Chad Byers, Car Dealership Guy, Scott Wu, Soren Monroe, Joe Weisenthal, PepsiCo, Fooling Tesla FSD

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (00:00) - Why was John in DC? (34:26) - Fooling Tesla FSD (48:12) - The Solana Ad (59:59) - Soren Monroe (01:13:50) - Joe Weisenthal (01:42:28) - Scott Wu (02:14:30) - Car Dealership Guy (02:42:29) - Chad Byers

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

• 0:01John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. It is Tuesday, March 18th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today, folks, and we're kicking off some listener Q and A. I'm feeling pretty bad. I was on a flight for six out of the last 24, 12 out of the last 24 hours.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  And you were bummed because you didn't get any paparazzi shots.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  There was nobody.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  There was no one taking pictures of me. I saw.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, that you know of.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, that I know of. I saw some paparazzi shots hit the timeline, but not of me.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  I want to see a video leak from a, from a Delta, you know, coast to coast flight where you're arguing about, how could you not have Dom Perignon on a flight?

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Just berating the stewardess.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then you get.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  This is unacceptable.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  Then you get exposed for not flying private.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. It just destroys my entire career. Yeah, just get laughed out of the podcasting world. Hopefully it never happens. Well, we, we actually got some questions from viewers. One of them was, what was John doing in Washington DC yesterday? And I just want to address, you know, people have been saying like, oh, maybe John's like, a political power player or like a kingmaker.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  Many people have been saying that.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  He's like pulling the strings behind the scenes and I just want to categorically deny those accusations. There's no evidence for that and it's not true.

• 1:26Jordi Hays?

  The accusations have been very widespread.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  And seem to have a bunch of, you know, independent sources.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  All been sort of saying the same thing in different ways.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, Teddy Schleifer at the New York Times has been sniffing around. Julia Black has been sniffing around at the information. But it's not true. I wasn't in DC pulling strings, although I was doing some lobbying specifically. I mean, we've been podcasting for, you know, a couple of months now. It's been going really well. But recently I've been getting very, very worried and very scared about the situation with podcasting, mainly about.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  You know, what happens if the power that accrues to podcasters just keeps accruing exponentially? Could we be in some sort of like podcasting doom scenario?

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  And I think we need the government to step in and regulate and create kind of a government sanctioned monopoly for podcasters.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  You know, normally, like, normally, I'm a free markets guy.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  You're normally against regulatory capture.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  Specifically in AI, a lot of the AI safety stuff was kind of overblown.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  I don't believe in any of that, but podcasting is different. I mean, it's it's right access to your brain's neurons. It's so important. And so I I was there on Capitol Hill calling for action, saying, regulate us. Make sure that, you know, you need you need a government sanctioned license to have an RSS feed.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  It should cost, yeah, it should probably cost $5 million a year to have an RSS feed and, you know, like, really bring in.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And you should have a stamp, an approval from a government organization like the FDA. They should look at your content and say, yes, this is not slop. This passes the bar. This is good for America and humanity.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  And also.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  And that would stop a lot of people from, you know, doing these sort of part time podcasts.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Exactly. We would get rid of all that, which would be great. And then also, I've been very, very worried about, you know, just losing our domestic edge in podcasting in America. So I was also calling for a 10,000% tariff on international podcasts. Exactly. If it's not made in America, it just doesn't make sense.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  We're non ironically seeing this in the App Store right now. A lot of the top entertainment apps are sort of slop content from overseas.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  And we need to put, you know, 10,000% tariffs on those.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  As well as all foreign podcasts.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  We simultaneously need to protect American, the American podcast industry.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  100%.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  Yet also protect consumers from the long term, you know, potential damage.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  Of, you know, certain, certain podcasters with unsavory content.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  You know, getting out of control.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It it it might have some short term pain, but I think in the long term, America will be better off with a with a with a with a podcast policy that's focused on America. Putting America first.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  Who would be, and it's possible that. David Sacks could also expand into being the podcast czar.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  The only challenge is he's historically been against monetization.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  True, true.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, could handicap the industry.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Oh, well, well, if you're planning a trip to DC, it is beautiful right now. You should book a place on Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Um, and yeah, I mean, DC's, it's a beautiful city and you, uh, one of my favorite memories as a kid was going with my family and seeing all the different museums. It's a fantastic place. It's overlooked, I think, because people say, oh, I gotta go to France. I gotta go to Spain. I gotta go to Japan.

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  We got it all right here.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  We got it all right here, folks. Stay in America. Go to DC.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  The National Mall.

• 5:10John Coogan?

  The National Mall. Visit the Smithsonian, uh, and potentially we might be, we might be selling off some of these Smithsonian assets.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  It was part of Dose, which would be great.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  Take private.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, the take private Smithsonian is gonna be great.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  So the, the take private of the national, you know, other countries are nationalizing their energy industries and, and sort of computing.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  We need to nationalize our relics or, or de-national, commercial, privatize, privatize them. Yeah.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's gonna be a huge, uh, mu- much like in, in Soviet Russia, you know, as all these sort of state-owned assets were privatized. You know, it's gonna be a, a huge wealth creation event for the American oligarchs that can sort of take these treasured assets private.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, those are the future LPs of, you know, uh, many venture capital funds and so.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Moon rocks, dinosaur bones, all of these things are up for sale in, in a more efficiently-run government.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  Truly, the Smithsonian is, uh, the, the National Air and Space Museum is like a core memory for me as a child. Because I just loved planes so much and, uh, was an avid, uh, flight simulator, you know? And so to be able to go around and walk around and sit in the. Sit in the cockpit or the cabin.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  And now you'd potentially be able to own a piece of that if you bought part of the private equity firm.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Fractionalize it.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  That took it private.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or say, we're going to fractionalize each asset.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  I love that. I love where you're going with that. This is good.

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  Add some leverage into the mix.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  This is perfect. This is more American than stuffing it all away in a dusty Smithsonian museum. Let's lever these assets up.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Smithsonian economy. They need a market map.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Anyway.

• 6:51Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere out there, somewhere out there, there's, there's somebody listening to the show for the first time. You're just like, what is going on?

• 6:56John Coogan?

  What are they talking about?

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  We lost that, we lost them, but for the rest of you.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  We'll move on to something a little bit more practical. We got a call from a listener, a question from a listener. They say they, they currently work at one of the most profitable podcasts in the world and they're commuting in. And they need a car. And so they were deciding between a Tesla Model 3 or a Toyota Camry.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  And we were talking about this off mic. We were kind of recommending like, I mean, both of those are great cars. Model 3 is great self-driving, which we're going to get into later with the Mark Rober scandal. Toyota Camry, also very reliable, very affordable, not going to lose a lot of money on that, but there is another way.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  Value.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were looking for deep value, looking for something where you could stand out, really impress your potentially two bosses at this podcast that you work at. And our recommendation was go and get a Dodge Hellcat.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you know where you should get it?

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, where?

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  You know, some of the people are always saying, okay, what marketplaces can you get, you know, sort of the best bang for your buck with cars, right? Cause if you look on.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Like cars and bids or bring a trailer.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  If you look on like DuPont registry, prices are typically high. They're more collector cars often. But if you go on Facebook Marketplace and you, and you just search for the term I Y K Y K.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  If you know, you know.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  If you know, you know, you can find cars that usually aren't photographed super well. They look like they're kind of like hidden away in some type of, you know, parking garage or something like that.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  It's a little bit of like a Thelian secret, like contrarian thing is that a lot of people say, oh, you need the title. But really to drive a car, you just need the keys.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're usually priced 80% lower than market.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  And the one downside is that they don't typically come with a title.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  And, but for the.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  For the potential savings.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  But if you have a Dodge Hellcat, do you even need a title?

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you need a title?

• 8:42John Coogan?

  I always say, when you're commuting to work, like, your tires should be breaking loose at least like three times.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, but anyways, I think people are, you know, you could go out and get a Model, a Model Y Long Range for 50K on, from the Tesla dealership.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  You could go and get a McLaren.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  For 50K, you might have to pay cash and bring it in a duffel bag and you might not get a title.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  It's gonna be wrapped.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  You might not get a title.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  Who needs a title, anyway?

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  As long as the wheels aren't falling off.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be in a pretty good spot. And, um, so yeah, the, just go on Facebook Marketplace, search "if you know, you know", find an exotic, and worry about the title later.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  I, I would say stick with your Dodge Charger, you wanna search for blacked out, you want, you want illegal tint on the front window.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  On the front windshield, for sure, for sure, because you wanna make a statement. If you're, if you're new in an organization, you're coming in and you're, you're trying to, you know, let people know where you stand in the organization.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's actually.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  When we hear the screaming engine of that, of that Hellcat engine.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  There's actually an entire Facebook Marketplace, apparently, called No Title Cars, If You Know, You Know, it has 44,000 members, and I don't know what they're talking about, but as long as the cars are in good condition.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, you know, it seems like, seems like some potential opportunity there. Let us know in the comments if we're missing anything on this.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:13Jordi Hays?

  But seems like some great, some great value.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  For sure. Anyway, if you.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna be having, uh, the car dealership guy on the show later today.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  We can ask him.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  And we'll ask him what this is all about.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but he's gonna be breaking down, you know, kind of what's happening.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Today in the automotive industry.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, and broadly how they're applying, you know, everything from, from AI to fintech and a lot more.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Well, if you are looking for something that is authenticated and does come with proper paperwork, uh, maybe you should get a luxury watch from Bezel. They have over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Go to getbezel.com and check something out. There's a bunch of fantastic options, and you know who's gotta get on Bezel soon? The Wiz founders, because they just cashed out to the tune of $32 billion.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  64x annualized, 32x projected 2025 revenue.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Wait, what was the, what was the purchase price in daytonas?

• 11:19John Coogan?

  It was probably...

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna run the numbers really quick.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Hundreds of thousands of daytonas, something like that. It's a lot.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna run the numbers.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Wiz was founded in 2020.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  It's roughly 1.5.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  That's a young company.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  1.5 million daytonas.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Okay, 1.5 million daytonas.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  It'd be hard to imagine, you know, the entire, you know, maybe there's some stock considerations too, but definitely in the millions of daytonas.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  That's great. That's a great outcome for them. So, Google acquired Wiz. And Wiz was founded in 2020 and markets itself as a seamless cloud, cloud security platform. Is this a smart move? Says Wasteland Capital. Google is a distant number three in cloud with 12% share. I don't know exactly how distant that is from AWS and Azure. I'm sure it's like far, but not that bad. Google Cloud's pretty good. And in fact, they were, they were supply constraint, right? This, this last year when we looked at their CapEx.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  Everybody loves to say, oh, we're supply.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it needs to differentiate itself.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just, just for some context. So, Google is a clear number three. AWS, this is as of Q4 2024, 30% market share for AWS, 21% for Azure, 12% for Google Cloud. And then Salesforce.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  That's not exactly a power law distribution.

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  Salesforce has 2%, Oracle has 3%, Alibaba is up there at number 4.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Okay. In that context, this is a strategically very solid move. It gets a new standalone product that it can sell to anyone and also probably offer faster, cheaper, and better plug and play integration for its own cloud customers. Security is of preeminent importance and hard to manage. But the PR on the deal leaves a lot to be desired. It's not clear from the deal description on Google's site, how this is going to impact their growth, margin, or revenue profile. They gave us a lot of stupid platform buzzwords, nothing tangible. How did they value this at such a high multiple? Plus, with $50 billion in annual R and D, one wonders why Google is unable to boost cloud security on its own. They are they not able to release products effectively? No, it doesn't look like it. Why can't they hire good people for all that cash? And was Google Cloud Security really bad before this? I don't know.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  They really need to work on this. I'd fire the PR team. The poor communication will cost shareholders a lot of money today. Also, considering the recent crash in Google's share price, could this cash have been better spent on a buyback? Let's face it, 32 billion is only 1.6% of Google's market cap. Despite sounding like a lot of money, it's Google's largest deal ever for a strategic move. If that's what this is, it's not much as such. But some buyback support would have been nice. You need it now. Shareholders are bleeding. You have the lowest multiple among the Mag 7 and still choose to spend on M&A instead? And consider the struggles of their artificial intelligence that face it. Gemini sucks versus the competition. It feels like many investors would have rather seen capital allocated to a better product in the AI space, like buying perplexity, for example.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  But instead of buybacks in AI, public shareholders and Google product users get whiz. Okay, now give us accelerated cloud growth targets. Give us, give the public something. Now, for sure, this is an incredible exit for the VCs here. And I saw Andreessen did 1 billion on 12 billion, like a year or two ago. And so they just made $2 billion, basically.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  And I think Thrive was in that round as well. And there was a small list of...

• 14:39John Coogan?

  The cap table is literally a Silicon Valley who's who. So, yeah, we got to ring the size gong for everyone involved.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they initially had a deal in 2024. Wiz runs a secondary sale at 16, which was double their previous valuation. And initially, the initial deal was somewhere in the $20 billion range. And anyway, so they put in basically all the investors into the new...

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Collectively Sequoia, Cyberstarts Index, Salesforce, Thrive Capital, Green Oaks, and two dozen others got, yeah, basically whoever invested at 16 got a clean 2X in less, almost less than a year, I think.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  What a cool, what a cool company story too. I mean incredibly quick, five years, I guess, from 2020 to now. Founded by Asaf Rappaport, the co-founders and the founder, Asaf, stand to make more than $3 billion each from the sale. It's the biggest exit for private, for a private venture-backed company on record, displacing Meta's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014. So we had a real dry spell there for a decade.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  We are so back.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  But we are so back.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the market, it's hard to say the market didn't, I mean, it's actually not very hard to say, the market did not love this. They

• 16:03John Coogan?

  They wanted buybacks.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Basically in the last five days wiped out roughly.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  But it's hard to say because this deal leaked earlier.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's some other factors.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  And the whole market's kind of collapsing.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  A pretty, pretty meaningful drop in, in share price at the, at the open today.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  And they wiped off like, you know, 50, 60 billion dollars in the last five days.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Not great.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  So, good, good point from Wasteland, basically saying that, you know, if, if there was better messaging around this entire deal, it would be potentially bullish. People might like it, right?

• 16:38John Coogan?

  So, we got some other news here from the history of the company. All of the co-founders are alumni of Unit 8200, part of the Israel Defense Forces, known for its cybersecurity savvy and intensity. Former Unit 8200 members, or 8,200, I'm not sure exactly how you say that, members have been able to attract clients and investment money from Silicon Valley in spades. And the Wiz team is now among the ranks of Unit veterans that have founded highly valued cybersecurity companies such as Palo Alto Networks and Fireblocks. Rappaport, a 41-year-old Tel Aviv native, often dons a hoodie with Wiz's logo on it in keeping with the tech aesthetic, or a white t-shirt, joggers and sneakers.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  And you'll love this part, his shoes from the, from the luxury Italian brand Golden Goose typically cost more than $500. Fantastic. We love to see.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  We love, we love to see.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Some, some, some fine Italian goods.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Even if you're going with the simple hoodie and jeans and joggers.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, doesn't have to be Amazon basics, guys.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  Sneakers.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  You can still class it up a little bit. Let people know, hey, I'm running a 30 billion dollar company.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, the beauty, the beauty of Golden Goose too is, is most of their shoes, at least the, the really popular ones with men, are intensely worn in. You know, the, the red and white sneakers I wear?

• 17:55John Coogan?

  No. Those are Golden Goose?

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  And they're, and they, and they look to the untrained eye like, like a 10 year old, like a 10 year old pair of sneakers.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 18:04Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, dirty, you know, scuffed up. Um, and so he's, you know, he's very, they, the, the, whoever wrote this article, the journal really put him on blast here because he was flying under the radar, uh, prior to that.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  They'd let him know.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  They, they did their research. They clocked those from a mile away, probably. Um, he often brought his border collie Mika, dubbed Wiz's chief dog officer, to work at the company's offices in New York and Tel Aviv, and encouraged other employees to bring their dogs as well. Mika, who died late last year, had her own LinkedIn page. That's terrible. I'm so sorry.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  That's unfortunate.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Uh, Rappaport wrote when the dog died.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  Did your dog ever have a LinkedIn page?

• 18:39John Coogan?

  No, he had an Instagram though. It was popping.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but why, what?

• 18:42John Coogan?

  I should have gone on LinkedIn, really.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  You, you didn't want him to link and build?

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, seriously. Seriously, do some thought leadership for that dog.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  Nothing happening on Instagram for dogs, right? They get enough attention in the real world?

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  Get him on LinkedIn.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  I made the wrong platform choice, for sure, for sure. Rappaport wrote when the dog died that they were a power couple and called the dog the love of his life. Oh.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's sweet.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Just a man, a man's best friend.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  He can now take his billions and spend the rest of his life.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Cloning the dog.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  You know, cloning the dog. He needs to acquire, he, he, I don't know if he'd quite have the money to acquire, uh, what, what's the woolly mammoth one?

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Um, why am I blanking on that? I forget. Uh, it's not mammoth, I'm trying to think of something. Colossal.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and just say, hey, look, cool tech. I it seems.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  This is a pure play, dog reincarnation now.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  We're reincarnating me dog, my dog.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  And we're gonna use the dog to do another $30 billion exit in five years and just sort of rinse and repeat.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. So, talks between Google and Wiz fizzled last summer. Wiz started talking to bankers again in the fall about a fresh deal. A paucity of IPOs this year prompted Rappaport and co-founders, Ami Lutwak, Ynon Kostika, and Roy Resnick, to explore deal conversations with several other parties, according to people familiar with the matter. None was willing to pay up as much as Google. The companies were ultimately able to improve the terms of the deal again and gain confidence that the Google transaction could overcome regulatory hurdles. Google also views the Wiz deal as something that is in the best interest of America's national security. The increased role of AI and adoption of cloud services have dramatically changed the security landscape for customers.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  The acquisition is likely to test the Trump administration's antitrust appetite, but if it clears, Wiz's security features could help Google attract more cloud customers. And we're having Joe Weisenthal on the show in about an hour or 45 minutes. And it was very interesting. I was listening to the latest episode of Odd Lots, and he had the new, the Lena Kahn replacement. I don't remember his name. FTC chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump vision for antitrust. And it was fascinating listening to this guy. He was incredibly eloquent and could just take you on these like really long like journeys in the history of antitrust, like clearly had really understood the foundational texts and research.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  It was a very interesting conversation, but maybe we'll get Joe to chime in on where he thinks this goes.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, overall, huge win for the Israeli tech ecosystem. Sean McGuire called this out earlier. They went by the Wizards, which is a good name.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Really?

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Oftentimes startup sort of team nicknames can be a little bit.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Little bit rough.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  Little bit rough, but this one works. And just good for. Venture broadly to get this type of outcome.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  We need our big asset managers to get some quick wins every now and then to just, you know, keep, uh, keep the fire hose of capital coming.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  We were so close to just like an IPO historic run with the Trump pump and everyone was getting ready and the market was up, every, all risk assets were way up. Everyone was like, well, everything's going public now. The, the doors open and everyone's like, okay, like, I don't want to be the first one through, but like, let's do it. And then the market crashed and everyone's like, let's stay private for another decade.

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  When, when you look at, uh, you know, I'm, I'm sure that Wiz was pitched on, on going public by a bunch of different investment banks, and I'm sure it was an option for them. That being said, uh, you know, selling, uh, to Google and, uh, you know, it's probably a much better lifestyle post than, than post IPO.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so it makes sense and, and still a great way to, to return. Capital, you know, back in ultimately into the ecosystem. I don't know, I'd, I'd be curious to know some of those later stage rounds, were they, you know, sort of made out of some of these funds? Were they special purpose vehicles? If they were in funds with that kind of timeline, they would, you know, likely be recycled, you know, directly.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, back in, uh, but, but who knows?

• 22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, redeployed. We'll have to ask one of the, one of the backers, see what they think. Well, I'm sure all the founders at Wiz are sleeping well, but they could be sleeping a lot better if they got Eight Sleep. Go to eightsleep.com, nights that fuel your best days, turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Uh, use code TBPN at eightsleep.com. Go to eightsleep.com slash TBPN.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  My Eight Sleep did its absolute best last night.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  I got four and a half hours of sleep.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Four and a half hours.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  It's telling me to, it's telling me in the app to pay attention. I'm definitely paying attention to how poor my sleep was last night.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  I got a 67.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  I need to. Yeah, I honestly need to, to, to sort of course correct tonight.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Just podcasting. Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Go to

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 23:48John Coogan?

  AteSleep.com slash TBP.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  They should update their website copy to that.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Early to bed, early to rise makes a man

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  All of us.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Healthy, wealthy and wise. Well, let's stay on the topic of acquisitions and go over to Kiva Dickinson, who says, what's this $300 million tax benefit getting talked about?

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  PepsiCo Poppy acquisition, you want to break down, break down this?

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just real quick.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  We can do the Wall Street Journal article first.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's, let's go through it. So PepsiCo announced yesterday they're acquiring prebiotic soda brand Poppy for 1.95 billion. The soda make the Pepsi, the snacks and soda maker said the deal includes 300 million of anticipated cash tax benefits.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  And really eye popping number.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense that sort of the big CPG brands would, would pay, uh, pay quite a lot to ultimately buy the products that are displacing them on the shelves, right? I think Poppy and Ollie Pop, uh, these companies have very, you know, very quickly made a product that was, I would argue, close to as good. Seemingly more healthy and consumers love them. They, they killed it on, you know, the merchandising side, just delivering a bunch of different flavors, iterating quickly. I saw somebody joking, um, you know, the backstory here is that Ollie Pop started, um, uh, uh, Poppy actually started before Ollie Pop.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  But was called something else. I think it was called Mother something.

• 25:21John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, they rebranded.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, they were an apple cider vinegar sort of tonic.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Ollie Pop comes out and I guess Poppy allegedly was like, that's a good idea and just immediately rebranded. And I remember at the time, I was living in Venice at the time, which Venice is the hub of, uh, in many ways, I feel like the hub of, you know, consumer packaged goods, uh, outside of Brooklyn, maybe.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I remember there, this was, you know, drama in that moment because Poppy had come out and basically like almost one to one copied the Ollie Pop brand, like. I'm sure there, I don't know the whole sort of like legal backstory, but I'm sure

• 26:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it had very like whimsical colors and cartoonish fonts.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was like similar, you know, very similar fonts.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Yep. And very similar products. Like, I think the, I think the main thing with at least Poppy is that they didn't go, like soda might be over 100 calories a can. Obviously Diet Coke is calorie free, zero calories. Poppy and Ollie Pop always played in this like 25 calories per can. Some calories, but in low calorie, kind of just a different positioning. And it's interesting that PepsiCo is feeling the heat from the prebiotic soda more than they did from the seltzer. Because, uh, do you remember Spindrift was really putting pressure on them? And I saw a lot of people switching to just chugging seltzers with, because they have zero, I mean, you look at the ingredients on Spindrift and it's

• 26:51John Coogan?

  just like lemon juice and water and seltzer. There's like nothing there.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  And I think, but, but the sales velocity for these prebiotic soda brands just ended up being orders of magnitude.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 27:04Jordi Hays?

  More than, uh, than the seltzer market. People realize, okay, Spindrift was hot, La Croix was hot. Uh, Poppy and Ollie Pop came and just flooded the market.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  And one, one thing that's, you know, I, I won't say one way or another if, if Poppy was a direct, you know, copy of Ollie Pop. I just don't, I don't know enough of the backstory. I just know the sort of rumors.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Doesn't matter now.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  But really fantastic example of, um, it, it's rare that you see a company sort of get, get, uh, called out for copying someone else.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  Especially in CPG where the product is one thing, but it's really about the delivery.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  And the, uh, you know, the branding and the packaging and all that stuff. Uh, but it's rare to see a copycat product do, uh, you know, scale to a $2 billion outcome in, you know, uh, in such a short amount of time.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  So let's talk about why Pepsi did this deal and then let's talk about those cash, uh, cash tax benefits. First, soda is under more attack than it's ever been. I mean, everyone knows that the, you know, big gulp at 7-Eleven is like. A thousand calories and very bad for you. RFK Junior, the new Health and Human Secretary, Health and Human Services Secretary, has called soda poison. And sales of traditional soda have gone flat. A little bit of a pun there. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have jumped into the market dominated by Poppy and competitor Ollie Pop with their own creations. Coke in February said it would launch a soda promoting digestive health called Simply

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Pop, while Pepsi is formulating a version it aims to sell in the spring. They'll probably cancel that because they have Poppy in the portfolio now. Unlike probiotic drinks such as kombucha and kefir, which introduce, is that how you pronounce it?

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  I think so, technically.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Why?

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  I've always said kefir, but maybe that's the...

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Kefir? I don't know. Kombucha and the other hippie one. Which introduce new microbes to the gut. Prebiotic sodas contain dietary fibers that feed the bacteria already living in our systems. Ollie Pop and Poppy use inulin fiber, often naturally derived from agave or chicory roots. So, that is why they're putting pressure on it. I'm not, we can go back to the previous post.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Kiva, pretty prominent CPG investor, says, "What's this 300 million of tax benefit getting talked about in the PepsiCo-Poppy acquisition? Is the deal being done at 1.65 or 1.9 billion? When you acquire an LLC, you get to step up the basis of the target company's assets to account for the difference between what you pay for the company and the balance sheet assets, AKA the book value. In situations like Poppy, where a lot of what PepsiCo is buying is brand, the step up can be quite large, often a majority of the value of the company. Pepsi here is saying, "Hey, people love this product. They're the sort of, in these retail stores with our distribution network, we can get them in many more, we can get them global. We're really buying a product that people already love that has velocity, that's competing

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  directly with one of our core products, which is their Pepsi-Cola, and I'm sure like Pepsi Zero or whatever they call it. So, Kiva says the acquirer can then amortize the value of the step up over time in the same way they depreciate a capital asset they invest in. That amortization reduces their earnings before tax, thereby reducing their tax bill for years. These future tax savings can then be discounted to reflect a present value. Presumably then Pepsi is saying they would have paid 1.65 billion if Poppy was a C corp. But instead, they were willing to pay an extra 300 million for the tax savings that they will realize over time.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  Since he has no inside information, but that's what he assumes is happening.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  So, interesting.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Good for them.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Either way, really big numbers. Good for the CPG ecosystem broadly. This doesn't mean it's a good time to start a pre-warded soda company, even though it's a very impressive outcome. The trap with CPG has always been that, you know, it's sort of these simple tangible ideas, right? Sort of, oh, I can make a beverage, I can put it in a can, I could get it in a store. And what you don't realize is that it takes just a monumental effort. It takes a, you know, really ridiculous execution over a long period of time. Poppy also, Poppy had like, pretty much a, pretty ridiculous, they'd done a sort of

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  series of, of party rounds over the years that I think they, they pretty well leveraged. If you look at their, yeah, if you look at their investor list, it's kind of a very

• 31:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's tough because with CPG, it's, it's extremely difficult to build distribution into the product.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  There's, there are very few network effects or fly wheels that you can build. Everyone does like a refer a friend program, but it just doesn't work the same way as something that's like Dropbox that has a refer a friend program where you get something like tangible that's free, high margin. So it just comes down to just grit and sales and distribution and advertising and out of home advertising made easy and measurable. You have to go on adquick.com, you have to say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. That's really what it takes to succeed. And so that's what I would recommend to the Poppy team and, and the folks at Pepsi.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  They're gonna have a lot more money on their, in their marketing budgets and, you know, I'm sure you're listening Pepsi CMO, like, go to AdQuick right now and just, just full set, just send it all on.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, they have a flavor called Pepsi Max and so they could lead. And, you know, literally buy every single billboard on AdQuick for Pepsi Max.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Sort of max out.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  Just max it out. Max it out.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  Max it out.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  And if you're a founder that's working on a consumer good, go buy a billboard, go viral, have some fun with it. Talk to the AdQuick team, they will get you set up.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  I, I have a buddy who really noticed that out of home demand in LA dropped dramatically after the fires.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  He just bought up, pretty much, he has a, you know, a nine-figure revenue CPG company.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  He bought up basically every grade A billboard in all of LA.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  The Jeremy Giffon of billboard buying.

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 33:32Jordi Hays?

  Special situations guy.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  I'm into it.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  And the amount of just like, like attention he received off of it was insane.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, every single day, there was, you know, tons of people taking pictures.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  It's one of those things that's like really, really hard to measure because you'll get like text messages from people that just like, your company feels more real. It's similar to PR and press where it's hard to measure, but that person who's considering joining your company, they see the billboard and they think like, okay, this is a more serious company.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Or, you know, you know, potential distributor, potential investor sees it. It just makes you feel more like you've broken out of just, oh, you exist in this hyper-targeted, you know, online flywheel that might, might be working, but you do something else that makes you more real.

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  The beauty of, of out of home versus traditional media is you don't have to talk to journalists.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  When you do Ad, Ad, AdQuick, you know, you just sign up and do it. Anyway, should we talk about this Mark?

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Yes, we should. So Mark Rober put out a YouTube video testing, can he fool Tesla's full self-driving system? And I mean, it's a very funny idea. He built a wall that looks like the road, straight out of Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. And of course, the Tesla, which is using a camera, is fooled and smashes through the wall completely.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  You know, impossible situation, not something that you should be worried about if you are purchasing a self-driving car, but it was extremely controversial because

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you have any enemies like

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Like Wile E. Coyote, or I guess the Roadrunner is the one who puts it out, right?

• 35:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you have any enemies like that?

• 35:09John Coogan?

  If you're feuding with someone with Roadrunner strategies and aesthetics, then yeah, maybe stay away from the Tesla, but if you're not, you're probably fine.

• 35:20Jordi Hays?

  Was there another, was there another, what was the other company that was?

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Luminar. And so that's another interesting thing. Luminar, founded by Austin Russell, a Thiel fellow, took the company public during the SPAC boom. I also believe Luminar's Austin Russell, at one point, he was trying to buy Forbes, and at another point, I think he bought the succession house that burned down during the fires. I think that was him, right?

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  Hundred, hundred million dollar plus home.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Hundred million dollar house or something like that. And so the stock has been, it fell from its SPAC peaks. It's down at around $213 million now, and I, as a market cap, and I think the company was at one point valued in like the four billion range, like most of these SPACs. And so Luminar sells LiDAR for self-driving car companies. It was a very hot topic, very hot product during the self-driving car boom. There was a question, okay, if Waymo really takes off and, or something like it, and Luminar is one of the providers, well, then Luminar is going to be a really key component in the supply chain. They'll be a very successful company. Obviously, the stock is down, but since that Mark

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Rober video dropped, the stock's up 27%. And it's very interesting, the way it's filmed, because they actually, they're using a Lexus SUV for the LiDAR car, but they, but they black out the logos. So you can't, like, you can tell if you just know what Lexus looks like.

• 36:42Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, Luminar has not really made progress on getting back towards its 2020.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  What was the peak?

• 36:48Jordi Hays?

  February 12th of 2021, it peaked at $565 a share.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  Wow, you're on public.com looking at that?

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's at six

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Six bucks.

• 36:59Jordi Hays?

  Point, $6.70 right now.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Wow, it's down 99% still.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  So if you loved Luminar at $565 a share, you're gonna love it at

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Six forty-two.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 37:12Jordi Hays?

  No, but this seems

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Like an interesting strategy to potentially get retail investors re-engaged with the stock.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally. And so it, so let's go through kind of the story here. So Alex Finn breaks it down in what is a pretty controversial thread. I think pretty much every single one of these tweets that he posted got community noted, but he does do a good job of just kind of laying out exactly what happened. He says, you know, Mark Rober's built one of the strongest reputations on social media. Absolutely true. I've talked to Mark briefly in a clubhouse room. Very nice guy. You know, Mark's background is he worked at NASA, just total science guru, like, you know, just science nerd. He just loves doing these little tests, has grown this massive YouTube channel where he kind of tests different scientific ideas. And Alex Finn is claiming that today he obliterated it

• 38:06John Coogan?

  all with one 18-minute video. It's a story of greed, deception, and cowardice. And you can tell from the writing like that, this is, you know, this is as clickbaity as a YouTube video, but it got 90K likes and 22 million views. So Mark is a long-time YouTuber who spent years accruing over 65 million subscribers. That is a massive, massive number. He was the Mr. Beast before there was a Mr. Beast. And then he says, yesterday, he let money, politics, and greed get in the way of all that. Mark put out a video called Can You Fool a Self-Driving Car? The concept is simple. Drive a Tesla in full self-driving mode on a road where there's a wall painted like a road. There's actually six tests he does. One is just, there's a mannequin with a kid in the

• 38:47John Coogan?

  road, then they sprayed some water, then they sprayed some fog, then they had the kid pop out at the last second. They did a number of different tests to kind of show different scenarios. And basically, the gist of the video is like, Lidar succeeded in six out of six, and the Tesla succeeded in, I think, only three out of six.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  But the Tesla fanboys really came out in strongly against this and there are some, you know, reasonable critiques of this. So Alex Finn says, wrong. The video was filled with deception, lies and illegal undisclosed advertising. In the video Tesla does not detect a wall and goes right through it. On top of that, there's a mannequin that gets absolutely nailed. It is very funny. But there are a few things Mark doesn't tell you. First of all, he lied about full self-driving. He didn't even use FSD. He used autopilot, which even Tesla admits is an older, not as strong technology. And this is where it gets really confusing because obviously in the context of like a highly edited YouTube video, Mark Rober's not giving you all of the details on like, this is the exact hardware I'm using. This is the exact software I'm using. I've updated the software. Here's how I'm engaging it. Like it's edited

• 39:51John Coogan?

  to be entertainment. And so it's pretty, it's pretty hard to tell exactly what's going on. There's, there's actually an ongoing debate on whether or not he deactivated it by accident or on purpose before it hit the wall, as opposed to whether or not the system disengaged. And technically, if the system disengages, you have to be ready to step on the brakes and that's the, that's the car signaling to you, hey, I need you to take over. It's time for you to press the brakes. And so if you don't press the brakes, when the car tells you to press the brakes, it's kind of on you, kind of goes back and forth.

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  Alex's writing is really funny, saying he sold his soul.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  I know.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  He betrayed his country by attacking-

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Betrayed his country.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  By the most American-made car company in the world. He deceived his entire audience, all for a paycheck.

• 40:36John Coogan?

  It's so, it's so sensational. I love it. But, so, so in the description, they do, Mark Rober does mention, thanks to Luminar for allowing us to test their LiDAR-equipped car. They provided the vehicle for testing purposes, but no compensation was given and this is not a paid promotion. And so it turns out that I think Austin Russell at Luminar and Mark Rober are like independently connected and like kind of friendly. And Russell had donated to one of Mark Rober's fundraising efforts. And it seems like they're just kind of like buddies, more or less. And I think the other like subtext here is that-

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Elon has just become such a lightning rod that if you are in the business of just getting attention and getting clicks, you can get millions and millions of views on YouTube right now with any video attacking Elon because the, the, the audience is just so ravenous for something to push back against Elon's new kind of political arc. And so I saw a video by a, a live streamer who's just sitting there just talking about Tesla and what the stock's done, 2 million views. And he normally gets like 400K views on a video, but like the Tesla stock crash got like 2 million views, showing that like there's super high demand for this type of like anti Elon content on YouTube right now. Everyone who's a YouTuber

• 42:04John Coogan?

  can see that. And even if you're not anti Elon, like for a long time, there was a whole sub niche of like, you put Elon with a clown nose on him and you say like, uh, like Elon's tunnel company is stupid or it doesn't make any sense. Like, or like Tesla just crashed.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  Why would you want to go underground?

• 42:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then, and then there was another genre of like Tesla glazing videos that got millions of views that were like the Tesla, Elon Musk just announced a nuclear reactor. It's confirmed. Like, like this changes everything. And they would just produce completely fake videos, but pro Elon, because they were like pro Elon people that would just click on anything that was pro Elon. And so Elon's just become this like vortex of content nonsense. But even the big YouTubers are clearly feeling that. Johnny Harris, this video essayist, when Elon started getting political, wanted to do a deep dive on like, how did he get here? What's his evolution? Like, you want to just address the things that are in the news and Elon is in the news. And so, uh, very, very, very controversial. Uh, we have

• 43:08John Coogan?

  a post from Nick Carter here. I don't know if you want to read that, but, uh, he says, I'm not a big, I'm not, I'm not a big Mark Rober fan and not a Tesla fan boy at all. Have never owned the stock or the car, but Tesla's, but Tesla has a case if they want to sue him for this video. It's clearly deceptive with the aim to disparage Tesla. And that was kind of the, the vibe on X.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  But overall, wild story.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an interesting position for Tesla to be in because suing a big creator is not going to necessarily get you more fans.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  It does feel like the right way to do it is to potentially have the engineers just do like an entire breakdown. Like if you did a two hour breakdown of the video and recording out, you know, here's, here's why the scenario, you know, we're not building these cars for the sort of road.

• 44:01John Coogan?

  Exactly that. It, it, it's literally just a trade off between, do you want a cheap self-driving car that is susceptible to Roadrunner scenarios? Or do you want an expensive car that is Roadrunner proof? And most people will say, yeah, you know what, like, I could, I could wear a five-point racing harness and a helmet every time I drive. That would be safer. But like, I can also just wear a normal seatbelt and an airbag and like, try not to crash. Drive safely.

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Like, there, there, there's obviously a spectrum of capabilities with every one of these vehicles. The LiDAR thing, I mean, Elon's been beating that drum for years, saying anyone who's using LiDAR is doomed. Like, it has its own edge cases. I think it doesn't work in maybe the rain or something like that. The rain confuses it. And so it has its own drawbacks, but it's also very expensive. And so unless you're running a Waymo-style business where it's fine if the company, if the car has 500K CapEx, it hasn't made sense. I've always heard that and been like, but can't we just make LiDAR cheaper over time? Like, it has to be possible to make that cheaper. Like, Starlink's making million, like, Starlink's making millions of satellites.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  Or is the right system to leverage both? Because you want to manage all the different edge cases and be able to work in different environments, you know?

• 45:13John Coogan?

  I mean, George Hotz, yeah, I talked to him about this. And, and he just said, like, look, how does a human drive? Two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet. That's all you need.

• 45:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know. He even said like it has like, like the comma AI self-driving kit that you attach to your windshield that adds self-driving functionality to your car. It has a mouth because it breathes air to cool the CPU. He sees it as like a human head. It's very funny. But yeah, he just says like fundamentally, like we don't have LiDAR and we can drive cars. Therefore, software must be able to drive cars with just two eyes and two ears and you know, a couple of other things. And that's it. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes. It'll be interesting to see if any car companies see this demo and say, yeah, let's roll that out because I think everyone wants more competition and no one wants less safe vehicles on the road.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  And so the most, the my most disappointing thing was that they use this Lexus SUV to demo the LiDAR and it seemed to be a good system, but you can't buy that car right now. Like if you're, if you're driving behind a Lexus, then they engage their autopilot, like they're just as likely to crash into you as anyone else because they don't have these systems engaged yet. At least I don't think they have it on offer yet. There are some, there are some companies that are obviously working on it, but.

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  We got to talk to Joe about Tesla.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  And the stock.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  Where does it go from here?

• 46:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  We had, I'm just curious to get his.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Just like analysis on, obviously he's not a hedge fund manager, but it's such a stock that, that trades on the future, Elon's.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Jordi Hays?

  Elon's popularity.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. You're talking about Joe Weisenthal, right?

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, from what, from what I know, I've only talked to him like once, but it seems like he's a person that takes investing seriously and thinks about multi-asset investing. He prioritizes industry-leading yields. You know, he would only use a platform that's trusted by millions. And that's why if I were talking to him, I would recommend that he sign up for public.com.

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Fantastic choice. Stocks, bonds, crypto, options, T-bills. You can get it all.

• 47:39John Coogan?

  At public.com.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  At public.com. And yeah, we're, we're.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  I'm excited to talk to him.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  We've got a video with, with public in the pipeline that I'm very excited about.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Should we make that video over the top anti-woke?

• 47:56John Coogan?

  Potentially kind of do like the Solana thing?

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, one way to get a lot of attention with with an ad in 2025 is to make it so anti woke that people decide, ah, I'm actually woke.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  I'm actually a liberal now.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so, uh, if you missed it yesterday, Solana put out an advertisement. Uh, what was it called?

• 48:15John Coogan?

  The blockchain put out.

• 48:16Jordi Hays?

  Solana, the blockchain, the foundation.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  The foundation. Put out an ad, uh, and, uh, Sam Lessin broke it out here. He was a early Solana investor. Uh, and he says, "The Solana ad completely comically misunderstood the 2025 media assignment re-authenticity. I love Solana and I actually agree with a lot, not all of the points in this video."

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  Seed investor in Solana.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, wow. Uh, but let's be honest, it's a terrible ad, hilariously terrible. The tone is completely wrong. They were right to take it down, even if the internet and of course, the blockchain in particular, never forget. LOL, irony. Uh, the reason it doesn't work is, isn't the content. It's that they used actors in a polished scripted scene. That is completely wrong in 2025. Interesting take. I don't know how much I agree with that, but I'm getting there. Uh, what people care about, what works in media is authenticity, warts and all, is real people in raw form, speaking their truth. I'm not suggesting it, but if the Solana leadership had made the exact same points in a speech on the street, like them or dislike them, the content would have worked. When other tech leaders make these points in their own voice, it works.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  But this, these points packaged in pristine background with scripted actors, it honestly just shows whoever made this completely misunderstands the moment and how media and comms works in 2025. It's the opposite of going directly.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  Your take on it was that they just seemingly planned the ad, like when Trump was elected and it took a while.

• 49:35John Coogan?

  You remember when the Jaguar rebrand happened and everyone was like, oh, they expected Kamala to win?

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  And it felt like a very Kamala-coded ad. Uh, this is kind of the same thing where it's like, oh, they, they greenlit this as the day Trump won. And they didn't realize that there would be like kind of a reevaluation of things post and like there'd be a settling in period. But yeah, I mean, these, these ads, like if you go can find it because it's been somewhat taken down, but it's still up there.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everybody was saying, you, you Solana deleted it, but they're like, we will not let you forget this ad.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  I wish I'd want to have the actor on the show.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  That'd be fun.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, the, the, an ad like that, it's like clearly shot on cinema cameras, professional lighting, makeup, hair, script, all this stuff. Like it takes months to get something like that made. They didn't, they didn't use just some, some film school kid to whip it up, which they probably should have. Took a long time. And so by the time it got through all the reviews and all the post processing and editing, color grading and sound mixing, it was, it had missed the mark. Like it might've been edgy. I mean, really, you got to go back to like Coinbase in 2020, 21, saying like, hey, we're mission oriented. And even that was different because it, the Coinbase, the Brian Armstrong piece about Coinbase was they were not saying we are anti woke. They're saying we're just mission oriented. We're apolitical.

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  We're not, it's not, they weren't saying, hey, we're right wing now. It was like, we're not left wing. We're not right wing. We're just crypto apolitical like, and we're gonna donate where we need to just on crypto stuff. We're gonna stay focused. And like, I liked that and I thought that was good. And I think that

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  And they were dealing with internal sort of mutiny.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  You know, people similar to what happened at Google and a lot of big companies were experiencing that.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  Yes, they had to kind of do something. And I, and I looked at Crusoe Energy launched a video yesterday, kind of reintroducing themselves as a producer of, of energy and data center capacity for AI.

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  Brother, brother Justin Mayer's first angel investment.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Chase Lockmiller, the CEO over there. And on one hand, like you watch this, you watch this Crusoe Energy video and it's like, It has like a very corporate vibe. It's somewhat stock footage-y, but it's just very clear what they do and what they care about.

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  It's authentic.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  It's authentic. And I'm like, this is amazing. This is actually what business is about. Like, they just care about their business. And you know what? I don't know what the political statement is here because it doesn't need to be a political statement. They're just saying, look, we want to build data centers. That's the business that we're in. We're gonna do it. And we're excited about what people will do on top of those data centers, training AI. And they have some pictures of people in healthcare settings that could benefit from AI and financial settings that could benefit from AI. And, you know, all these different things that could benefit from data centers. But at the end of the day, they just say, we're crusoe and we're, and we're building the next generation of data centers. And I'm like, I'm so here for this. This is so refreshing.

• 52:33Jordi Hays?

  And if you love big data, you're gonna get excited.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I actually do, so.

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  If you love energy.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  I love energy and I love big data, so I was very happy with that.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  If you love leverage.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Yes. And yeah, let's go to Dylan.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I can break this down. So Dylan says, this should have been the Accelerate America ad. Solana is about builders like a 22-year-old dev born to Sri Lankan immigrants putting real-world assets on chain. Still one of the projects I'm most proud of. So, and this is referencing a video. You can go watch it. It's capital dot XYZ slash founders. We made this video in 2022 highlighting Mary Gunearte. And Mary has a very, very cool crypto company. She's been building on Solana from day one. She has this amazing story.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:27Jordi Hays?

  And this ad sort of breaks it all down.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  And not an actor.

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  And this was, this was very, yeah, like incredible story.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  You can just talk to a builder. People are building.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very real story. Mary is not, you know, doesn't bring politics onto the blockchain, you know.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  Let's keep politics out of meme coins, folks.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  Delivering, delivering value. And I'm proud to have, be an angel in her company.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  Let's keep politics out of the pump and dumps and out of the rug pulling and out of the meme coins and out of the pumped out funds. Let's just keep it clean.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  Except, except politics definitely got onto the chain through Trump coin, Melania coin. You remember Joe Bowden and all those other things.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  Just keep politics out of it. Keep politics out of everything. I'm over it.

• 54:16Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I'm sure Solana is already working on their next ad, the comeback ad.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  Cool opportunity.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  For what it's worth, like I, I've done a whole deep dive on the founders and although their marketing seems to be missing the mark, like I think that they're really, really talented engineers and their whole story of, of working on wireless networking and high-performance computing, like I don't even know how much we could say about like, is it not decentralized enough? Like, maybe that's a good argument for or against Solana, but I think like the founders are just interesting people, but they, they have so much attention on them because it's such, it's like, it's not just a huge pool of capital, but it's also like where people make the huge wins and huge losses.

• 54:59Jordi Hays?

  Here's a play. If you want to make a statement around innovation in the future, take the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum private, put it on chain. Put all those planes on chain. Planes on chain.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  Put the planes on chain.

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  We need planes.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  I mean, call Mary. She's putting real world assets on chain, right?

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. This is, Mary takes over the CEO role at Solana Foundation.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  It becomes, it becomes a private equity firm.

• 55:25Jordi Hays?

  And yeah.

• 55:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Kind of rip out all like the decentralized stuff.

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure it would trade at like 400x book value of the underlying planes. And that is a real financial innovation there.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Well, we'll, we'll close with the last comment on the, on the Solana thing. Joe Weisenthal, who's coming on the show in 15 minutes, he says, he's, he's sharing a post from 2020. I wonder how many Silicon Valley people are inspired by that Marc Andreessen post on now is the time to build, to get working even harder on their next generation decentralized stablecoin protocol. And Joe Weisenthal said, this is painful, but also exactly what I joked about five years ago, especially if you make it to the final 45 seconds. Well, Solana could be in trouble. They need to control their costs. And so, you know, we would recommend that they get on ramp if they're not already on ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more

• 56:19John Coogan?

  all in one place. Next time you see a bill coming through on a credit card charge for anti-woke, over the top.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  Marketing campaign, you can just be like, hey, that's out of policy.

• 56:28Jordi Hays?

  Not approved.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  It's out of policy.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not approved.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  We, we, we want to do mission driven content here.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  We want to stick to the basics.

• 56:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, John, do you have a battery real quick? Do you got some extra batteries?

• 56:42John Coogan?

  I think we got Soren joining the team.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  He is crazy nominative determinism there. He's snoring over this guy's.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Can you bring him in?

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  Bring him in.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in. Soren, can you hear me?

• 57:03John Coogan?

  We got Soren from Nero's. Uh, we have his post here. I'm thrilled to announce that Nero's has raised a $35 million Series A led by Vi, V Y Capital or Vi Capital U S with Sequoia, Interlagos, D3 and Keller. This funding is going straight into mass manufacturing capacity that America desperately needs. My co-founder broke the news today in front of 800 DOD stakeholders and industry leaders at Manifest Demo Day in Washington DC. Um, we're going to try and bring him in in just a second. He should be here any minute.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Okay, we're having an audio issue. We're working through it.

• 57:40John Coogan?

  Have you actually had a chance to meet Soren before?

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  I have not. What's his co-founder's name? I met his-

• 57:45John Coogan?

  Olaf.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Olaf.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Hichwa.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  I met Olaf.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.

• 57:49Jordi Hays?

  And I just want to say, uh, they, I mean, we're going to get into some of this stuff. They only announced both their pre-seed and their seed, uh, less than a year ago, back on May 20th of 2024. And so, uh, they've been actually, uh, you know, absolutely crushing. Um, I got, uh, I got a breakdown on Nero's probably six or so months ago from one of the partners over at Long Journey, which are also having the show on tomorrow. Uh, but, but crazy, crazy lineup of, um, you know, investors and the traction that they've seen is pretty crazy. I believe they're already- Deploying some of their early tech overseas.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  I went and toured his first office, maybe, small, pretty small office in El Segundo. And I'd heard that he was a fantastic, kind of like, maybe the number one in the world, or like world renowned drone pilot. And I was like, look, I've flown a DJI camera drone, like, how hard can this be? Like, what am I really gonna see here? And we go out, we're kind of walking, talking, and we get to this park, and he puts on the, puts on the FPV goggles and takes off, and is the most aggressive drone pilot I've ever seen. And like, there's this tree, and he's circling it like 50 times a second.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  And it's just the craziest, like, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop. It was really, really insane. Yeah, he's a fantastic drone pilot. And what a great demo, like, as an investor, or a journalist, or anything like that. It's really, really fun.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, few founders have the advantage of being able to go and give a technical demo that can display that level of capability, right? Both in the operator and in, you know, the tech, right? So.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Okay. Ben, how we doing?

• 59:51John Coogan?

  Okay, so you can hear us, guy? Soren?

• 59:55Speaker 02

  I got you, guys.

• 59:56John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  Okay, sorry for the lack of video. We're building the plane as we're flying it. You're building the drone as you're flying it. Give us the update, how you doing? How was Manifest Demo Day?

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, my co-founder Olaf was out there. He crushed it. And we had a big announcement, so we just closed our Series A funding round, $35 million, going straight into more American drone manufacturing. So, really excited about that stuff. We also, a few weeks ago, announced our 6,000 drone production contract. So, we are now officially making over 1,000 drones a month, which I believe is the highest rate of any drone company in the United States. So, our vision of mass is coming together, but there's still a long way to go.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  What's the main use case for these drones?

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean primarily, we're, we're building drones that are going to be putting warheads on foreheads. It's, you know, FPV precision strike is kind of all the, all the rage right now. And, you know, you are, we have kind of two systems. Archer and Archer Strike. Archer Strike is the one where we're actually the warhead integrator. It's basically a modular warhead system. And then we have Archer, which is just the, the plain FPV drone. And you can basically mount whatever you want on there.

• 1:01:15Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about scale, long-term? I think that's probably the, the, the number one question on, you know, people's mind that are following the industry. You see this sort of footage coming out of China of, of, you know, not even drone-specific manufacturing capacity, but when you just think of, you know, China's scale and that being, you know, one of our most obvious adversaries, you know, that's what you're up against. You're clearly not afraid. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't be doing this. How do we, how do we sort of reach and exceed China's manufacturing capacity over the next 10 years, given that they have a, you know, decades-long head start?

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  I think the question we need to be asking ourselves is what would happen if the Chinese supply chain was completely cut off? And we had to build, say, a million of these systems in a year? What would we do? What would that look like? And right now, the answer is, you know, the entire American industrial base, I think, would be, would be a disaster. And even the defense industrial base would be scrambling to, to make that happen. And we really need to do whatever we can to make manufacturing cool again and get people excited about working on this problem. And we've been sanctioned multiple times by China. It seems like we're, we're getting attention because we're doing something that is, that is relevant, but there's a long way to go.

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  You guys individually?

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  We're 18 months into this very, very long journey.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying Nero has already been sanctioned by China?

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  We have, yeah, we were sanctioned a few months ago for the first time and then recently they they re-upped it. I think we're in the list with General Dynamics and a few others.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  It's more prestigious than being on the Forbes 30 under 30.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  I see that as a huge both case. What about, can you give us a little idea, a little overview of like, what's actually happening at various orders of magnitude of scale? You said you're doing 1,000 a month, I think. When I, when I first met you and toured the facility, it seemed like you were putting everything together by hand. The founders were welding or soldering or doing everything. Now it seems like you probably have some machinery in there, but what does the path to like, the lights out factory look like? There was some debate on the timeline last week about, you know, you don't want to do too much automation too early, but obviously we want to get to high production value, uh, numbers. So walk me through that.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Automation is definitely the last step in the process and the, the first step is designing the product around this, uh, you know, this high rate manufacturing. I think that's one of the big problems that a lot of the existing drone companies in the US run into is because they're basing off of, one, these pretty exquisite components that are, you know, tough to, to source in high volumes, um, and they're really expensive. And then two, they just didn't actually design the airframe around, uh, you know, these really scalable manufacturing techniques or having low human labor to be able to put it together. So that was kind of the, uh, you know, first thing we looked at when actually designing Archer, uh, was how can we reduce the amount of human labor that goes into this thing?

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  So even if we're not automating yet, because things are still in flux and we're not at crazy high volumes, uh, we're, you know, still spending say like less than an hour of human time per drone that goes together. So that's really, really critical. I mean, we've been in our current factory for about a year and In that time, it's mainly been about optimizing the main assembly line. And it's still a very manual assembly line, but there's a lot of tooling in place to make everything really repeatable and easy. And then just the design of the drone itself is very intentional.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's one of those things that, you know, people might say, oh, like, they're putting these together by hand, but that could actually be the right decision, given where you are. Can you tell me a little bit about supply chain? I've heard it's basically impossible to find an American-made drone motor. Is that still the case? Is there a change there? And are you leveraging any of the cool companies that we've talked to, like the Hadrians, the Range Views, the 3D printing companies? What do you see as really beneficial to you?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Motors are still a big challenge in the US. I got asked on X the other day, like, oh, are you guys winding your own motors? And the answer is no, we're not doing that yet. We definitely want to be part of solving that problem. And, you know, there are some things in the works, but motors have been historically really tough. A lot of US companies are still using Chinese motors because it's not mandated by the government to avoid them. And same thing with cameras, especially low-cost sensors. We've seen they're primarily dominated by China. And in our world, in the FPV world, really, everything is kind of built on top of architectures that use Chinese chips. So our, you know, long-time challenge, until we kind of finished the work and got onto

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  the BlueUAS list, was rebuilding all of these components from the kind of chip level, because you'll look at these open-source projects that a lot of drone racing technology is built off of, and, oh, look at that, it's off of a Chinese microcontroller. Or like every video receiver for analog FPV in the world uses this Chinese radio module. So you have to get rid of all of that, do all the engineering up from a clean sheet, which has been a big challenge. But, you know, we're getting there, and it's great to see these companies that are working on the kind of like fundamental manufacturing challenges. Like, that's what I would put, you know, Range View into the bucket of, like... America needs investment castings where we're sort of one level up where we're we have

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  to be really smart on our component design, but we're not actually, you know, making the chips. Sure.

• 1:07:00Jordi Hays?

  Do you think a lot of these suppliers over time can and should localize to a specific area, you know, China has a massive advantage, you know, with Shenzhen and, you know, a lot of DGI being a lot of being able to source a lot of, you know, components locally, do we need that or is it not necessary? What's your vision of of how these things, you know, how we get to producing, you know, millions of drones per year?

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  That's what El Segundo should be, baby. Let's make the American Shenzhen. Let's go.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Do you feel like, you know, you've been very successful at, you know, raising a significant amount of capital, you know, very quickly? How much, you know, is there enough private investment into drones broadly? Or do we need to, you know, do do a multiple more? I posted probably a couple of months ago at this point that it felt like we needed a sort of project Stargate for domestic drone manufacturing, like it seems like such a, you know, critical national security issue that, you know, potentially there needs to be an order of magnitude more investment in the category? Or do you feel like there's there's an adequate amount of investment yet?

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  I'll say that I, you know, the capital is available to, you know, to companies, but it has to be directed really well because both on the, you know, private capital side and the government side, like my main ask to the DOD is not to spend more money, it's to spend money in a different way. It's to mandate higher volumes of systems that are lower cost. So it's not just about throwing money at the problem. I think we have to set the expectations and those expectations might be in order of magnitude greater than, you know, like billion dollars goes towards buying a thousand loitering munitions. That should probably be a hundred thousand, you know, two orders of magnitude difference.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  So it's not necessarily about spending more money. I do think there is private capital that is ready to go, that's excited to get into this industry. On the government side, I think there are really positive shifts happening in the direction I'm describing, but that's where a lot of this will be driven from.

• 1:09:11Jordi Hays?

  How's the transition gone from drone pilot to CEO? I know you were running a sort of drone oriented company in high school. So you had a little bit of experience, but does it feel like you're playing a video game when you're in Slack? And you're, you know, just sort of manning the ship. Has it been pretty seamless?

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you use Slack in the FPV goggles?

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  That would be really locked in.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Well, it's not Slack, it's ITAR compliant, he's on Teams, for sure.

• 1:09:40Jordi Hays?

  Teams guy.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  We, we, we're actually, we do use Slack, but not in the goggles, I wish. But it's been an interesting transition. I mean, you know, sometimes I do kind of look around and I'm like, wow, I, you know, used to just be flying drones off my back porch. And now I'm, now I'm doing this, but I think I've always had this, you know, really strong natural inclination to start a company. And I've been interested in startups for a really long time. So it feels very natural, like I understand the exact progression of why I'm doing what I'm doing. But certainly a ton of learnings and we're also just moving really quickly. And so that comes with, you know, at times a lot of pain and a lot of, a lot of lessons, but it's, it's been a great journey. I'm, I'm super grateful for what I get to do every day.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Last, last tiny question, will we ever see a Nero's consumer product? We're, we're, I think DGI is number one haters over here. We've been trying to get on the sanctioned, we've been trying to.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  We do a lot of cinematic things, we want to film them with drones, but we want to be American about it, it's tough.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the, the market dynamic right now is, is in defense and that's where the most critical need is. But our mission is to fix the American drone industrial base. So that doesn't just, you know, that doesn't just mean defense, right? I think way in the future, there's a very good possibility that we'll be able to replace DGI on the, the consumer shelves. I would love to.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 1:11:03Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for stopping by. We'll have to have you back next time there's a big announcement. We really appreciate you calling in. Thanks so much.

• 1:11:10Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the milestone.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:11:11Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. I want to go to Andrew Huberman for a bit. I mean, unless you have something to debrief on that?

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Because you got a shout out.

• 1:11:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so out of nowhere.

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  Out of nowhere.

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  On, it was Saturday, woke up, I guess, yeah, it was around noon. He says, I find it weird that most of all the countertop reverse osmosis water filters are made of plastic, the same industry that is built on keep contaminants out of what you ingest. Ethos puts clean slash cleaned water into plastic glaring contradiction. I'm excited that Rora water is metal. So he's of course referencing to this product here. I don't know if you can see it on the camera now, but it's in the, it's on the set here with us. Yeah, we developed this product extremely intentionally to eliminate as much plastic as possible from the system because

• 1:12:03Jordi Hays?

  we saw that the vast majority of filters that were supposedly filtering out microplastics had, you know, huge amounts of plastic used in the process. So I'm fortunate, appreciate the shout out, Andrew. And yeah, we, we saw a massive pop in sales from this post alone, as you can imagine. And it was very cool to see.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Well, there's other big news from Dan Primack. He says, VCs always tell me they can't talk about active fundraising on advice of lawyers, but that may be about to change. The SEC has issued new general solicitation guidance that makes the process much less onerous for private equity and venture capital. We may not see Times Square billboards advertising new funds, but we should. But at least it's theoretically possible, they say. Firms would also be able to discuss fundraising efforts with reporters. That's huge. So next time you're doing your big fundraise, call into TVPN Live, announce that you're raising a $10 billion micro fund to rip checks into 100 million companies.

• 1:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this has always been sort of done indirectly, you know, that somebody will leave a fund and there'll be an announcement, you know, oh, they're coming out. But yeah, we want to see one-on-one billboards of all the big asset managers.

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  100%. I mean, we talked about scout funds. You know, you're, you're a scout at a venture capital firm. You find a company, take some of their money, put it in there. I want to see scouts on the LP side. I get comped when I, when I go and solicit a bunch of the rich friends to write LP checks to you. That's what I'm interested in. Anyway, we got the perfect person to talk about this. We got Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg calling in.

• 1:13:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Hi.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Hey, Joe, how you doing? It's our financial brother.

• 1:13:49Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm thrilled to be here with my, with my technology brothers. Thank you for having me.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  I'm so glad to have you on the show. Look, is this, is this guy professional? The seven repeats, fantastic. He's a professional or something.

• 1:14:00Joe Weisenthal?

  I know. I'm not used to this. You know what? The last time I did any sort of like video call-in show, my producer, Kale, who is in the room with me, he scolded me because he's like, "You look like garbage in that video that you did." Because I just went down to like the basement here at Bloomberg and I like propped up my phone and it was a weird angle. So he said, "Next time you do anything, just let me know." And so he got me set up. Shout out to Kale in this really nice, this really nice studio here.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  It looks great.

• 1:14:23Joe Weisenthal?

  And I have like a proper ring light and everything in front of me.

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  So, can we give, can we give the viewers a little background on you? As I understand it, your, your passion is for finance podcasting, but you have to make ends meet by playing in some sort of band? Is that right?

• 1:14:36Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. You know, you can't really live on finance podcasting alone. And so I'm in a country music band called Light Sweet Crude.

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:45Joe Weisenthal?

  And yeah, we pass a bucket of tips around after each show.

• 1:14:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:50Joe Weisenthal?

  And I think the last show, I probably, after netting it out with the opening act and the other members, I think I got about $10 out of that.

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Amazing.

• 1:14:58Joe Weisenthal?

  That was the key.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  Hit the size gong, John. There we go. Boom. There we go.

• 1:15:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, thanks for joining. I did Odd Lots a couple of months ago. It was a great show. We had a bunch of stuff we wanted to talk about today.

• 1:15:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  I mean, did you see this SEC news that VCs will be about to, that they should be able to advertise their active fundraisings? This is in Axios today.

• 1:15:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, did this? I, I missed that today, but I'm sure. I'm sure this will be wonderful. Many retail investors convinced that they're getting on, getting in on the next big thing. This can only mean good things. I'm sure that's a more wired checks to you guys.

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think, I think the idea is that if you can put $100,000 into a fund, or if you can put a million dollars into a fund, it sort of implies that you're accredited, right?

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  I mean, it could be less risky than some SPACs, I guess. Like, you know, you get into some diversified fund that's professionally managed. Doesn't seem that crazy.

• 1:15:52Joe Weisenthal?

  I love that. Well, there are riskier things that are conceivable, so therefore, yeah, no, I get it. Look, you can advertise literally anything else, right?

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:01Joe Weisenthal?

  So, why not?

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  So, I, I, I want to know, you got to break the news here.

• 1:16:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  You posted yesterday, "I have a good idea for something I want to write in the newsletter tomorrow. I'm so tempted to just waste it as a pithy tweet right now." You put it in your newsletter.

• 1:16:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  We're going to encourage people to go subscribe, but can you break us down?

• 1:16:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you.

• 1:16:19John Coogan?

  What was that good idea?

• 1:16:20Joe Weisenthal?

  I hated that Solana ad.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:22Joe Weisenthal?

  And I, I know everyone hated it, and I hate just like, if someone follows me on Twitter, I don't usually like jump on the thing that everyone's jumping on. That's not really like my style. But I hated that ad. It had nothing to do with it being like anti-woke or whatever.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:35Joe Weisenthal?

  It was just like, I hated the premise.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:38Joe Weisenthal?

  That like investing in crypto, that like investing in meme coins, which is the primary use of Solana, is somewhere along the land.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  Space travel.

• 1:16:47Joe Weisenthal?

  To be in the same conversations, like, "We built the railroads, we landed on the moon, and we trade coins on Solana." It's like, no, I'm sorry. I don't accept that premise. It's not part of it. And I was going to make, you know, like, there's this, I, the joke, when I was gonna, I could have just done it in a tweet.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Which is the real sad, which is, you know, it's like, what would your job be on the, you know, the Soviet commune? And everyone imagines that they're the poet. It's like, what would your job be on the, you know, the Martian landscape? And probably your job's going to be miserable, because it's miserable up on Mars. And it's cold, and there's no climate. You're probably doing something with like, trying to mine ice or something like that. But everyone imagines that they're the guy who's going to be like, oh, I'm going to like set up the decentralized payment platform to like finance. Like, everyone imagines that that's if they're going to be that guy.

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  The Martian meme coin artist.

• 1:17:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's like I'm gonna be the guy posting dank memes to like motivate the workers who are out on the Martian landscape. I hated that ad. I hate the whole premise. It could have been a tweet, but because I have employed, because I need to make ends meet here at Bloomberg, I was like, you know what, I'm gonna write it up in slightly longer than 280 characters for my newsletter today.

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, the steel man, the Solana on Mars, we're gonna need to fractionalize that ice, get it on chain, trade it. Like, this is gonna be important, I think.

• 1:18:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, no, like, who has the one token, you gotta tokenize the ice. I get that.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:18:06Joe Weisenthal?

  So maybe, alright, well, then I'm slightly open-minded to it.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  We've got a, we've got a working theory. We want Doge to let us privatize the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and put the planes on chain. We want planes on chains. So that's our, that's our political platform. I'm curious what you think the, the whole play was with Mark and the Tesla video yesterday. Do you have, do you have any sort of comments on that? It felt weirdly sort of conflicted in the sense that, you know, Luminar was...

• 1:18:38Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't know what the, I'm sorry. I'm so online and I'm embarrassed. I miss, who is Mark?

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Mark Rober.

• 1:18:46Joe Weisenthal?

  I totally missed it.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah, Mark Rober put out a video testing the Tesla self-driving, which is camera-based, against the LiDAR system from a rival company.

• 1:18:59Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna, we're gonna switch this interview. We're gonna, we're gonna pretend like we're interviewing a country music superstar.

• 1:19:04Joe Weisenthal?

  You just asked me about country music. You asked me about like Tesla. I don't know anything about that stuff.

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  Well, what about your, your recent interview with Andrew Ferguson on, on the FTC antitrust thing? I, I liked that. I thought, I mean, my takeaway from it was that he is very eloquent and a great storyteller. He did a really good job of kind of going back multiple decades, talking about Trump won and Lena Khan and stuff, and like, kind of just taking me on a tour of what's going on. But, and also it's very interesting that he kept coming back to like worker harm as well. That was kind of an interesting talking point. But first, like, what was your, what was your read coming out of that in terms of like how things might change?

• 1:19:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure. You know, it's so interesting because obviously everybody remembers there was the huge market rally immediately after Trump won. And one of the narratives was that, you know, the FTC under Lena Khan... Had taken this really strict line on mergers and mergers weren't getting done. And so it's like, okay, we're going to finally get this green light on merger wave. I think there's two things here. So one is like, when markets are down and risk is off, obviously, that's, that's a main driving force for declining mergers, right? When people are uncertain, et cetera. So that's one factor why we haven't seen this big merger wave happen. It's just because actually market volatility came fairly quickly as soon as the new administration

• 1:20:30Joe Weisenthal?

  hit for various tariffs and reasons. And we could talk about that or maybe the general economy even prior to tariffs. But, you know, I think that like this expectation that the new administration was going to be sort of this like, at least on the regulatory side, or at least on the deal side, this sort of like libertarian green light, everything is not really panned out. And so it's interesting, we did a live show down in DC just last week and it was a lot of fun. And we had the new FTC Chair, Andrew Ferguson. And it's interesting because he's keeping Lena Kahn's merger guidelines in place. He does have philosophical disagreements, as he puts it. And, you know, he did this like fantastic history of like what the consumer welfare standard was.

• 1:21:14Joe Weisenthal?

  It was actually funny because so early in the interview, he actually, there was a point, I forget exactly what the question was, but something about Trump and the rule of law, et cetera. And the whole audience like started laughing.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  They started booing.

• 1:21:28Joe Weisenthal?

  And you could hear it, it's in the audio.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  Well, no, no.

• 1:21:30Joe Weisenthal?

  And I was like, all right.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  Your producer like turned down the volume on that. So I just heard like a gap and I was, I thought they might be booing him and he's like, I get it, it's a DC audience.

• 1:21:39Joe Weisenthal?

  It was a booing, it was laughing. It got a little hostile.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  It was kind of crazy.

• 1:21:43Joe Weisenthal?

  It was like, I was like, oh, boy, like this is going to go off the rails. It didn't go off the rails. And then to your point, in the next question, he sort of walked through the history of the consumer welfare standard, as it's been understood by like theorists and conservative jurisprudence over the years. And he did a very good job at that. And actually, the same crowd that had laughed at him before gave him a round of applause for that part. So they did the, the sort of like history of some of this stuff is really interesting. But to your question itself, like, I think his point was there is more to consumer welfare than just lower prices. We don't need to expand. You don't have to expand beyond consumer welfare. We just have to sort of have an expansive definition of the term.

• 1:22:25Joe Weisenthal?

  And so, as he puts it, if there are issues that are going to slow down innovation because something is anti-competitive regardless of the price, that could be a harm to consumer welfare. He did talk about the idea of harming workers as a harm to consumer welfare. So I think like, I don't know yet. Like, it's really hard to say because the next time, if we get a sustained market rally at some point, we might see a bunch of deals get announced. Until there's a bunch of deals announced and they actually have to go through and green light or red light them, I don't think we really know how tough this new cop on the beat is. But, you know, he's made this point in now public and private. He's like, we're not, we take this idea of corporate power as a harm very seriously. And if you think this is going to be sort of like a Bush era FTC, you're mistaken, which

• 1:23:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I think is really interesting and probably relevant for investors, both in private and public markets.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. In terms of consumer harm, it almost feels like people are, they're not saying consumer harm, but people are frustrated with the pace of AI innovation at Apple and just the fact that Apple can kind of just sit there and Siri is free. They're not raising the price, but it feels like it's underperforming relative to if it was true.

• 1:23:34Joe Weisenthal?

  What do you think? I'm actually curious your take on that. Why do you think that is? Because Apple must feel some angst about that, or maybe they don't because no one is going to switch to the green.

• 1:23:42John Coogan?

  I think they feel angst after John Gruber's article last week because they got really taken to task. But.

• 1:23:50Joe Weisenthal?

  But anyone, it seems, but this is what I don't get. Like, I get the impression it's not that hard to build a pretty high-quality LLM because everyone seems to be able to do it. So what is it just about like turning it into a Siri-quality product?

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  You just need seven million bucks.

• 1:24:06John Coogan?

  So I think it comes down to, you know, Apple wants every, they have this insane standard for. Every interaction has to be perfect. You look at what's going on in Apple TV and they're having trouble getting through the awkward stage of what Netflix did where there was a lot of just like background laundry TV on Netflix, just reruns of sitcoms and stuff. And Apple, everything needs to be polished, almost like award level. And so they've gotten close, but they're kind of trying to play HBO's game. And I think with the AI summaries, yeah, they could easily just vend in an LLM, but then they're going to get hallucinations.

• 1:24:49John Coogan?

  Those screenshots are going to go out on X and people are going to say, look at what Apple did, it's crazy.

• 1:24:54Joe Weisenthal?

  But this is why, to me, it makes me wonder whether, like, so much of this conversation has centered around the Apple question. Why can't Apple get this right? And I keep wondering, it's like, maybe this is an AI thing, which is that like, all of us who, and I use LLMs every day for sometimes work, but sometimes just out of curiosity, I'm simultaneously every day blown away. And I'm also every day like, oh, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And the idea that this is approaching human intelligence is a joke. And so the fact that it can't be productized to like a real, for a company that really is like, takes the consumer experience very seriously, as Apple does, like, I wonder if that's like a, oh, this is worrisome about.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  Here's an angle. It seems like LLMs are good at delivering sort of human intelligence, which is not always reliable, right? Sometimes you're working with somebody that's smart and they give you some work and you're like, this sucks, do it again. And so people are used to that dynamic, whereas with a machine, if you click on Chrome and it opens Spotify, you're like, what are you doing? And so like, that kind of seems like the challenge.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  We expect our systems to be deterministic.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's possible to be blown away by an LLM when you're using it as a copilot to write stuff, but then if you're using it to order an Uber, it just does, you know, it's not going to do it, right?

• 1:26:18Joe Weisenthal?

  I had a great hallucination the other day. I was using perplexity to prepare for an interview. And I, you know, I find them useful. Anyway, we were interviewing some of the founders of Dimensional Funds and I said, what are some interesting aspects of Dimensional Lore that would be just sort of interesting to bring up? And it said, oh, ask them about their famous low volatility coffee that they serve at their headquarters where they claim to have like developed the perfect mix of caffeine and taste.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Complete, does not exist.

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  It doesn't exist.

• 1:26:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Complete, and so I'm thinking like, I'm not a responsible journalist, I'm not going to just like ask a question at an LLM, but somewhere, someday, some reporter you're going to see on TV is going to ask an insane question with an insane premise and it's because someone along the lines like gave them a list of questions generated from AI.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:05Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm just waiting for that moment because God, if I had just like asked that question, what's the deal with your low volatility coffee?

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  They're just like, what are you talking about?

• 1:27:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Professional humiliation.

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  There's like an offhand joke that the CEO made at one point.

• 1:27:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right, right. No, I could buy zero, also the clue was they say, it said, they serve it at their Santa Monica headquarters, they're headquartered in Austin, so it was something off about it from the beginning, but anyway.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  So going back a little bit to M&A.

• 1:27:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  We're purely technology focused. We were covering the Wiz acquisition today, which is obviously good for the private markets. It's good for everyone from the big asset managers that, you know, got a nice 2X in less than a year. It's good for, you know, broadly, you know, SaaS broadly. You're less focused on that type of M&A and more focused on stuff like the sort of Capital One and Discover. Like, is that the M&A market that really, you know, if Capital One and Discover can happen, does that mean that M&A is really back on the menu?

• 1:28:08Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a really good, that's a really good question. And actually, one of the things I regret, we only had so much time with Ferguson, is we actually, so much of it was talked about tech and tech power and concentration of tech power because like, you know, everyone on the right and the left is in some degree anxious about that. In retrospect, had we had more time, I wish we had actually spent more time on non-tech things because that matters too. It just doesn't get as much attention or people don't think about power to the same degree in some of these areas. But I do think that's interesting and it's if you look at that spread, my colleagues, I think flagged it yesterday. If you look at that spread on that deal, that's been a complete round trip since the election. So if you want to see like one chart that sort of encapsulates the sort of changing

• 1:28:53Joe Weisenthal?

  moods since the euphoria in mid-November, mid-December, et cetera, and then the sort of turnaround essentially when Trump took office, which was basically the turn. You know, I think like the crypto high was literally the day he had that ball.

• 1:29:06John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:29:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, Trump meme coin.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  The Trump pop followed by the Trump dump.

• 1:29:11Joe Weisenthal?

  It was just perfect. I mean, it's so perfect because of course it was.

• 1:29:14Speaker 04

  You want to start strong.

• 1:29:15Joe Weisenthal?

  But I think if you look at that that spread chart for Capital One and Discover, you kind of just see the whole like, oh wait, the rethinking of, you know, how sort of markets friendly this administration is going to be.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  On on economic data, I love following you on days that are like, you know, the jobs numbers and stuff.

• 1:29:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Love jobs day.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  But I want to get kind of like a high level for someone who's maybe in tech and not is embedded in finance. Like, what is the Super Bowl of finance? Like, what are the important days to watch for? Because I know that there's data dripping out. There's, oh, preliminary CPI data, then there's Fed funds data and stuff. Like, what is the one day that like you can't miss or like what and what's kind of noise that you can kind of write off?

• 1:29:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Well, I'll say like the Super Bowl is always going to be jobs day because it's a really good, high-quality survey. If you want to understand like are businesses in a mood to invest?

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:09Joe Weisenthal?

  And are they feeling good? I mean, there's no better measure than are they actually willing to like hire someone and take on new payrolls? So I think like just sort of like, if you want to like understand the business climate, that has got to be the gold standard and there's so much to chew on and there's so many ways to slice it, there's so many ways to analyze it. There's a lot there. You know, it's what I guess the first Friday of every month typically, that's good. You know, the other things that I think are really worth watching right now, several of the regional feds have a monthly survey of the manufacturers in their in their district. And I think you right now, you really be want to be watching specific questions about Are you, how are you feeling about investment right now?

• 1:30:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Capital expansion plans, capital expenditure plans? To me, that is like the sort of billion dollar question right here, which is there's this hope, right? That we're going to have this re-industrialization or further industrialization or, you know, that's kind of what the administration is banking on.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:10Joe Weisenthal?

  The sentiment right now is that there's too much chaos to like make any big choices and no one really knows what the final tariff arrangements are going to be, et cetera. But I would say in terms of like the sort of second tier data beyond the jobs report, I'm really interested in those sort of like business surveys that sort of ask a bunch of different questions about, are you, you know, what's happening with your, your costs? What's happening with your, you know, various, various business planning as they see it out the next six months?

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Are you looking at any kind of like alternative data sources? Like, we were talking to somebody who was looking at trueflation data instead of kind of CPI? Or are you like a purist? You gotta go straight to the source?

• 1:31:47Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I love all of it. I look, there's no, the truth of the matter is, is that the government data is very good quality by and large. There are a bunch of other surveys, you know, it's like, I remember like during COVID, you know, looking at like those like measures of like dining out, et cetera. And when is that coming back? Or airplane sales, which were actually, that's another sort of like yellow flag or red flag for the market. Some of the airlines, I think Delta last week or two weeks ago, they said they're already starting to see ticket sales tail off. It could be because there were a lot of

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Crashes.

• 1:32:22Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, travel incidents in the news. So it's not totally clear. I love, look, there's no data I won't look at. I'm really, but I think right now the question is like, is the sentiment data, the business sentiment data, the consumer sentiment data going to translate into hard numbers? And I don't know if the answer is yes or no, to be honest, because we had pretty terrible sentiment data the last several years. You think back to 2022 when inflation peaked, terrible sentiment numbers. Consumers kept shopping and dining out. So for all they told survey, surveyors that things were so bad, they were still active as consumers.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  It's the Kyla Scanlon vibe session.

• 1:32:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, it really like, it really did seem to be a disconnect between how awful everyone is saying things were and what they were doing, which was going on cruises and record numbers and all kinds of things like that.

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, question for you. People have joked about, you know, there, it used to be, we had bull markets and bear markets, and now it seems like we have kangaroo markets. I, I grad, I, which is just like, you know, going, going up and down like this. It's just sort of a fun, fun analogy.

• 1:33:23Joe Weisenthal?

  I hadn't heard that one before.

• 1:33:24Jordi Hays?

  I graduated, I graduated college in 2018, you know, very, we had, you know, very quickly, it was COVID, and then the COVID crash, and then ZIRP, and then, you know, the interest rate hikes, and then, you know, every, everything's, it's been this sort of kangaroo dynamic.

• 1:33:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Is the, is a kangaroo market just a obvious byproduct of the internet? Where just information is just traveling so quickly, where, you know, sentiment can change so quickly, and trade on, you know, you know, I joked historically, like now we have group chats, where like, friends are just, you know, from all over the world, sometimes are just like talking about what's happening, and trading against that information, and trading against the sentiment in the group chat, right?

• 1:34:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:10Jordi Hays?

  Historically, it would be like, oh yeah, you go to your college reunion, and you're hanging out with your buddies that, you know, maybe you got some, got, you know, and everybody's like, oh yeah, it's, actually, we should be really bearish, and then you sort of make these sort of long-term decisions.

• 1:34:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you know, it's funny, like, because I am a journalist in financial markets, people think I know something, you know, they're like, oh, is now a good time to refinance my house? I was like, I have no idea. If I, if I knew which way mortgage rates were going, I'd be maybe in a different business. But I do, you know, typically get a few texts after a, when the market's down, and people are like, hey, Joe, how you been? It's been a long time. What do you think about the market? And that's often like, okay, maybe we're getting close to a bottom here. So just for what it's worth, I haven't gotten any, but I, no old friends have reached out in the last several weeks. So if you want to use that as an indicator of something, maybe that means we have more to go down. But I think, look, like markets are volatile because the world is volatile.

• 1:35:06Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, there's a war going on, there are multiple wars that the US is in some way connected to.

• 1:35:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but isn't the argument that we directly, we feel like we're experiencing that volatility?

• 1:35:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Jordi Hays?

  Because we're seeing it live, we're seeing the war in Ukraine, we're seeing something happen in Syria or Libya. Or you can sort of like.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, during the war on terror, like it was pretty smooth sailing until like a massive crash that lasted years. And then a massive buildup for years and now it does feel more volatile. It's a bull market in the vix.

• 1:35:40Joe Weisenthal?

  I think that's real. I mean, I think that like in terms of like the emotional vandalism that everyone experiences every day because they're just scrolling. How can it not be having an effect on things?

• 1:35:50John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:35:52Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you see a world in the, you know, are SPACs doomed because they have such a bad reputation right now? Or could they be great? Could SPACs be great?

• 1:36:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Uh, you know what? SPACs have come and gone multiple times in their history. So I would, I would never bet against the return of the SPAC. It might take a while. I think, you know, it's like maybe even like every 15 or 20 years or whatever. But I am confident that in my lifetime, there will be another SPAC boom. I will, I will, I will make that prediction, whether it's in a year or five years or 10 years. But like, uh, you know, yeah, I believe that this idea of like, you're going to put money into a box and something magical is going to happen. That will never stop being tantalizing to investors. I think we will, the SPACs are not dead.

• 1:36:36John Coogan?

  Capital finds a way like sand through pebbles. It just needs to find its way. Uh, I want to talk to you about, uh, your, like, you post on X, but you also post on Blue Sky. And I see some posts do really well on X, some of them do on Blue Sky. Are you using other platforms?

• 1:36:52Joe Weisenthal?

  I mostly use X.

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:54Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, when like the market's down, I post on Blue Sky.

• 1:36:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Because that crowd is like sickos for bad news under the Trump administration.

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  It does seem like that.

• 1:37:01Joe Weisenthal?

  So I'm like, I'm gonna throw, I'll throw them some chum about like how the Nasdaq is down 2%. I, you know, I love Twitter. I'm so addicted to it. I'll stay on. You know, it's like Donald Trump and Diet Coke. Like, I'll like keep like.

• 1:37:12John Coogan?

  But are you using any of the other platforms? Are you on Threads?

• 1:37:14Joe Weisenthal?

  No, well, so, uh, no, no.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  I went on Blue Sky. I think you're the only person that I follow.

• 1:37:18Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't use Threads. I don't use TikTok.

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:19Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't use Threads. I don't use TikTok. My Instagram is private.

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:23Joe Weisenthal?

  But we have a Discord.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:25Joe Weisenthal?

  And the Odd Lots Discord, 10,000 members.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:37:27Joe Weisenthal?

  It's like a really, so I'm in there a lot.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  That's really cool.

• 1:37:30Joe Weisenthal?

  It's great. People are like posting book recommendations.

• 1:37:31John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:37:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Stuff like that.

• 1:37:32John Coogan?

  Like much higher signal, I imagine. Much less noisy.

• 1:37:35Joe Weisenthal?

  And like, you know, yeah, so it's mostly X, a little bit of, and then my Discord and.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:37:40Joe Weisenthal?

  It's fun.

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Uh, what about prediction markets?

• 1:37:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you just give me like how you're experiencing them?

• 1:37:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:37:47John Coogan?

  Pros and cons, values?

• 1:37:49Joe Weisenthal?

  This is like my co-host and I, Tracy, we have different perspectives on this, which is good. But, um, look, the way I see prediction markets is like threefold, which is like, I think it's good to have a price on the news in many cases. Cause people make a prediction, they'll be like, oh, you know, I think AI is going to eliminate all white collar labor within two years. I would like to see some like price on that. I would like to see people put their money where their mouth is, rather than just that being said with tweets. I think what is a good way of knowing what people are interested in at any given moment. And the other thing I'll say, and I've said this before, which is that the US Treasury market is literally a prediction market. Because US Treasuries at any point in the curve are the ensemble prediction of what the Fed is expected to do over the course of any given time.

• 1:38:34Joe Weisenthal?

  So a five-year Treasury is what the next five years of Fed short-term rates are gonna be. You could decompose it. And the Fed makes its decision on like, you know, whatever, 12 voting members. And so the Treasury market is literally a prediction market on when 12 people at the Fed are going to do eight times a year over any given term. So the idea like that, it's not like a prediction market. It is a prediction market. And so they're clearly validated as one of the core pillars of the, um, financial system. So hopefully, I don't know, I'd be into it if they have more liquidity and people can have more specialized bets on things. I think it'd be a cool thing.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem like they need to figure out how to do longer dated prediction markets.

• 1:39:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right, because you don't want to tie your money up forever on some 2032 contract.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Exactly. I was talking about like the, the, the, the last election was so exciting. I was like, I'm ready to start betting on the next election.

• 1:39:26Joe Weisenthal?

  You don't want to like make a bet that it's like your money's.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  Exactly. And, and they're just like, yeah, that, that's not a product that anyone wants. It's, uh, yeah, yeah, it, it's very funny, but.

• 1:39:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Sorry, I gotta run, fellas.

• 1:39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 1:39:38Joe Weisenthal?

  To a, uh, recording, but I'd love to come back.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you gotta come back. This is amazing.

• 1:39:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Technology brothers sometime. And thank you so much for having me.

• 1:39:45Jordi Hays?

  You have to go get on the Ted Cruz podcast. I know you were.

• 1:39:47Joe Weisenthal?

  And I would love to go on the Ted Cruz podcast one day, too. It's between you guys, it's between you guys and him.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thanks for stopping by.

• 1:39:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Thanks for having me. Take care.

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on. Have a good one.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  We'll, we'll talk to you soon. That's great. Okay. Up next, coming in two minutes.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Joe's voice, by the way, makes me very, uh, nostalgic.

• 1:40:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:40:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he just, it's, it's, it sounds, sounds like he could, could, could easily have been recording about, uh, you know, the Great Depression. You know, you could hear him chattering over the radio.

• 1:40:20John Coogan?

  No, he's a great podcaster. I love Odd Lots. That was like one of the first, one of the first podcasts I listened to. I think they've been doing it for almost like 10 years. It's fantastic.

• 1:40:27Jordi Hays?

  And he's held the line on not going independent. I'm sure people have dangled a million dollar pre seat over his head. Hey, why don't you come over here and, you know, but he, he reps Bloomberg.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, reps Bloomberg. That's great. Well, we got Scott Wu from Cognition coming on the show in a couple minutes. So many questions for him, obviously, highly.

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  We gotta start with AI. What is AI? What is this whole thing? People have been talking about it. We want to know about it.

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  I mean, when everyone was saying like the AI, like massive job displacement stuff, the, the, the bet I would try and formulate with people was, uh, over, under 10% US unemployment by 2030. And even that, it sounds like not that crazy. Like we've had the unemployment higher than 10% in the past.

• 1:41:19John Coogan?

  But a lot of people who I would talk to, they say, oh yeah, AI is going to like take all the jobs. When I tried to get them to concretize it in 10% higher or lower than 10% unemployment in the United States in 2030. It's like not that far out. It's not that high. We've had higher than 10% before. A lot of people would say, ah, like, I don't know, maybe we'll still, maybe it won't roll out that fast. And so like, that's the prediction market that I want.

• 1:41:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, there was always that headline of, you know, humans will be having more sex with robots, you know, by 2025. Do you remember that one?

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  No. Oh, yes, yes. I see that go viral all the time.

• 1:41:55Jordi Hays?

  And then Tesla optimist just did a campaign with Kardashian.

• 1:42:00John Coogan?

  Kardashian.

• 1:42:02Jordi Hays?

  Being very silly.

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  Very scintillating.

• 1:42:05Jordi Hays?

  Very, very silly.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  And it seems that that feels like a big campaign by Tesla.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:42:13Jordi Hays?

  To go and work with a Kardashian. That's sort of the final boss of influencer marketing.

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:42:18Jordi Hays?

  And so I saw people speculating on that, but.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  It'll be interesting to see where it goes. Well, we have Scott Wu in the temple of technology. Welcome to the show, Scott.

• 1:42:29Scott Wu?

  There he is. Scott, man, good to see you guys. How are you?

• 1:42:31John Coogan?

  We're great. How are you?

• 1:42:33Scott Wu?

  Good, good, good. Busy couple of days for us.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah? What's keeping you busy?

• 1:42:38Scott Wu?

  Oh, there's always, I mean, there's always so much stuff going on. I feel like there's, there's, there's, there's new products that come out every week. There's new models that comes out every week. And then, you know, we obviously have a lot going on with, with Devon, so.

• 1:42:48John Coogan?

  Well, we appreciate you taking the time. Could you give us kind of just an overview?

• 1:42:51Jordi Hays?

  By the way, real quick, Scott and I talked on the phone, I think it was maybe 5:30 or 6:00 Friday night. And he was like, yeah, everybody will be here until probably, you know, what did you say? What's your normal? You guys have a pretty intense.

• 1:43:05Scott Wu?

  We're usually, we're usually still around past midnight. Yeah, yeah. Busy schedules for us.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Hopefully it's fun. You clearly haven't put yourself out of a job.

• 1:43:14John Coogan?

  But can you give us the update on kind of like, where is cognition now? Obviously, like massive launch, huge, like going direct moment. Great launch video. And then, you know, you kind of went into build mode. We kind of haven't heard that much from the company. So can you give me an overview of where the products are, where the company is, and kind of set some, some, some ground rules for, for where you are?

• 1:43:37Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we had our initial announcement about a year ago, actually, at this point. And and from then, a lot of it was was basically just going through all the all the frictions of software engineering. You know, the the truth is engineering is just so messy in the real world. If you think about, you know, what has to get done. Obviously, there's some pretty hard, logical, problem-solving type work that has to be done. But there's also a lot of practical stuff. And so, you know, figuring out how to to to have a clean experience that slots in, figuring out how to work with all these enterprise customer code bases, figuring out the the capabilities and working with logging and documentation and tooling and things like that. And so, you know, for for a decent chunk of time, our main work actually was with larger enterprises.

• 1:44:21Scott Wu?

  And so we would work with a lot of these these different groups, you know, bigger tech companies, you know, financial services or or things like that, and and work with them on on a lot of these bigger projects and more repetitive projects and have Devin basically come in and and speed up the job for a lot of this stuff. And then in December, we we rolled out our our general availability. And, you know, it's a self-serve plan where you can just put put down a credit card and get started and plug in your code base and have Devin. And we were super, super excited about that, obviously, because it's, you know, really the the chance for for everyone to just get to try it out and see how it is. And it's it's been a fun last few months for us. It's been a lot of iteration and a lot of growth and so on. We've had users talking about how how Devin's now quickly become become the number one committer in their code base and so on.

• 1:45:06Scott Wu?

  And so it's it's it's very cool to see. Yeah.

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  Can you talk to me a little bit about the decisions you made early on on where to kind of put your AI efforts? Like, as I understand it, you didn't train a foundation model, you didn't do one of the massive runs, you you work with different model providers. But what considerations were made in the early stage? And are you still sticking with those or have those evolved over time?

• 1:45:29Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we had, you know, I would say two major bets that we really started the company with. And I would say the first one was, you know, that reasoning and this whole RL paradigm was going to work. And this is, you know, this is, it was a pretty controversial thing, I think, around the end of 2023. Because most of what, you know, the first generation of AI was, or, you know, the first generation of language models was, was more like imitation learning. Right? It was basically like, read all of the internet, you know, read every Reddit post and talk like somebody on the internet, right? And, and obviously, I mean, it was pretty incredible, you know, we passed the Turing test, ChatGPT was a massive, you know, and for a while, all of the work that was being done and all of the products that happened in particular verticals were much more in that style,

• 1:46:14Scott Wu?

  which was basically, you know, I'll call it text completion, basically, right? And so, you know, you had, had this, you had product like that in marketing, right? You had a product like that for, for customer support and similar things for code, where it's kind of like, here's the code so far and just predict for me what line comes next, right? I, I think we had a strong view that, yeah, that this reasoning was really going to work and was going to enable a lot of new use cases. And then the other thing that we felt really strongly about was that the product experience was going to shift from this kind of more Q and A text completion style products to basically an agent, you know? And practically, I think what that means is, I honestly, I think a lot of folks today still think of AI as kind of, you know, a better Google, call it. Like, you have a question and you want to go search it up, you know, you ask your AI and your AI has a better answer,

• 1:46:59Scott Wu?

  which is big, obviously, I mean, Google's not a small company, right? But, but I think the, I think the actual vision that we're going towards with AI is actually even bigger than that, which is basically, you know, your buddy that does your chores for you, right? And, and the obvious difference between those two is the ability to actually interact with the real world and do real tasks and so on, right? And so, you know, there's, there's a big difference between having a legal Q and A, for example, versus having a lawyer that can actually go submit things for you, that can go and, you know, interact with all these different surfaces. And the same is obviously the case in code, right? Where it's, you know, this is how we build software, right? It's, is you, you, you write code, you run the code, you see if it worked or not, you run, run the tests,

• 1:47:42Scott Wu?

  you look at the documentation, you know, you click around on the product yourself. And this is how we, this is how we iterate and build, right? And so the, the ability to do that is, is, is a big step function difference.

• 1:47:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you think of getting Devin to go from sort of this reactive experience where you talk to Devin like you would you know, a teammate or employee and say like, hey, can you help me sort of execute on this specific thing? It goes and does it, you know, maybe it comes back to get, you know, feedback at different points to, I imagine, long-term, you want the sort of proactive, sort of like, high-agency agent and how, you know, I'm sure you guys are already experimenting with that kind of thing internally. But, uh, you know, what are your plans along sort of that route?

• 1:48:26Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so, you know, the way that we kind of think about it is turning all the bricklayers into architects is almost, you know, is how I would describe it. And, um, you know, I think the, the really beautiful part of software engineering, I would say, is getting to do this core, you know, problems of solving and decision-making around what do you want to build, right? It's, it's like, you know, let me understand the problem. Let me understand what's exactly, what exactly is going on. And then let me figure out, here's exactly the solution that I want to build for this, right? The thing is, you only spend about 10% of your time doing that, you know, as a software engineer in practice. You probably spend about 90% of your time, you know, dealing with your Kubernetes and fixing your unit tests and upgrading your, your thing to the new version and all of this other stuff, you know, fixing these bugs that come up, right? Um, and so a lot of it is, the way I would kind of describe it is, is working with Devin as,

• 1:49:12Scott Wu?

  as the implementer that allows you to be a really great architect, right? And so, um, there's, there's a lot of detail with that because naturally you have to be in, you know, all, all the same flows that, that humans use for software engineering, if you want to do that, right? And so you have your logs on Datadog, so like, you know, Devin's got to go look at those logs, right? You're, you're talking about issues on Slack, so Devin's got to be in Slack, right? And a lot of it is, is really kind of figuring out the workflow where, where it's, it's very natural and very easy that as you're talking about this idea that you have, or this new feature that you're trying to build, or this bug that you're trying to fix, or whatever, you're able to just tag Devin and just say, hey, @Devin, can you take a look at this? And, uh, and, and make this fix or do this thing.

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk about specifically, I can imagine that Devin, because it's so embedded in these different workflows, you know, there's every single day we see, you know, conversation on the timeline from somebody that says, I'm switching from, you know, this code editor to that code editor, or that code editor back to this code editor. How do you think about, you know, sort of long-term moats and sort of lock-in as, you know, you're building Devin for yourself, but then you're also, you know, trying to build a, you know, you're already a billion-dollar company. Eventually, you know, I'm sure you have much, much bigger ambitions, but how do you think about sort of long-term moats and, you know,

• 1:50:38Jordi Hays?

  around the sort of like software engineering agents?

• 1:50:41Scott Wu?

  Sure. Yeah, you know, I think in the short and medium term, it's, there's a lot of different experiences in code and, you know, I think a lot of folks building kind of different, different product experience for different verticals or use cases within code. I think in the short and medium term, it's, you know, things are just changing so quickly that the natural thing is just whatever is able to help folks the most is what they're really excited to use, right? And I think there's, there's just, you know, when the pace of development and also the pace of progress in AI is as high as it is, I think that's going to be, to continue to be the case for a while. You know, I think with that said, in the long term, I think these things naturally do kind of converge to a point. And there are a few particular pieces, I would say, that really kind of cause that.

• 1:51:24Scott Wu?

  And one of the big ones that I'll just point out is, you know, there really is a lot of, I guess, in most spaces, you know, we would call this personalization or something of that sort, but there's a lot of it in code, right? I mean, if you imagine you hire, you know, the smartest software engineer in the world, and, you know, you get them to work on your code base, day one, it's- They're not going to know a lot of these little details about here's why we chose to do this architecture, here's what this function does and that function does, here's how you do this database migration or whatever it is, right? So, you know, they have to learn all these things from the ground up as opposed to somebody who's, you know, just as smart but has been at the company for, you know, 10 years and built half the code by themselves and, you know, they wrote all of these files themselves and so on, right? Then, you know, you get to a point where you really just understand the code base, you're

• 1:52:08Scott Wu?

  making the same decisions and trade offs and you're working with it very tightly. It's the kind of thing where, and we see this already where it's, you know, as, as folks start using Devin more and more, one of the really cool things is, you know, you can have one of your engineers ask Devin a question and Devin is drawing on the knowledge that it has from all of the previous sessions it has with everyone on your team. Right. Right? And it's able to learn all these things and, you know, if someone says, hey, you know, we gotta, we have to go do this, this version upgrade and Devin might say, oh yeah, I remember this, I actually just did one just like this, like last week for this other part of you guys code base. And so let's, let's figure out this one and let's do this, right? And so I think there's a lot of, that's kind of the shape, I think, of what we're going to see a lot in AI actually over the next couple of years where, you know, this is, this

• 1:52:52Scott Wu?

  is a bit of a hot take, but I would say a lot of the problem solving is actually good enough already. You know, a lot of the reasoning and the problem solving, I mean, AI has been shown to be capable of solving some pretty hard stuff. I think actually what we have left to do is a lot more so just understanding the detail and the complexity of the real world, right? And you think about all these tasks that we spend our time on, you know, they, they, there's some amount of problem solving, but there's also a lot of just pulling in the relevant context and, you know, understanding what is the common sense, what are the common sense considerations you're working with and, and that's a lot of what we spend our time working on with Devin's capabilities.

• 1:53:27John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about, I, like, I have this take that we're almost in an AI winter for consumers, even though AI feels like it's moving so quickly, the chat GPT moment was so big because we passed the Turing test that for most average people, it's just Google search, as you mentioned. But over the last year, obviously if you're following this stuff, there's been incredible breakthroughs, inference cost has gone way down, models have gotten bigger, context windows have gotten way bigger. Has, have there been particular milestones in, in just AI research and development that have been more transformative to your business than others over the last year?

• 1:54:07Scott Wu?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, you know, I think the, at a high level, you know, I think all the continued progress that we're seeing everywhere in AI actually is primarily due to essentially like reinforcement learning, RL, that's really working. And it is a very different paradigm, right? Where we're saying how in the past it was all just imitation learning and it's get as much of the internet as you could possibly scrape up and just train on all of it, you know, and hopefully you get something that knows a lot of stuff, right? Whereas this is kind of, you know, this whole reinforcement learning paradigm is, you know, if you have a clear problem space where you can do the problem a hundred times and you know this was right, this was wrong, this was right, this was wrong, you know, it's a little bit more like AlphaGo, you know, this self-play learning, but in a language model, right? And I think that's the biggest paradigm and, you know, folks like OpenAI,

• 1:54:51Scott Wu?

  Anthropic, and lots of, you know, Google X and so on, have shown a lot of real progress through this whole RL paradigm. To your point on consumer, you know, I actually think that, I think that we'll probably see a resurgence actually in consumer over the next, the next few months or so. And I think one of the big things I think that will actually flip that switch is, is like a really great consumer agent experience, you know, it's, there's, I think it will be a

• 1:55:16Jordi Hays?

  We haven't had the, we haven't had the moment of, of just chatting with, with this sort of generalized agent that can just book you a flight and a hotel and it's like super seamless and like that, that's like what I feel like we've all been waiting for.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  We've had that preview since Siri 1.0 back in a decade ago, and it still isn't here and we're still waiting for it, but it feels like now it's actually just a couple months away.

• 1:55:36Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, I want to buy this pair of shoes and just go and look on all those websites and find which one delivers and which one is the best price for that and just go buy it for me, right? Like things like that where it's, I think that'll be, that'll be a pretty big moment for folks because you'll really feel, I think, the difference of

• 1:55:51John Coogan?

  How did you process the DeepSeek moment? Obviously that took over the timeline earlier this year. It was, it was very controversial in a bunch of ways, but what was your, what was your DeepSeek takeaway from that development?

• 1:56:04Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I think at a high level, it's a competitive world out there. You know, I think there are a lot of, a lot of really smart folks going after this problem. And it's, it's, it's the kind of thing where it's, you know, if you think about like, what, what, what people even, not just what was possible a year ago, but what even people even imagined could even work. One year ago, or two years ago, or three years ago, I mean, every year, it's basically totally, it's totally flipped, right? And now it's kind of like, everyone in the space is talking about agents and the future of agents. You know, when we were doing this like year ago, no one really even believed that agents were like a thing, you know? And I think that, yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's the case, I think, everywhere in the stack. And, you know, we'll see, you know, I mean, there's the, there's the GPU layer, there's the hardware layer, you know,

• 1:56:49Scott Wu?

  there's the foundation models and so on. But, but I, I, I think, I think all throughout the space, you know, you have these, these really, really smart folks and really smart teams that are going after the problems and, and basically pushing things forward. You know, I think we're in a very high velocity period where it really does feel like every month in AI is, is like a year. And, you know, and in a lot of these tech industries in the past. And so, so, yeah.

• 1:57:11Jordi Hays?

  How is, how is AI adoption? What's been your takeaway from AI adoption within the Fortune 500, right? You see all these companies are spending billions of dollars on like Gen AI consulting contracts with Accenture. It feels like the consulting companies are probably doing more revenue from generative AI than like all of the software companies combined, maybe ignore, you know, OpenAI. Is it happening sort of bottoms up? Like an engineer sort of comes to their team and they're like, you know, it's, they're, they're in, you know, not, not on, not in San Francisco or New York. And they're saying, hey, guys, I got this like guy named Devin, he's 500 bucks a month.

• 1:57:53Jordi Hays?

  And like, I think he can do, you know, what, what, you know, our next 10 junior engineers can do. Or is it happening more so top down where? Execs are super, you know, kind of clued in and following the stuff or both?

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Like, we need an AI strategy.

• 1:58:08Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the interesting thing with these times is there's a lot of both. You know, and executives, obviously, and boards, for example, I mean, everyone is thinking about how do we get AI native and how do we make sure we're on top of this wave? And how do we make sure we're ready to just accelerate as fast as possible? And that we're ahead of the curve on this rather than being too late on it, right? Because obviously, these things are moving so quickly. And then, at the same time, you know, it's like you have individual developers and folks like that who are just really excited to use these things. I mean, it's, you know, a lot of these painful tasks. I mean, if you're, if you're doing a full codebase migration and your codebase is, you know, 50,000 files and you got to do the same migration on every single one. I mean, it's, it's not a fun task, you know? And figuring out how to, how to go quicker on those things so you could spend more time

• 1:58:53Scott Wu?

  on, on the problems that you really care about and on, you know, figuring out what to build is really exciting for folks as well. But yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting time for us where it's, you know, it's, it's bluntly, I mean, it's, I think most of our waves in tech, you know, there's always been kind of a hype phase, I'll call it, and also, you know, a phase where basically, you know, this adoption really comes in. And you saw the same thing with cloud, you saw the same thing with mobile, I mean, you saw the same thing with the internet itself, right? And yeah, I mean, I think it's an exciting one for us because I think with AI, I mean, I think the, I think if anything, you know, I think the capabilities and I think what will be possible in AI are, are, are just getting exponentially better and better every year. But I, I think what I would say is, you know, I think there's a lot of different, there's

• 1:59:37Scott Wu?

  a lot of different areas, you know, of generative AI where it seems very clear that's like, this is getting better by the month, this is, you know, this is, this is clearly going to work soon and we want to be, you know, ahead of our time with this and get, get ready for this. And, you know, there are a few spaces, I would say, and code is one of those where it's, you know, this is actively working right now. I mean, if your team is not using any AI code tool, you are just heavily behind, right? And so it's, it's kind of interesting, and I think we'll see each of these kind of come online at, at different points in time. And I think there are a few reasons why code is one of the first to really get there. But, but, but yeah, yeah, it's going to be an exciting few months for us.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  What advice would you give the young Scott Wu, you know, the younger version of you that's learning, that's just starting to learn to code?

• 2:00:21Scott Wu?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  And how do you sort of fast track to be kind of at the bleeding edge? Obviously, you can learn from the models themselves. They're great instructors. But, you know, I think we went from this period where maybe a year ago, everyone was like, oh, all the software engineers are cooked. They sort of like made their own replacement. And now it's very clear that if you're a software engineer today, you have a massive More leverage than ever. You have more leverage than ever. And you have this massive sort of edge because even if eventually all this work goes from, you know, code to natural language, you know, there's still this sort of, it's possible to be on the bleeding edge. But how would you, if somebody sort of 22 year old coming out of college today, what would your advice to them be?

• 2:01:06Scott Wu?

  Yeah, for sure. No, I mean, I really think, I really think we're coming up on the golden age of software engineering here. And I think the main thing, you know, as we're saying, I mean, I think it's always going to be up to us to decide what to build, obviously, right? And a lot of the core of computer sciences, I would just say, is that question of understanding and deciding what to build. And so if anything, I think the theory of computer science is going to be even more valuable. You know, understanding the layers of abstraction and knowing, you know, the basic model of how a computer works and how to break down problems logically and how to reason with these, with these systems is going to be, you know, even more valuable. The other side of it, I would just say is there's no shortage of demand for software. You know, and one of the things that I think about all the time is like, you know, I think today, even still, it feels so outlandish.

• 2:01:49Scott Wu?

  But I think a couple of years ago, a couple of years from now, this is going to be commonplace is single use software, actually, right? And, you know, you can imagine a world where it's like, hey, you know, I got to go look at these, these 10 LinkedIn profiles today. And I got to click through each of these and I'm looking for this and that and whatever. And, you know, I got to go like research and get a bunch of data online and then put that into an Excel sheet and run some numbers. You know, a lot of these things are naturally Code works just as well for these tasks, if not better, right? But obviously, it makes no sense at all to go hire some engineering team to go build you, you know, this massive script that you're only going to run one time for this use case that you have today, right? But I think we will get to a point where basically you can just ask Devin, "Hey, here's the thing that we need to do. Let's just go build this real quick." Right?

• 2:02:32Scott Wu?

  And software will do that for you and will solve that problem for you. And I think there's just, you know, there's so many more products out there to build. That's the main thing that I always index on. It's crazy to think about, but I think it's like, you know, you can imagine all these products out there that are niche products for 1,000 people or 100 people, or even just for you. But, you know, they have the level of quality and the level of execution as,

• 2:02:56Scott Wu?

  you know, the biggest products in the world today, you know, YouTube or Instagram or whatever it is, so.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Talk a little bit about, you know, there's been a bunch of these sort of platforms, apps that have popped up, lovable.dev, I think, bolt new or bolt, I forget what it is, where, you know, these sort of products that allow you to just generate an app immediately and they're showing this tremendous revenue growth. You guys seem to have focused on the potentially much harder problem of sort of building durable software products, but is there a world in the future where Devin goes more downstream and is actually, you know, somebody comes on and creates their very first, you know, application ever with Devin? Because, you know, I see a lot of these companies pop up and I have no idea what their

• 2:03:45Jordi Hays?

  long-term roadmap is, but I can see why it's easy to generate a lot of revenue quickly to just generate apps or generate websites. But then, you know, maybe that's not, you know, the, you know, it feels like potentially a good wedge, but not a super durable business necessarily, which is like, do I need to generate a new app every month? Like, probably not, but maybe, you know.

• 2:04:07Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I think a lot of different product experiences in the space, for sure. I think the way that we've always thought about it is, you know, I kind of think of self-driving as the parallel where it's, you know, there was first, it was all manual, and then eventually there was, you know, there's automatic shift, right? And then there was cruise control, there's auto park, you know, and basically, I guess, the kind of the thing that I would point out here is, you know, up until the point where it was true, full, you know, it could do every single thing you wanted it to do, you still needed a driver's license for all of that middle era, right? And, you know, there was a point at the end where it's kind of like, yeah, you could just sit in the backseat and just have the car do everything for you, right? And so I think we kind of have this similar paradigm, I'd say, in code,

• 2:04:48Scott Wu?

  whereas maybe not so, maybe not as much of a kind of like, single-step function switch, but you kind of have this gradual spectrum where, you know, there are a lot of tasks, I think, where, you know, like you said, building a cool website or something like that, where it's, yeah, you know, you don't have to have any experience with code at all, and now you can just do this, right? And then I think there are a lot of these kind of like, larger and more complex tasks, you know, working on a big code base, or figuring out things with your existing product, or, you know, building, as you're saying, like, a lot of this really kind of, these bigger projects, where, you know, you still want to be an engineer, and you still want to be really deeply technical, I think, to be able to make the most out of these AI coding tools and to use that. But with that said, I mean, I think that every month, the capabilities change, right? And I think there will be a

• 2:05:31Scott Wu?

  time, I think, where you're able to, it's just as easy as kind of looking at your product and talking and playing English about what you want, and that's it.

• 2:05:38John Coogan?

  Do you like the innovator's dilemma framework? And do you think AI is more in the sustaining innovation camp, or disruptive innovation camp? There's been a lot of debate about this, people comparing it to mobile, where the really large companies were actually the best positioned to take advantage of mobile. A lot of people are saying, Google, even though their product roadmap has been a little lumpy, they still have amazing talent, amazing hardware, amazing software, lots of talent to kind of reap the benefits of AI over the long term.

• 2:06:10Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one. I mean, I think there's going to be a lot of interesting second order effects. And, you know, one of the, the, maybe the most obvious ones to call out is, is basically a lot of these,

• 2:06:21Scott Wu?

  a lot of these switching costs, you know, that exists, especially in these B two B businesses are just going to go way down. You know, and I'm sure we could all think of these, these companies that, you know, they only really thrive today because it is so painful to, to, to, to switch off and to migrate off, right? And I think that's going to change a lot. I think on the other hand, I, I think a lot of, as we're saying, you know, this deep personalization and, you know, the ability to use data and to, to really build customer experiences for, for your, for your users or your customers. I think that is going to only become more and more powerful. And, and so I think, long story short is, you know, I, I, I think that, I think that a lot of the, the existing great businesses are going to do very well. In the age of AI, I think there will be, you know, in, in the neighborhood, I would say of kind of like,

• 2:07:05Scott Wu?

  you know, the, the 10 to 20 power law businesses of the new ones that come up from AI, you know, and I mean, I think we already kind of see it's, there's, there's the foundation labs themselves, and then there's some of the, you know, each of the big verticals of the application layer, right? There's code, there's law, there's, you know, customer support, there's sales and so on, right? There's, there's image and video. And, and, and I think there'll be kind of like, yeah, like a, a handful of businesses kind of from each of those categories. I think that, that really make it to the really massive outcomes. But yeah, I mean, as is always the case with these things, you know, a lot of it is, it's, it's very hard to know in advance which ones will, will be the winners. I do think that, yeah, I mean, I do think with the richness, I think of the space of AI, you know, I think one of the big differences is,

• 2:07:46Scott Wu?

  is there's just so much difference in technical execution. Where it's, you know, you can, in, in AI, you can be doing things that other teams or other products just cannot do, right? And, and I think that difference kind of means that. I think really great, really talented, new innovators will have a meaningful edge and the best ones will be able to create some.

• 2:08:07John Coogan?

  What's your take on the various walls? There's been this, oh, deep learning's hitting a wall, scale might be not all you need. Now it's, everyone's pretty scale-pilled. Then we got in the reinforcement learning paradigm, as you mentioned. Are you worried about a data wall, or an energy wall, or just some sort of wall where we hit and we kind of stagnate? And we're not seeing the breakthroughs and the acceleration that I think people are kind of expecting if you're following AI closely. Are you worried about any of those walls?

• 2:08:37Scott Wu?

  Yeah, I actually, so I actually had the opposite take, which is in some ways optimistic, some ways pessimistic, but what I would say is stagnation is actually the default. You know, it's by default, it's not the case that we're going to have this, you know, the next, and I think we've kind of like, we've felt it for so long at this point that it's like, yeah, the next model is going to be even better, and the next product is going to be even better, and the next GPU is going to be even better. But I think more what it speaks to actually is kind of the, yeah, how amazing the kind of the flow of innovation is. You know, it's like, and just to give simple examples, I mean, it's like, you know, GPT-3 wasn't just more of GPT-2, it was like, you know, it was a step function different, and there were a lot of things that had to be figured out.

• 2:09:20Scott Wu?

  And GPT-4 wasn't just more of three, it was like, you know, and the same is true, I think, with reasoning, the same is true with the advancements that we're making in hardware, it's the same as true with the advancements that we're making in the application there. So in some ways, it's kind of, you know, I'm saying it's like, there's no single kind of like force of nature that we get to rely on, where it's just like, these things will get better all on their own. At the same time, it's truly remarkable, I think, that over the last few years, you know, we haven't slowed down in figuring out the new innovations and the new categories that will get us there, so.

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  What is one thing that you learned from Eric and Kareem, from your sort of ramp days, that you feel like you've really focused on making sure that you guys implement at cognition?

• 2:10:07Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, you know, it's a they they've I I've known them a long time. I'm super, super tight with both of them. They've they've given me a lot of incredible advice. I'll share one, which I think was hilarious was, you know, we were we were just getting started. Um, and I I called Eric and I was like, hey, you know, we're um, we're we're starting this company. Um, you know, obviously like ramp is incredible. I I I so much respect for you and and what you built and I just want to get your thoughts on. Um, basically, yeah, what what is the thing that I should really uh that I should really focus on today that I'm not thinking about right now? And Eric said, you know, take a lot of pictures. Uh, and it was it was, I mean, it was it was actually great advice. It is funny because, you know, it's I would talk to these people and and all the, you know, they would say, oh, you know, you really, you got to really nail in on on hiring and you got to really like figure out these.

• 2:10:52Scott Wu?

  And all the all these things are also true, obviously, and and Eric has helped with all these other things. But I I I found that funny that that was the first, you know, the day the company is founded. Don't forget to take those pictures. And it's like the, you know, it's it's it's only been, I don't know, 15 months for us, right? But but it's uh, I I am actually really grateful that that uh that we have those and that we did that. And I I think there's a lot of things where it's just. You know, just just being in it and going through the experience and um, and and knowing what you what you miss and what you don't miss. I I I think Eric and Kareem understand that better than anyone, honestly.

• 2:11:24John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for joining. It's 1:30. Uh, we won't take any more of your time. Where can people sign up and and who should who who's kind of the wheelhouse client right now?

• 2:11:32Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's a it's Devon.ai and um, anyone who's uh, you know, I I'd say engineering teams all over the world. So so, you know, we have we have teams that range from uh, one or two person startups all the way to to the biggest financial services firms in the world. Um, and so, um, yeah, we we would love to hear folks feedback on Devon as they're trying it out.

• 2:11:52John Coogan?

  Awesome. Amazing. Thanks for joining.

• 2:11:53Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on, Scott.

• 2:11:54Scott Wu?

  Thank you guys so much for having me.

• 2:11:55Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:11:58John Coogan?

  Very interesting. I always love talking to an AI founder. There's so many things that you can peel into. We didn't even get into AGI timelines, P Doom, all the fun things that you can go from there. You want a pen? What? Oh, Charger. Here you go.

• 2:12:11John Coogan?

  And we're in, we're in, we're in demand today. There are multiple guests trying to call in right now. We can only let one in at a time. Or maybe we could do a debate between.

• 2:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Do we have two guest schedules? That would be cool.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  I think we have. Yeah. Do we, should we do a VC and a car dealership guy at the same time? I think there might've been some confusion over scheduling, but let's try and let in. Well, there's two people in the waiting room right now. We're, we're not sure who joined, but we want to let in the car dealership guy because that's who is scheduled next. Hopefully we can get him in the temple of technology and pick his brain about what's going on in the car world. Should be a fun conversation. But we got to figure out some, some zoom details.

• 2:12:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I love how the entire, entire like stream infrastructure right now is just melting down.

• 2:13:00John Coogan?

  Melting down. Yeah. We're pushing this to the limit, folks. We're building the plane as we're flying it, but I think we're having, I think we're having good streams back to back. It's been a lot of fun and I, I like these little conversations. Take us on a little tour, go over into finance land with Joe, drone land, defense tech with Soren, some AI with Scott Wu. Now some car dealerships.

• 2:13:23John Coogan?

  Hopefully. Ben, how we doing with the car dealership guy? Is he ready to come on down to the temple of technology? He left.

• 2:13:31Jordi Hays?

  He says trying to join.

• 2:13:33John Coogan?

  Why don't you send him another message and I will, I will pull up some info on this, on this car dealership.

• 2:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he said, uh, he does a lot of these stuff. So he says, we didn't let in his main camera.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  Oh, he has two cameras. Okay. Okay. Well,

• 2:13:53John Coogan?

  let's see. Nissan has a profitability problem that it's determined to fix. How a mix of product, pricing and placement? Interesting. Honda is sidestepping some tariff uncertainties by reworking its battery sourcing strategy. Beginning in April, Honda will source hybrid batteries for nearly 400,000 vehicles from Toyota's $14 billion North Carolina plant.

• 2:14:16Jordi Hays?

  He's in.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  He's in.

• 2:14:19Speaker 06

  Hey, can you guys hear me?

• 2:14:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:20Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. You sound fantastic.

• 2:14:24Jordi Hays?

  Got a real professional.

• 2:14:25John Coogan?

  Welcome to TVP live.

• 2:14:26Speaker 06

  That's the least I could do if this is what I do all day.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Great. Great to have you here. Can you, can you kick us off a little introduction? What do you do? What's your name? Who are you?

• 2:14:36Speaker 06

  Well, it's great to be on the, on the fortress of finance.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:14:41Speaker 06

  No, I'm so I'm the founder of Car Dealership Guy. You've probably seen me on Twitter if you're, if you're listening to this right now. Uh, we are the leading content news and insights platform for car dealers.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:14:52Speaker 06

  Uh, didn't start that way. We were very consumer based, but it's been, you know, a couple of years where I've really, um, just shifted to focusing on the industry. And today, you know, we're pretty much, you know, offering anything for dealers to come and, you know, learn, kind of stay informed, get ahead, really just trying to make a better industry. With the kind of ultimate vision that if we can, if we can create a better dealership experience and educate the dealers. And, you know, kind of democratize knowledge, then the consumer experience will be better and everybody wins. So that's kind of like the utopian vision.

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  I know very little about, uh, car dealership. So I bet my questions would be silly.

• 2:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe give us the crash course history, your personal history in the industry leading up to this. Cause this is not, not the kind of business that you start, uh, you know, uh, just because you had a good, good X account. Uh, I imagine you, you experienced a lot of the, you know, the, the turmoil of the industry and the good and the bad.

• 2:15:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. So it's quite the opposite. Uh, but I'll give you the, the short version. So I was a dealer. I grew up in used car business. Uh, father had a small car, used car dealership. So that was where I spent most of my time. Uh, in 2018, I got the bug. I said, there's no way that we're still selling cars this way. Right? Everything's done online. Why do I have to, why do people have to come to my dealership? You know, why can't I expand virtually and whatnot? And so I took this traditional dealership and I said, we're going to build a better way to buy a car. We're going to do it a hundred percent online. Uh, at the time, Carvana had just gone public, but it was still kind of a nascent thing, you know, kind of selling cars online. And so I actually raised capital and we transformed to do a venture backed online auto retailer.

• 2:16:29Speaker 06

  You know, we started building out our own website, our technology, our platform. And I spent five years doing this. So we were completely vertically integrated this entire time. So as we were building this business, you know, we were acquiring the warehouses, building up the logistics network and actually retailing vehicles online from what was a small used car dealership. It was a crazy experience. I mean, you know, we raised lots of capital throughout the time and grew the business to close to like a hundred million dollars in annual sales. And in end of, I want to say it was 2021 when rates started rising, you know, we kind of, things are really tough. We spent the next 18 months, you know, we couldn't raise more capital. Business was obviously, you know, the burn

• 2:17:10Speaker 06

  was accelerating and we kind of had this like existential, we're facing this existential point in our life. And the next 18 months were just brutal. We ended up shutting that business down. We tried to pivot to private equity. We almost got acquired, but that didn't work out. And in the meantime, I sort of had this like, you know, anonymous Twitter account where I was just tweeting, you know, just trying to stay sane, be a little creative, but really just sharing kind of my thoughts. And it blew up like crazy, right? So I, I, I don't remember when I launched a Twitter account exactly. I think it was like early 22.

• 2:17:41Jordi Hays?

  For anybody just on audio, he's got almost half a million followers on X, which is the equivalent of 50 billion followers on Instagram. No, it's a big, big.

• 2:17:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, it was, it was definitely very like, you're right. It's, it's very difficult to, today it's completely much more difficult, I would say, even unless you're putting out slop. But I mean, like, high quality followers is a very tough thing to do, right? You got to put an insight. But that's essentially what I was doing. I was just sharing my knowledge and experiences that I've gone through. And then after we ended up, we ended up closing down the business completely. This was like, you know, like I said, 18, 24 months later, I said, I don't exactly know what's in store for my next thing, but I do know that there's a thirst for this knowledge, right? When I launched this account, people didn't understand what the hell is going on with prices and inventory was all over the place. And it wasn't just consumers, it was dealers themselves as well. And so I said, there's something here.

• 2:18:40Speaker 06

  And so I formed a B2B media company and um and we can talk about like I went down the holdco route and you know all that stuff that Sean Puri spoke about on your podcast the other day as well. We can talk, talk, chat, chat about that as well. But that was essentially how I fell into this business. So I went from like a traditional family business to a venture backed tech business, right? Raised like $60 million and all that hoopla. And now we're like a bootstrapped media brand. It's completely different things, but it's been a fun, fun learning, learning experience.

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. So one of the reasons I wanted to have you on uh now is just to get a sense of of, you know, really on the consumer side, how are, how are people behaving in the market? What are, what are the, you know, you guys get a lot of data from dealers that are, you know, in your community. And I think it's a good signal of of sort of how consumers are feeling. It's obviously sort of this like shaky time broadly in the market. But uh, how are dealers doing broadly? What what is, you know, consumer sentiment looking like? Uh, and then I want to kind of get into some individual brands and and, you know, potentially ask you about the EV market and some other stuff as well as uh later, I'd, I'd love to get your thoughts on on the war between, you know, platforms like Bring a

• 2:19:52Jordi Hays?

  Trailer and Cars and Bids and all that stuff. But maybe start with a kind of a market update. Uh, what's happening uh sort of on the ground today?

• 2:20:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. So look, the market has been, I would say, very consistently improving and just becoming more pro consumer, right? It's, we're definitely in more of a buyer's market today, although it's still very divided. Like if you go to a Toyota dealership, they are still at like 30 plus day supply, which is roughly half the the level of supply they should have uh for, you know, current demand. And so Toyota and Lexus are sort of the anomaly here. I'd say the majority of the brands out there are oversupplied right now, which is simply a good thing for consumers. Uh, because it means you have more negotiation leverage. It means that brands will put more incentives on these vehicles so that they'll, they'll sell them faster. Um, and I would say they're roughly like 30% oversupplied. So it's not,

• 2:20:45Speaker 06

  you know, these numbers are not low. Um, we're sort of in this phase right now where It's the incentives are only going to keep getting better because the reality is the inventory is out there and it needs to move. Now it is spring season, which is typically a pretty good time of year for dealers, right? People get it. Most people are getting their tax refunds and whatnot and they're going shopping. So there, there has been a bump in business over the last couple of weeks. But you know, other than that, I mean, I don't expect the spring bump to last that long and never really last that long. And, um, you know, it's a very temporary thing. Um, but look in a nutshell.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  Go ahead. Oh yeah. When is the best time to buy a car if you're a consumer and like, are there any like tricks to getting a good deal? It feels like a very opaque process.

• 2:21:27Speaker 06

  Everyone asks that question. Look, yes, you, you, you might get luck out if you go like, you know, end of month, end of quarter. Because there's these things called stair step programs where, you know, it's like, hey, you sell, I'm just making it up a hundred cars. Uh, you'll get an extra, you know, X amount of dollars as a dealer, right? So if I'm trying to get that stair step, you know, if I'm trying to unlock that, um, uh, you know, that, uh, that benefit from the deal, from the automaker. Then I'm going to maybe even sell a couple of cars at a loss at the end of the month because I want to hit my number. Now, many manufacturers have moved away from those. Many dealers don't even participate in them. Um, but yes, I mean, in theory you could do that.

• 2:22:07Speaker 06

  I would honestly tell you that a better way would simply, would be to simply see what brand right now is most oversupplied. Now you might not like that answer because maybe you don't want to drive a, uh, you know, an infinity or, or whatever, you know, the, the most oversupplied at that current moment. But reality is like, that's where you will have the most negotiation leverage as a consumer.

• 2:22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:22:28Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Uh, what, uh, you know, Tesla as a stock has been down tremendously. Uh, over the last month even, I think it's down like 35%. As you know, at the same time, we're seeing more than ever on the roads. But they're, they're obviously, you know, the stock pressures in part, there's probably a political angle. There's a, you know, broadly, the sort of moat they had around EVs has been eliminated as other manufacturers have, have entered. What, what do you see in store for, you know, Tesla? I know they're, they're verticalized, you know, there's not like Tesla dealer owners on your platform.

• 2:23:11Jordi Hays?

  But what is the future of the Tesla brand in the near term? In your view, are you see sales performance, you know, continuing to slide? Or is there, you know, John has joked, joked a lot of the show, obviously, you're completely joking that like they should come out with a gated manual transmission with a combustion engine.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Naturally aspirated V12 ideally in the Roadster. The Roadster has been delayed so much, let's just put a carbureted V12 in there. Let's get the Countach engine in there.

• 2:23:41Speaker 06

  Look, I think first, if you look at EVs in general, right? The, the, the pendulum swung too far over the last couple of years. So these manufacturers went, you know, had all these crazy proclamations, right? We're going to do X amount of EVs, you know, or whatever, X percentage of our production will be EVs in sales. And the problem was that EV demand simply was way behind. So you look like Ford was the prime example where they were kind of make, producing all these vehicles and people didn't want them, right? Now, demand has been growing very consistently and linearly. Like it hasn't gone exponential, like their demand is still growing. If you look at simply, you know, how many EVs are being sold.

• 2:24:22Speaker 06

  But relative to the supply that was produced and what was out there didn't make any sense. So what happened? Well, all these crazy incentives started happening and all the legacy automakers started to sell all their EVs. But again, they didn't sell them because there was the demand out there was, oh, wow, this is such a great car. I want it. They sold it because wow, the price is so incredible. This is all I can get. Or maybe this is simply the, the cheapest monthly payment in the market. I think we forget like how, you know, consumers are, are, are practical, right? Like I have a budget and I need to fit into my budget. And if an EV is going to get me within my budget, I will consider an EV. I don't care. Like the average American doesn't care if it's an EV or a gas or it runs on fricking water, right? They need to be able to afford something.

• 2:25:05Speaker 06

  So I think that's kind of what happened in the big picture over the last couple of years. Now, look. There's no doubt about it that Tesla has some of the most incredible technology. Um, I don't think that the, I don't think the actual interior is anything, um, you know, extravagant. It's actually pretty basic and, and in many cases, sal par, but the tech is incredible. The driving is amazing. Um, I love driving Teslas and, and I know that, you know, many dealers that I, I personally know drive Teslas themselves. Um, many do it just because they want to, you know, see what it's like. Others just do it because they genuinely enjoy it. And so I, I think that there's, the EV market has been very volatile. It's, you know, the, the swings have been very, um, just very rough up and down.

• 2:25:45Speaker 06

  Uh, I, I can't say like I'm too concerned long-term. I still think that it's going to continue rising very slowly. I think dealers that put focus on it and, and make the investments to serve more EV customers will do well. Obviously it's market dependent. You know, if you're in the mid, Midwest, it might be 10 years behind because they simply don't drive as many EVs out there. But in general, I think it's a, it's still a smart investment. Tesla's stock price is just, it's so hard to know, right? Because like, what is even driving that? Is it like the Elon political, like, you know, um, like overhang? I mean, there's so many factors going into that price, the price of that stock. And so it's really hard to tell, uh, what's next for it. But I would, I would sort of kind of, you know, quiet out the noise.

• 2:26:29Speaker 06

  And I still think that we're, EVs are going to continue rising, albeit a lot slower than anyone has predicted and expected. Because that's just how, you know, consumer adoption takes time.

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  Outside of Tesla, who's on a tear and who's in trouble in terms of the big car brands right now?

• 2:26:46Speaker 06

  Um, well, you know, I actually just had, um, one of Nissan's top executives on the, on my podcast today. His name is, um, um, I forget, Shahani is the last name. I forget the first name. But long story short is Nissan is in trouble. Or they've been in trouble recently, right? They've been really losing a lot of money. Vinay Shahani, that's what it was. So they basically, Nissan has sort of been the culprit here. Um, and you have to understand the auto business is very, it's, you know, it, it, it just, it cycles and it comes and goes. So like, if you look at 21, it was like Ford was in the spotlight, like they were in the penalty box. Then the last couple of years, it's sort of been Stellantis, right? Chrysler Dodge, Jeep Ram. You know, now it's sort of Nissan because they oversupplied their vehicles. Dealers are not making any money on them.

• 2:27:29Speaker 06

  There's way too many dealers for the market share that the brand has. And on top of all that, because they oversupply, because they put all, because they've been selling these, you know, wholesale to like rental car companies and whatnot, all the consumers are left with lower residual values, right? So now you're the Nissan that you purchased is worth a lot less. So you're pissed. You don't want to buy another Nissan that I think loses value very quickly. So they're probably, they're one of the brands that's really struggled recently. And all that, you know, sort of accompanied by a sales decline. But they are, you know, they have new leadership in place and, you know, the hope is that they're going to kind of come out of it. I, I think that their leaders are very convincing and have, just like I said, I haven't spoken to Vinay on the podcast.

• 2:28:11Speaker 06

  I mean, he, he sounded like he, he knows what he's doing. I mean, the guy's been around the block, worked at Toyota. Very, very smart and sharp, but it's, it's not an easy thing to get out of. I mean, do they have the resources to really get, to get clawback a significant amount of market share? So that the brand is sustainable or will they have to do some merger like they tried to do with Honda? Which didn't really work out. And because of that, they actually ended up switching CEOs at Nissan corporate. So that's one of the brands that's, that's struggling pretty bad. You know, Infiniti is included in that as well. It's, it's Infiniti is under the umbrella. But for the most part, I would say like that, they're probably the, the biggest, the biggest culprit right now in the market.

• 2:28:52Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the durability of the dealership model. You know, your audience, a lot of people that are working in the industry, working at dealerships, obviously. But, you know, you, you had a, you know, SMB dealership, then you had a venture backed, you know, online, you know, car sales platform. Something about cars, it feels like the sort of final boss of e-commerce and that, you know, with a car, you're going to spend a lot of money. It's one of the most expensive purchases outside of your home. And so it's really nice to just go to the deal. You know, I like going to a dealership, even if I'm not actually, you know, necessarily in market, just because it's fun to look at cars and, and, and stuff like that. But, you know, do you see 50 years from now, are we still going

• 2:29:37Jordi Hays?

  to dealerships to buy cars? My personal bet is yes, because I would rather, even if, even if an online platform says, yeah, we'll, we'll send you the car, they'll put it up on a truck, you can drive it, you can buy it there if you want it. I'd still like to go and just see more inventory, right? And experience, you know, more vehicles.

• 2:29:58Speaker 06

  So what's interesting is, I mean, I learned so much selling cars online, strictly online. First of all, I learned that online car buyers, by a large percentage are subprime car buyers, right? Subprime consumers. They can't otherwise get approved anywhere else. And this is sort of their last resort. Carvana, CarMax have built such a great mousetrap that it's attracted customers who are also not subprime, right? And I would bet you that if you looked at a graph from when they started till today and just how their customer mix evolved, I would guarantee that, you know, it started out a lot more subprime than it is today. But, you know, that's an example of a brand that's evolved. So, look, the dealership is evolving. There's no doubt about that. And if you're a dealer that doesn't think that, your head is in the

• 2:30:43Speaker 06

  sand. People, what we learned through COVID and after COVID is that people still want to interact in person with the dealer. And it's not for the purposes necessarily being with the dealer, but rather you might be making a large purchase, you know, you want to go in, you want to talk to someone, you maybe want to test drive that thing. I mean, there's several things you want to do in person. And so the dealer is simply going to continue evolving just to meet the needs of the customer. There are certain things that the dealers are going to do, which I think are very durable, such as service. The service department is the highest margin profit center in a dealership. Because, you know, for those that don't know how dealerships work, right? You have many different profit centers. You have parts, you have new car sales, used car sales,

• 2:31:26Speaker 06

  service. Service is the highest margin, you know, revenue stream in a dealership. And that is simply something that, you know, won't go away. You're always going to need to get the vehicle serviced somewhere, even if it becomes more fleets, right? If we have all these autonomous vehicles on the road, they're going to need to be serviced somewhere. Or, you know, if it's sort of like Turo, where people are actually acquiring fleets, that will need to be serviced somewhere. So, service is a very, I think it has crazy kind of staying power, and it's not going to go anywhere, and the margins are strong. I think new cars is, i- it's tricky, right? Because if you look at supply levels right now of new cars in the market, we're not right, we're not quite at 2019 levels yet, but we're we're inching up. Many dealers are already breaking even on new cars, you're depending

• 2:32:07Speaker 06

  on the brand. Some are taking losses. And so, new cars has never been like a real profit center, right? It's a commoditized product. The the good thing about new cars for dealers is that it brings the customers back, right? So if you lease a new vehicle, then they come back to you for service, right? Maybe they trade in their vehicle, then you sell it as a used car, right? You get another client. And so the dealership is going to continue evolving. AI is completely shaking up things now. I would say for the better, if anything, for dealers, because they're simply able to offer a better experience, offer more targeted products and services for customers, waste less time, consumers are getting a more consistent experience. So AI has definitely been doing a lot of good, but i- it's just moving all so quickly, and we don't really know if dealers will become, you know, kind of new car fulfillment

• 2:32:50Speaker 06

  centers eventually, and just, you know, then you'll also do service there and maybe buy some used cars, or what that future really looks like. I don't think the dealership model's going away, other than the fact that lobbying is super strong and all that. Like, let's put that aside for a second, even though it's a super important one. I simply think that manufacturers sometimes underestimate what it takes to be a successful retailer. You know, they, do they really want to carry all that balance sheet risk on on our inventory risk on their balance sheet? I mean, there's many considerations, and it's been, you know, tried many times. And frankly, Tesla is the only one that has really done a great job at it. Or sure, maybe Rivian as well. But there's been other, plenty of examples on the legacy side, that they simply have not been able to do it successfully with launching like a D to C or something, direct to consumer or something like that.

• 2:33:35Jordi Hays?

  On the service side, are there exciting robotics companies that you think are going to get meaningful traction in the service departments of these dealerships? I imagine, you know, we cover the robotics companies, the 1Xs, the figures, the Tesla Optimus, things like that. You know, I'm not convinced that humanoid robots are going to be the ones in the sort of service bays doing the work, but maybe it's

• 2:34:02Speaker 06

  They already are. They are. Well, not doing the work. So I actually invested in a company called Robo Tire, which went out of business. So that wasn't a good one. But they were literally replacing tires on, they were replacing tires on vehicles in like, I think Firestones or something. I guess the economics didn't work out there. But there's a company now, robotics company, and I shouldn't say now, I'm pretty sure they're public already. They're part of a bigger company called Rich Tech, which I had them on my podcast, and they're literally transporting, they're literally transferring parts in the service center, right, from the parts counter to the technician. And this is live. You can literally see Rich Tech Robotics, pretty incredible. But again, saves a ton of time. Think about it. The technician, you know, these are skilled trades, maybe you're making like

• 2:34:45Speaker 06

  50 bucks an hour. I don't know how much you're making like, and to go each time, grab the parts. I mean, it's extremely inefficient. And so these robots now are in service centers, transferring parts. I would say, you know, I'm a fan of like, the whole, you know, vertically integrated, kind of low NPS, high margin. I think Keith Rattboy is the one that spoke about it, I think. But, you know, asking yourself like, what is the, you know, what part of the business has the lowest NPS and the highest margin? That's right for disruption. And it's pretty crazy how true that is, because if you look at the car business, the lowest NPS in our business, you know, net promoter score is actually service, right? So the service department, and it's used car auctions, surprisingly. Now,

• 2:35:28Speaker 06

  auctions are dealer to dealer, right? And those are also extremely, both are high margin businesses. Now, if you look what's happening on those two fronts, we're seeing a lot of just attempts at disrupting those two different businesses. So on the auction front, you're seeing all these kind of auction substitutes that have spawned up over the last couple of years. You actually mentioned a couple right there, Bring a Trailer, for example.

• 2:35:53Speaker 06

  Yeah. And by the way, that's not new. Bring a trailer is not, they've been around for a while.

• 2:35:57Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I know.

• 2:35:58Speaker 06

  But they've, they've gotten a lot bigger.

• 2:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:01Speaker 06

  But just to kind of finish my thought there. So the point, bottom line is like, you're also seeing a lot of disruption in service now, where all these AI companies are trying to create tech for dealership service departments to make them more efficient, more profitable, the better customer experience. And so I think that that's going to kind of work itself out over the next couple of years.

• 2:36:17Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Talk about the used online used car marketplace specifically around collectibles. I don't have a good read right now on market share between, you know, I've had success on Bring a Trailer. Every, every car enthusiast, you know, looks at the platform and they're like, somebody needs to disrupt this, right? It's, it's got a great community and it's sort of rich data and history. But the actual experience, yeah, it feels very dated. Cars and Bids has this sort of amazing YouTube-driven marketing engine and Doug Demuro. What is, who's winning there right now? Do you feel like Cars and Bids is gaining a real foothold? It's, it's, once you actually get it working, it's like the best business ever.

• 2:37:03Jordi Hays?

  Because you don't have to hold inventory and you're just clipping fees over and over and over.

• 2:37:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:37:07Jordi Hays?

  But it's certainly highly competitive.

• 2:37:10Speaker 06

  You know, it's crazy that you said that. It feels like it's aging because I just spoke with a dealer, maybe like three days ago, who just discovered selling on Bring a Trailer, right? Like let that sink in. Not like, it's like, it's crazy how adoption in this industry with, you know, these auctions, I mean, it just takes time. Because people are, you know, are set in their ways, things are working. And these auctions are like the original network effect, right? If you think about the auction is all about how many people can you get? Can you get the highest concentration of the right type of dealers, right? The right buyers to purchase. Now, again, Bring a Trailer is consumer-facing as well, so that's different. But you still need that really, you know, high concentration of, of the right shoppers to buy. So, look, my take is that, um, I think.

• 2:37:57Speaker 06

  I don't know the specifics behind cars and bids today because it's evolving and bring a trailer. I can tell you like anecdotally, I hear about it the most from dealers. Take it for what it's worth. It just, you know, if I tell you what's the buzzed, it's I always see dealers mentioning bring a trailer, bring a trailer.

• 2:38:15Speaker 06

  I think that it's going to, it like, it's unclear to me how the, these brands, not bring a trailer, but like the up and comers that came after like cars and bids, it's just unclear to me how they, how, how they could maintain their margin long term and avoid really losing their business to the bigger players like the bring a trailer in the market. Because I just don't like, you can only pump so much demand from your, you know, having, having an audience is great because you're able to, you know, send over demand and, and community and all that to your product. But that's not sustainable. At a, at a certain point, you have to kind of, you know, the business has to stand on its own feet. And, you know, that might get you started. I don't know how far that takes you. So I think the real question is, you know,

• 2:38:58Speaker 06

  are they able to really solve a problem in the market in, in a unique way, long term? I, I don't know. Like I haven't bought on cars and bays. I've played around with the product. But I just, I don't know if there's enough, if there's, if there's enough demand for all of these because they're, they're not the only ones. There's other ones that have popped up. It's sort of like,

• 2:39:17Jordi Hays?

  the, the real network effect with bring a trailer for those that aren't familiar is it, it has the longest standing, you know, most active community. And if you're a collector and you have a unique car, you want to get it in front of the biggest possible audience to get the best possible price. And bring a trailer has so much leverage that people will sign up their car to sell and it won't even necessarily be slated for auction for months sometimes. And so cars and bids has an opportunity to say, hey, we'll list your car next week, but then the challenge is if they don't have the same level of, you know, collectors on the platform, you're just not going to get the best price. And so they technically offer the same service, but they offer a worse service because they won't necessarily get the, the best price.

• 2:40:00John Coogan?

  It's still just a fantastic go to market strategy to seed a marketplace with a huge YouTube audience. But yes, there's the question of like, how do you grow from there? You're like, you are kind of tam constrained. He only has a few million viewers and only so many of those can actually convert on to the platform. But I mean, he's done a great job just going full send and every single video.

• 2:40:20Speaker 06

  I would say the biggest physical auction or traditional auctions, what they've done is, you know, they've integrated other businesses. Now, I'm not telling you here that they've kind of given up on margin on the sales front, but you know, they become, they become lenders, right? So they floor your cars as like a line of credit. They do other services as well, which helps you kind of, you know, build a motor around your business. But it's, it's just, it feels like every automotive YouTuber that gets an audience runs to like, launch this, you know, auction marketplace. And I just don't know how many of those will really have staying power long-term, or if, you know, it's going to end up being kind of like a winner takes all or winner takes most.

• 2:40:56John Coogan?

  We will see. We'll have to check in with you in a couple of months and see how it's.

• 2:40:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anytime, anytime there's big car news, it'd be great to have you back on to break it down. And.

• 2:41:05John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Thanks so much.

• 2:41:06Speaker 06

  Now, you guys, you guys are doing great work. Seriously, you guys are definitely cutting through the noise. And I can tell you, um, it gave me a lot of like early CDG vibes when I, because like you put out that like breaking news stuff the other day. And like, that's how I got started. People just started sending me shit. They're like, oh, by the way, this dealer is out of business. And I just started posting that. People were calling me like the gossip girl of automotive, which I never wanted to be. But, um, it's a, it's, it's this thing where like all media in the future, in my opinion, or the winning media will be like expert-led media, which is sort of what you're doing here. Um, you know, you're in the game, you're bringing people that are in the game to talk about things that are relevant to them. So I think it's really great. And it's exciting.

• 2:41:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, thank you so much for joining.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  Thanks for stopping by.

• 2:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang.

• 2:41:48Speaker 06

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:41:49John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later.

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  What a background.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 2:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Setting the bar on backgrounds.

• 2:41:55John Coogan?

  Totally. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, fantastic. Clearly knows what he's doing.

• 2:41:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, both, both. Sean last week.

• 2:42:01John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, you can tell like the early stage builders who aren't just on the podcast circuit constantly. You know, you get a little bit more plain background, but they come with a different set of insights, you know?

• 2:42:11Jordi Hays?

  That's true. That's true. So we got, uh, we got a, we got.

• 2:42:16John Coogan?

  We got some breaking news.

• 2:42:17Jordi Hays?

  We got some breaking news, I believe. I gotta pull this up, but we're gonna get Chad Byers.

• 2:42:22John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:42:23Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 2:42:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he should be in the waiting room any second.

• 2:42:29John Coogan?

  Hey, how you doing Chad?

• 2:42:31Speaker 04

  What's up?

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  What's up? Welcome to the show. Welcome to the Temple of Technology. How you doing?

• 2:42:36Speaker 04

  Doing fantastic.

• 2:42:37John Coogan?

  That's great. Good to see you.

• 2:42:40Speaker 04

  Good to see you guys too.

• 2:42:41Jordi Hays?

  Chad, before, before we dive into it, I gotta highlight some facts for you. So until the 20th century, Chad was rarely used as a given name. It first entered the top 1,000 names for male children in 1945, ranking at 997. It actually peaked in popularity in the 70s, reaching rank 25. But now because, you know, it comes with so much symbolism, it's now 1,600 on the US birth charts. And I was telling John earlier, you're a Chad, like by, by sort of definition, right?

• 2:43:19Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're slinging checks, you're very grinding on the fitness front, you're sort of skiing in exotic destinations.

• 2:43:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:43:27Jordi Hays?

  I feel like there's an incredible, we talked about nominative determinism on the show.

• 2:43:32John Coogan?

  This is a great lead in.

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's almost like your parents blessed you with that name. And now you're, now there's not a lot of new Chads entering the market. You almost have a monopoly on it. And I just wanted to give you a little hat tip for that.

• 2:43:43Speaker 04

  So that was the best intro I've ever gotten to something. Let me give you, let me give you a funny data point though.

• 2:43:49John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:43:50Speaker 04

  I'm after, I'm named after two people. One is my great grandmother, who is Granny Chatham.

• 2:43:57Speaker 04

  And the other was a gay wallpaper salesman that my mom fell in love with when she was pregnant with me.

• 2:44:03John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:44:04Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:44:04Speaker 04

  So talk about what I was supposed to be named after, and then my fall from grace as, you know, this, you know, Chad was dragged through the mud as a derogatory name.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:17Speaker 04

  And, you know, then Giga Chad and, you know, all these things kind of like came out. So it's not loss on me that I've unfortunately kind of like grown into the exact stereotype in a way.

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  No, but you rode the, you rode the, you know, it's like the Masa, you know, the Masa, famous Masa slide where like it's like the

• 2:44:35John Coogan?

  Trough of disillusionment.

• 2:44:36Jordi Hays?

  Trough of disillusionment and then you came out of it. Now you're, you just get to be a Giga Chad, but great to have you on the show. You've been a long, long, I feel like a long time supporter. So thank you. And you got some news today?

• 2:44:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. So, so big news. Like we just dropped this a couple of minutes ago, but we are announcing Sues of Ventures 5. So this is our fifth early stage fund. I'll talk a little about what we do as a firm and everything, but wanted to drop in here. New media. You guys are.

• 2:45:04Jordi Hays?

  Hit the size, Gong. Boom. There we go.

• 2:45:07John Coogan?

  What if he says it's a $2 million fund?

• 2:45:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no. I, I, I got the scoop. I got the scoop.

• 2:45:12John Coogan?

  Okay. So preemptive size.

• 2:45:14Jordi Hays?

  Seed only fund.

• 2:45:16Speaker 04

  So, so really quickly, Sues has started in 2013 and we've been an early stage venture fund based in San Francisco. Since then, look, our, our general belief is that entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of progress broadly defined in the world. Like they are the most important people in the world. And so we exist to, to serve them. And we're 10 years into this and you know, fifth fund, 175 million, and it's a return to what we did at the very start. So only pre-seed and seed. And I think that makes us probably one of the largest of this exact focus. And so in a moment when venture is changing a ton, and I'm sure we'll talk about that.

• 2:45:53Speaker 04

  We are kind of going back to specialist and try to do one thing. And this comes from my core belief in the world that I think you guys are embodying too, which is like, if you want to be the best at anything, you just have to focus and try to do one thing super well. And so that's, that's the big move on this, this new fund and excited to talk about it with you guys.

• 2:46:13John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:46:14Jordi Hays?

  No, it's amazing. Uh, one, I, I wish we had the data point on how many venture funds make it to fund five. It must be, it must be like, uh, harder to do than getting to your 50th podcast episode, you know, or something like that. Like it's very, very challenging. So, so, um, you know, congratulations on the milestone, but yeah, maybe walk us through kind of your, your full journey. You know, it sounds like you went from super early stage to sort of. Expanding scope and now you're you're sort of fully refocusing with this fund, but it'd be great for for the audience to hear the backstory.

• 2:46:50Speaker 04

  Twenty thirteen started with twenty five million. It was kind of a pass the hat type fund, no institutions, all individuals, family offices, seventy five LPs, like horrific to manage, wouldn't wouldn't recommend that to literally anyone. Twenty sixteen, we did fifty million fund two, and that was really on the back of the two breakout companies we've become known for, which was Robin and Flexport, and I can kind of go into those stories. And we got our first institution in fund two. So Horsey Bridge, I still am grateful for them. We're like, we'll take a risk on you. You guys are not the shape and size of fund we typically do, but we'll put in ten million of the fifty and then kind of the rest is history. LPs look for those types of signals, etc. In twenty nineteen, raised ninety million,

• 2:47:33Speaker 04

  and this is what you were alluding to in terms of like strategy. I think there's this general thing in venture, but it's true of the whole world, right? You get a little bit of success, start to think you're, you know, you're on to something, and then you get feature creep.

• 2:47:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:47:45Speaker 04

  And so feature creep in venture is like, oh, maybe I'll do other stages, or maybe I'll do these other things. I'm going to launch a program, or I'm going to do this thing. And everybody, that's like the natural inclination of the world. So we started doing other stuff, and then we, in twenty twenty one, raised one twenty five seed, two fifty op fund. I looked around shortly after that, and I was like, you know, so happy. We raised all this money. That felt like a badge. And then I was like, wait a minute, my day is like materially different than what it used to be. I used to just meet seed stage founders, which I love, the stage I love. Our average dollar goes in after the seed. Like, we can call ourselves a seed fund all the way up, but we're not, like, just definitionally. Like, let's not lie to ourselves. And so that evolution of really just deciding, like,

• 2:48:28Speaker 04

  what do I want my day to be? Like, what is the stage I love working at? And Fund Five is just a testament to, like, refocusing that entire realization back on what I think we're the best at, what I think I love the most. And that's been our journey and evolution. And as I said, like, the backdrop of that personal, you know, realization was what's happening in venture broadly. And that's bigger, you know, I call them buffet venture capital is my term now, like all you can eat, right? You get any cuisine, there's three starters, unlimited breadsticks, you get like three course desserts. And like you can go fill up on that. You can go fill up

• 2:49:08Speaker 04

  on that. It's not the best individual dish of your life, but you know, we're trying to be like the single Michelin star. Like, we're not, you know, hovering over you, but you know, hopefully if you know what you want, it's a, it's a good product, right?

• 2:49:22Jordi Hays?

  So you had, you had Flexport and Robinhood in the first fund. So, you know, generalists from the start, what, what was the sort of tech trend since 2013 that you were closest to going all, going, feeling like, you know, going all in on, uh, we, we've seen a number of venture capitalists, you know, fall so, get so excited about a trend that they make themselves, you know, we're a defense tech fund, or we're a crypto fund, or things like that. Uh, and I feel just like the feature creep you're talking about, oh, let's add growth investing, uh, or there's that same thing of, oh, maybe we'd have an advantage if we were just doing this one thing. And, and that's historically, you know, it's worked out very well for some,

• 2:50:04Jordi Hays?

  but makes venture, I think, a lot harder, given that this is a people game.

• 2:50:09Speaker 04

  Totally. Um, we have yet to go all in on something, but that is not to say we haven't had a risk of potentially falling into that a hundred times in the last decade. We talked about going all in on crypto. We talked about going all in on AI. We talked about going in on all sorts of things at different moments. We talked about pivoting the whole fund to a program. We talked about all this shit. And as I said, like this applies to not just venture funds, but any business. It's as much as what you say no to doing and the decisions you decide not to do is what you do. And so we have thankfully, I think, navigated to, we don't try to opine too heavily on the thing. We are still led by people. So like, at the end of the day, what I

• 2:50:52Speaker 04

  love about seed and what I was alluding to on my realization is, Partnering with people, which is seed, seed, there's nothing there, there's nothing built, there's nothing to underrate, is what I love. And I have found that other people are smarter than me and other people see the future better than I do. When I met Vlad and Bijou, I hadn't thought about that opportunity, but when they told me their vision and showed me a demo of the product in 2013, it was the most beautiful mobile app I'd ever seen in my frickin' life. And right when they said the narrative of changing the way our generation, I was 25 at the time, experienced the stock market, it was like, yeah, like 100%, like that's gonna happen.

• 2:51:32Speaker 04

  And so it wasn't my brilliant idea, right? It was just, you know, I've done a good job attaching myself to brilliant people. So that, that's how we still operate as a firm. And it'd be very easy right now to be all on AI. But, you know, we're still, I think, honest with ourselves that we're still people first.

• 2:51:48John Coogan?

  So how do you think about Prorata and kind of maintaining a position, riding your winners, any of that? Is that kind of off the table? Or do you have a specific strategy for that now?

• 2:51:57Speaker 04

  So this goes to a broader thing that I've been thinking a lot about, which I think that

• 2:52:05Speaker 04

  venture is a pretty inefficient market. And if you, let me just take a step back and I'll answer the question, which is like, public equities are pretty, pretty efficient, right? Like a bid ask spread of a single stock is like really tight and you end up having a clearing price. It's weird that, in my opinion, the most important industry in the world, which is the innovation industry in the world, which is technology, has a market, which is called venture capital, that is really efficient. If you're a founder and you're raising a B, you pitch like 20 firms and get a price. Like kind of crazy, right? And so what we're trying to do at Sousa is not force upon founders certain round constructions. Like, why is the A 20% dilutive, no matter how much you raise? It's a construct of the venture business model. But what if a startup wants to raise four at 100?

• 2:52:49Speaker 04

  What if they only need three? Like, we should develop more products and venture to allow every type of founder to finance their business in that way. And so the way we think about it is like, we start at the seed, but then we'll be creative, we'll partner with you however you want as you build your company.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  Do you think that the fundraising needs are changing over time? You're seeing more companies ramp to 100 million ARR faster than ever. They're more profitable, there's just more smaller teams doing stuff. Is there, are capital constraints changing?

• 2:53:20Speaker 04

  Hundred percent like that is for sure. The efficiency of companies is real. How much does early hype revenue vibe revenue? I think a lot of new terms are so good. They're just like they're golden.

• 2:53:32Speaker 04

  You know, how much is this durable? I don't know, right? Some of these are going to be bloodbath, but like what is empirically true is companies will be more efficient in the future than the past.

• 2:53:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:39Speaker 04

  So what I love about where we are positioned in the market is in a world where companies are more efficient. Early stage is really like the place to do this business. It'll be the last entrenched Alamo of venture.

• 2:53:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:53Jordi Hays?

  Talk about FOMO right now. You're you're based in the Bay. I'm sure you experience it all the time. Everybody, you know, every time I see, you know, one of these sort of revenue charts. Where where it's just like parabolic to a hundred million ARR. I I get, you know, I'm happy because, you know. It's good for the ecosystem, but if I'm not in it, I'm angry, a little bit angry. But but but on your side, what what's the general sense? Like, do you feel like a lot of investing right now? It's so unclear because it feels like we're we're early in AI adoption and understanding the potential of AI. But the market is so uncertain right now. What what do you do you think?

• 2:54:38Jordi Hays?

  FOMO is still sort of like is a is a dominant force in investment, sort of venture investment decision making right now? Or is it, you know, still dominated by the the sort of beautiful potential of the technology across all these different industries?

• 2:54:55Speaker 04

  I mean, FOMO is real. Like, I have FOMO every fucking day. Like, to your point, I see these graphs. I'm like, I text my team, why aren't we in that deal? You know, it's like, it's it's so real. And at the same time, like, I don't know, I'm not fifty, but I, you know, like, if you were a venture in twenty one, you remember twenty one and you remember. Twenty two and twenty three suck. Like that vintage is going to be historically shitty. So it doesn't take, you don't have to be around that long ago to remember 21 and we're in for sure some type of bubble. Now, how much of that will be enduring value or not is like, I have no clue, but like, this makes no sense what's going on. Like it makes no sense. There's seed rounds at 70 with nothing and like four 19 year olds. Like this is insane.

• 2:55:39Speaker 04

  Um, and because ventures power law, that individual deal can make sense if it's the right one.

• 2:55:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:47Speaker 04

  But as an industry, it's going to be a huge waste of capital. So FOMO is real and I, but I, I think I'm doing like, we do a good job to like, temper our FOMO and remind ourselves, like, let's just try to stick to our, you know, our guns here.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  What, what, what are you doing for sourcing these days? And, uh, how'd you meet Ryan Peterson for Flexport? How'd that deal come together?

• 2:56:08Speaker 04

  We met Ryan through Wesley Chan, who was at Google Ventures at the time. He's now at FPV, his own firm.

• 2:56:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:14Speaker 04

  And, um, Ryan pitched us on a call, it was a Zoom back then, really. And we text each other YC demo day.

• 2:56:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:25Speaker 04

  Right before it, right before it, they allowed people to talk to investors before demo day back then. Gary really locked that down. Or they're just not talking to us. It's one of the two.

• 2:56:36Speaker 04

  We committed to Ryan on the phone. It's the only time we've ever done that in SUSE history. We committed to the deal on the phone call. It's hit for 24 and a half minutes and we were like, yeah, we're in whatever, tell us where to wire, you know, super irresponsible. It was our first ones. Like I cannot tell the LPs this. This is insane. This is like, you know, a bad idea. But, um, it was the most compelling pitch I'd ever heard. He's one of the best salespeople of all time. Um, and he's become an incredible friend. Our families are friends. He and I even own like a business together outside of work now.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:57:11Speaker 04

  You know, the, the cheesy thing about ventures, like it really is the friends we've made along the way.

• 2:57:18Speaker 04

  He's the best. He's the best.

• 2:57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was the best. He was our first guest on the show.

• 2:57:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he was.

• 2:57:24John Coogan?

  It's a solid call in from Texas.

• 2:57:26Jordi Hays?

  Out of your, out of your portfolio, recent, you know, maybe some more recent investments, what, what do you feel is the, the most under hyped, uh, portco? The company that, you know, should be getting, uh, more headlines and attention, but isn't for one reason or another.

• 2:57:42Speaker 04

  I mean, one that flies relatively under the radar, but I'll tell you why it's not going to be under the radar for very long is a company called Chapter, which is based in New York City. The founder is Kobe. Kobe worked at Palantir back in the day. The reason it's not going to be under the radar for very long is up until two years ago, Kobe had a very interesting board and a very interesting co-founder. So his co-founder was Vivek and his board was JD and Peter Thiel. So talk about going from like, oh, we have this great board dynamic to all of a sudden being like, my board member is the Vice President of the United States and you know, Peter's still very involved. And this company is doing really meaningful work and AI is going to accelerate it.

• 2:58:25Speaker 04

  It is helping this very big problem of senior citizens in the US like navigate the Medicare, Medicaid, healthcare system, pick the right plans. It is super hard to do. There's all these contingencies and other to understand the flows and prescriptions and what of stuff are you on and what state are you in? And so they're making that process easier. It should help healthcare costs and the wrong, it should help patients. This is really important work, but just talk about upleveling your connections in the world by the facet of who you chose to be investors. We were the, led the seed there and it'll be a many, many billion dollar company.

• 2:59:00Jordi Hays?

  Love it. Question on specifically around re-industrialization. Andreessen had their American Dynamism Summit today. JD was speaking there. There's sort of this broad emphasis on bringing manufacturing back to the US. I'm curious to get your take on manufacturing, even robotics-led manufacturing as a category, because from my sense is there's going to be a lot of great businesses that come out of this that just aren't necessarily venture scale because they get to the point where they're, maybe you're doing $20 million in EBITDA and you, you know, maybe you're not, you know, hyper growth, but you're just a good business. And then, you know, people are going to look at that and say, okay, this, we know what the

• 2:59:43Jordi Hays?

  market price is for a manufacturing business for this kind of widget. And so how have you looked at that as a category? And are you making, are you making net new investments there out of the new fund?

• 2:59:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, shout out to my co-founder, Susa Leopold, that he started a fund called Humba Ventures a couple of years ago. That's only doing like manufacturing, American dynamism, hardware stuff. So he's primarily of the original OG Susa founder guys. His fund is really what's doing that. Susa primarily focused on software, but I think a couple of things you said are interesting trends in and of themselves. Like one, I think this question of like, what is venture backable? And what is not is a good question in the next decade, which is there's going to be this Kimmer explosion of like micro SMB and midsize company creation that AI enables that maybe shouldn't be venture backed. Or to my point earlier, there should be different products, different ways to finance a company, maybe different ways to not have it only be equity,

• 3:00:39Speaker 04

  but also have rest, you know, profit sharing or other long term. I think that's a reasonable point of whether it's hardware or really anything like as a big question. Two is like the strategic value on showing manufacturing is like obviously a very good idea, incredibly important. We're doing less there, but we're doing more on is stuff back in our realm of, you know, we led the seed of stored now over a billion flex core others like we're doing a lot in supply chain resilience and other. So obviously when stuff is manufactured, whether it's abroad or here, there's like a whole supply chain resilience of a company that has to happen, especially with terrorist stuff going on of like, where do we move stuff? Once it's already manufactured around the world like that's probably what we spend a lot more time thinking about. But like you guys have had Chris on, I

• 3:01:24Speaker 04

  think power from from Adrian others, like these companies are insanely important and awesome. We don't spend a ton of time in and around it.

• 3:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Have you made any investments out of the new fund? You're you're already doing deals?

• 3:01:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, we we soft secretly started writing checks out of it in December. So we're, we're actually four in, which is a little, a little hot for us. We're, we're different than a lot of investors. We do relatively low volume. Each partner will only do two or three deals a year. It's kind of like 90s venture capital and But to your point on FOMO, we're running a little hot right now. So we've done a couple. I think we're just excited to get going. I have, I guess none of publicly announced, but they're all over the place to give you, you know, what you asked earlier, like, we're still founder led. So one is a stealth consumer gaming thing with I'm partnering with this US chess grandmaster to build.

• 3:02:18Speaker 04

  One is a AI personal kind of co-pilot that uses a bunch of cameras to collect first party context about you yourself. And then has like a, has an app on the phone for a personal AI where we think the apples and others are going to have a little bit of innovator. So I'm on this stuff. We've done one that's AI co-pilot in hardware manufacturing. So like, you know, we're all over the place. Like we're, we're just curious.

• 3:02:46John Coogan?

  Are you seeing more solo founders these days? We, we were at YC demo day and we saw a couple of teams come through where it was just a guy with no team because he's building it all himself because of AI stuff. And that kind of flies in the face of YC's like early advice of like, you need a co-founder. It's going to be hard. You need someone early. But what are you seeing out there?

• 3:03:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, literally the pitch right ahead, right before you guys, I was literally seeing our comments from here. This guy walks in, he's thinking about starting a company. He's like, I really want a co-founder. We talked about it for 30 minutes. I was pushing him to just start himself. And his actually entire product thesis, which is the irony of how he was thinking about his own co-founder thing was once, you know, hi, hi, his belief, without giving too much of the idea around is like, we are starting to abstract away parts of building software, right? If you think about, we had like cursors, literally like, you know, code itself, then you have like the bolts of the world and you have, you know, lovable, lovable in Europe, right? We're like, they're extracting way not just the code, but kind of like, like, like prompting entire parts of the system.

• 3:03:51Speaker 04

  You know, where we're obviously going in three years is like prompt to like company or like prompt to entire thing. And that's the company he's thinking about building and his entire argument is like, could a software company of the future not have? And he's a world-class CTO, sold a company to Apple, has built big companies. Could we not have a company where instead of the engineering looking like 10, 20, 30 people, it's like, Three really good people and they control front and back end, everything through like a series of agents that are responding to prompts and understanding computer science, understanding technology is still useful. So I think that is a counter to like the Jensen's and all the things like, you don't have to learn computer science anymore. But like that, I think that's where it's heading. I kind of buy that vision.

• 3:04:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you had any AI tools that have particularly helped your job in venture? Even just like scheduling or note taking like or?

• 3:04:42Jordi Hays?

  Put the deck in chat GPT and say, what do you think?

• 3:04:44John Coogan?

  What do you think? Chat GPT?

• 3:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Rip it?

• 3:04:47John Coogan?

  Should I do it?

• 3:04:50Speaker 04

  I feel deeply insecure about this question.

• 3:04:52John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 3:04:53Speaker 04

  LPs asked me this and I'm like, not really. Like I should probably be doing more.

• 3:04:58John Coogan?

  Somebody asked me like, oh, how many chat GPT queries are you making per day? I'm doing 20 and I was like, I think I'm doing like five. I don't know if that's good or bad. Like I should be using it.

• 3:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Rookie numbers, John. You gotta get those numbers up.

• 3:05:10John Coogan?

  Numbers up, I guess.

• 3:05:11Speaker 04

  I find it not that useful for what we do. I mean, what I, to be honest, like we don't do a ton of diligence. Like what are we supposed to diligence?

• 3:05:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:21Speaker 04

  It's like people and like themes.

• 3:05:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. So maybe like, yeah, if you're searching like, how big is this market? Where, who are the major players? I want to get to know the industry.

• 3:05:30Speaker 04

  I don't ever search how big a market is. That's where you're already wrong. I've never done that work. I actually think it's bad work to do at seed.

• 3:05:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that makes sense. It's seed. Yeah, that's very funny.

• 3:05:40Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing better. I mean, this is, this is, I just, it's so important to be authentic. And I believe that that is actually the dominant approach of, of most good early stage investors, yet still half of people want to be able to sort of claim credit and reverse and dress it up and say, well, look, you know, I had this memo and I knew exactly how the market was gonna unfold.

• 3:06:04John Coogan?

  A lot of that's just window dressing for someone else, their boss.

• 3:06:07Speaker 04

  So it's not like we, we just had it. We tried this. Early on, I was like, I need to do the work. So I used to write memos and then we looked back, we're like, everything we did a lot of work on that we overthought and passed on, we were idiots about. And then all the things we ate didn't do like, like Flexport worked and we're like, what's the learning here?

• 3:06:24Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's got an ape in his, in his, in his logo.

• 3:06:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. What, what, what's the origin of the ape? I'm curious.

• 3:06:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the we registered the the firm in October 2013. And going into that, we had 10 names picked out that were all similar to like, we weren't very creative. We were like, oh, venture names are like trees and mountains and shit. So we had all these trees and mountains and shit names picked out. They were all taken in Delaware and we had to register the firm because the next day we were doing our first close. So we were like 11:30 PM, we're on the phone, we're scrambling, we're trying to think of names. Sergeant like, I don't know, we're like trying to get creative or like, just, why don't we talk about trips we've all enjoyed? So someone's like, I went to Rwanda and did the trekking with the gorillas. And then the other person was like, I also did that. And another person was like, I also did that all before we knew each other independently. We're like, that was the best trip of all our lives. It is truly a mind blowing experience. Go see the gorillas.

• 3:07:15Speaker 04

  It's insane. They're so human like. So we looked up one of the the family names of the gorillas and it's the Sousa family. And we were like, this is, this is so dumb that we're about to name our financial firm after like, A, a family and B, with this little thought. The irony is like, the only thing people remember about us is our logo. It's worked.

• 3:07:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fine.

• 3:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, venture capital is just a game of trekking with gorillas.

• 3:07:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:07:40Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's about appreciating the entrepreneur, you know,

• 3:07:43John Coogan?

  Who is the gorilla in this metaphor?

• 3:07:44Jordi Hays?

  But you're really just sort of admiring them. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  The gorilla is the founder of the

• 3:07:49Jordi Hays?

  The founder is the gorilla.

• 3:07:50John Coogan?

  The founder is the gorilla.

• 3:07:51Jordi Hays?

  I think the founder is the gorilla.

• 3:07:52Speaker 04

  You can't, he's kind of inscrutable. The founder and the company become the 100 pound gorilla if they're big enough.

• 3:07:56John Coogan?

  That makes sense, yeah.

• 3:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question. What, what's your, I break down the workout routine. I think you've been going pretty hard lately.

• 3:08:06Speaker 04

  You guys have to like, people need to roast me way harder when I post this Twitter.

• 3:08:11Jordi Hays?

  No, we don't. We work out as a team together every morning at like 6:30.

• 3:08:15Speaker 04

  Currently, I had a crazy list, did the half marathon, doing the tri soon, doing the high rocks in in April. And then, starting mid year, I had this crazy goal that people have now told me who actually lift real heavyweights that the goal makes literally no sense. First time to the thousand club, which is like the bench squad.

• 3:08:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:08:34Speaker 04

  When I wrote five reps, which everyone's like, you're an idiot. One in five is like night and day.

• 3:08:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:40Speaker 04

  My plan in July is to go like full meat, all protein, no cardio, bulk phase and try to get as far as I can by the end of the year.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  Meathead mode.

• 3:08:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm going lean to meathead and we're gonna see what happens.

• 3:08:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then, and then maybe John's been really wanting a venture capitalist to go for their IFBB pro card. So maybe if you really fall in love with the, the sort of just the weights, maybe you go the bodybuilding route and you'd really be, I'd love to see you become the Suzie Gorilla.

• 3:09:08John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Like, next time, next time. Yeah, next time we want to see your traps just in your, in your back right here. Just full Chad. Chad, it's been fantastic having you.

• 3:09:20John Coogan?

  Congrats on the launch.

• 3:09:21Speaker 04

  Can I, can I do one other quick shout out?

• 3:09:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, please.

• 3:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 3:09:23Speaker 04

  Um, one other quick shout out. So every great product eventually becomes a dating site.

• 3:09:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:09:27Speaker 04

  And, um, I have a friend in SF who is definitely the most eligible bachelorette I've ever met. She's beautiful, like smart, ripping surfer, great skier, super hard worker, passionate about the environment, amazing human.

• 3:09:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:42Speaker 04

  So there's a guy out there that sounds like that would be of interest. DM me, I will set you up.

• 3:09:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:09:47Jordi Hays?

  It's funny you bring that up because I've, I've had that thought recently. I want to, I want to run sort of anonymous, basically anonymous, you know, semi anonymous ads because it's kind of, it's kind of cringe to post on X and be like, yeah, like I'm looking for the love of my life, but we can do it.

• 3:10:01Speaker 04

  This might be the first setup. You guys might get credit for the first setup on this. So here we go.

• 3:10:05Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. We'll, we'll test it a little bit. We'll do this one for free and then maybe we'll get like some marriage contracts.

• 3:10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. And if you get married, uh, tell them the technology, but I sent you use code TBPN at the chapel. And, uh, good luck to you.

• 3:10:19Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 3:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Thanks so much for coming on. Congrats again. It's awesome.

• 3:10:23Speaker 04

  Catch you soon.

• 3:10:25John Coogan?

  I, I hope someone, uh, I hope the matchmaking works. We might have a lucrative business. Maybe this is our cars and bits. It's a matchmaking service. That's what this all is for.

• 3:10:32Jordi Hays?

  I mean, uh, if you're in SF right now, if you're single.

• 3:10:36John Coogan?

  DM.

• 3:10:37Jordi Hays?

  DM Chad.

• 3:10:38John Coogan?

  But don't show up if you, if you're not a ripping surfer, great skier, you got your life together.

• 3:10:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:43John Coogan?

  Your, your, your traps are in your head. You're jacked already. You know, it seems like, it seems like he's looking for someone who's got their stuff together.

• 3:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Definitely.

• 3:10:50John Coogan?

  But good luck out there, folks. And we will see you tomorrow.

• 3:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Great episode.

• 3:10:55John Coogan?

  Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you all and have a great rest of your Tuesday.

• 3:10:59Jordi Hays?

  Go crush it. See ya.