31:22John Coogan?

  There's no other functionality, just constantly content. Uh, I mean, the, the, the new Orion headset does have a watch. It's not an actual watch. It's just a wristband, but it, it measures what your hands are doing. And then that translates into the augmented reality experience. And so you could imagine if they really want people to wear the glasses all the time and they want people to have the wristband all the time. Well, throwing watch functionality out and making it look like a watch, making this look like sunglasses or eyeglasses. And making this look like an actual watch is going to be much easier than saying, okay, you still have a watch, but then you also have this wristband.

• 2:31:54Jordi Hays?

  It's actually, I really wonder why Meta hasn't done a smart, a smart watch, at least for the international market that runs on WhatsApp. Right?

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:04Jordi Hays?

  You know, when somebody messages you in America on WhatsApp, you're like, really dude?

• 2:32:11Jordi Hays?

  We're both here. We're both here. Let's jump over to the, you know, the iMessage. Like, we don't have to do this.

• 2:32:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:17Jordi Hays?

  But you'd think that they would have done something in that lane, given.

• 2:32:21John Coogan?

  Well, they tried. They tried to do a phone. Chamath was on the project apparently and it didn't go well. Yeah, the Facebook phone. This was back in like.

• 2:32:33John Coogan?

  Chavas just like sitting there like, what if we spun this out as a spec?

• 2:32:37John Coogan?

  No, but yeah, the, the, the, the, getting into hardware is really hard, especially if it's an existing platform where there's entrenched duopoly. Getting people's switches really hard, tricky. Yeah, it would be cool to see like if Zuck took like a sabbatical or like a, you know, a trip to his island in Hawaii and was like, let me just think of like a cool consumer device instead of like thinking about like,

• 2:33:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I, I'd like thinking about.

• 2:33:03John Coogan?

  Platform and all that stuff.

• 2:33:05Jordi Hays?

  The thing I've liked about these AI hardware startups is the shots on goal.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:33:10Jordi Hays?

  And people think about software as it's okay for software to take shots on goal and have misses, right? Think about how willing people are to experiment with software, yet with hardware, there, there seems to be this sense of, it's super embarrassing if a hardware device flops, like we should only do it if, if like, we're gonna really make it the core thing. Whereas Meta is like, okay, figure out a way to spend $20 million, which is a rounding error for Meta to make a new.

• 2:33:42John Coogan?

  Done that. They spend 10 billion on the.

• 2:33:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, like they're spending 10 billion on everything. Why doesn't Duck?

• 2:33:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Set up a Skunk Works team.

• 2:33:50Jordi Hays?

  Skunk Works where it's like, you know, Avi from Friend is launching a consumer hardware device for $5 million.

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:57Jordi Hays?

  So why don't you do a bunch of stuff like that?

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  And four and a half of that's on a domain, right?

• 2:34:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. But you can like distribute, just like, think of it as, as, you know, it's okay for it to be ephemeral and it's okay to just, put stuff out there and I want our big, our lovely big American tech companies to just be innovating and just like doing cool stuff.

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  Launch a printer.

• 2:34:18Jordi Hays?

  Launch a printer. We badly need a better printer that can do 10,000 pages a minute. We should maybe do one more and then wrap it up.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's do.

• 2:34:31Jordi Hays?

  We could, at this rate, we could hit five hours. We could do our first five hour show, but our, our children want to.

• 2:34:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's go to Dennis. He says, you just got lucky is equivalent to, I failed more times than you tried. I like that. A little bit of just an inspirational quote. Yeah.

• 2:34:52Jordi Hays?

  No, it's great. I mean, there's so much, most of the successful entrepreneurs I know have failed more times than the entrepreneurs have, I know have ever tried, right? And it, the most, the worst thing is when somebody who wants to be an entrepreneur tries really hard and fails and just gives up completely. And that happens so much. So you've just gotta take a bunch of shots on goal. And that's one of the, honestly, the downsides of venture capital is the stakes become so much higher. And now it's become easier for people to raise venture capital. And so.

• 2:35:25John Coogan?

  I feel like the stakes get lower in a sense.

• 2:35:27Jordi Hays?

  No, the stakes are low.

• 2:35:28John Coogan?

  Ten million dollars, I get a 400K salary on day one.

• 2:35:32Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's more like, it's more like, uh, when you raise venture capital, you're, you're, you're taking people's hard earned money and then you have to like, turn that into, you're trying to turn that into multiples of it.

• 2:35:43John Coogan?

  And you're certainly trying to build a business faster.

• 2:35:45Jordi Hays?

  The emotional pain and turmoil, if you don't do that.

• 2:35:48John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, that's real.

• 2:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Is, is so real. And then, okay, if your company sort of works and you're stuck on that idea, if it doesn't work, you know, maybe you operate for a few years and then whatever. And so it eats up way more time. Whereas when you don't raise venture capital, you can just ship, ship, ship, fail, fail. You're not hurt, you're not wasting any resource except your own time and money. And so I think that, um, I think there would be less capital incineration if more people were just.

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  I would, I would like to add that luck is a skill issue. And if you feel like you're not lucky, you need to get your Feng Shui in order. You need to make sure your desk is in the, in the power position. Make sure something in your life is the Chinese number of wealth, eight.

• 2:36:36Jordi Hays?

  Many things in your life, phone, address.

• 2:36:39John Coogan?

  Everything should add up to eight.

• 2:36:40Jordi Hays?

  Business partners.

• 2:36:41John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:36:43Jordi Hays?

  Group chats.

• 2:36:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. So get your Feng Shui correct. Make sure your desk is in the power position. It's easy to do. Just move the desk.

• 2:36:49Jordi Hays?

  Follow astrology. Do not incorporate without consulting with the stars.

• 2:36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, make sure it's the right time to get on Stripe Atlas.

• 2:36:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Stripe Atlas should have an astrology. It's like, hey, before you hit submit, you're gonna have a better chance if you just wait 12, you know, 12 hours and let it tick over the next day. Jeff, Jeff Weinstein over at Stripe Atlas, please add an astrological incorporation functionality.

• 2:37:13John Coogan?

  You need to make sure it's the right, it's the right time.

• 2:37:15Jordi Hays?

  It just can be devastating if you do it at the wrong, at the wrong, uh, day, month, you know, year.