Holiday Party Recap, Christianity is So Back, Stop the Clock, Vitalik Needs to do a Cycle

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  I didn't know that you backed Elizabeth Holmes' new company. Oh, we're live. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are putting the information in the truth zone. Truth zone.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  They're back.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  A lot of people are calling on the misinformation. We don't encourage you to say that. Just call it the information. It's classy. You don't need to call it the misinformation. But there's a new article in The Information about the Antichrist and the new apostles. And it's talking about Christianity being so back in Silicon Valley. It's a great piece, breaks down a lot of people we know, basically everyone mentioned in here. It's funny, a Bloomberg reporter actually reached out to me about this exact story like six months ago. And the pitch was basically like, I think Christianity is having a moment in tech right now.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so this was a different writer?

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Different reporter, Ellen Hewitt at Bloomberg, completely different reporter, but was smelling the vibe and could tell that this would be a good trend piece to write. And this happens a lot. You know, they write a trend piece about Gundo and everyone writes that piece. Similar thing happened with this Antichrist and Christianity in tech story. And she was texting me about it. I was like, I just, I don't think it's that much of a trend. Like, yeah, Peter, Trey, but they've been, you know, prominent Christians for a long time. No one's really talking about Pat Gelsinger. And then, yeah, you got Augustus. But beyond that, it's not that big of a deal. But The Information hunted it down and put together a very compelling narrative.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because it's somewhat of an old, I brought Augustus to a buddy of mine's house who has a venture fund and it was early days of Rainmaker and Augustus, this is over a year ago at this point, was wearing a huge shirt with Jesus on it, like bench pressing with a gold piece hanging out. And so this story almost feels like old news, right?

• 1:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. In one way, it could have gone just like, oh, wow, another puff piece for Augustus. Which you love to see.

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  You love to see it. They try to, everybody tries to do like, you know, they try to write a hit piece on the guy and it comes out as this glowing.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Rizmaster. Rizmaster. Like, yeah, I had it all written up as a hit piece, then I hung out with him and he's the real deal.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he gave him a horse.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Maybe. I love Augustus. It was good seeing him. Did you get to talk to him on Saturday? We saw him at some VC holiday parties. We gotta give you the update on the VC holiday parties.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  It was such a bummer. I saw him and his mullet from across the room and then I couldn't get to him.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  There were just too many people there.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  There were too many. There was legitimately too many people.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  I said hello to like half the people I wanted to. It was really tough. But I do have some tips for VCs throwing their holiday parties now that we're out of holiday party season. The main one is you don't want to gild the lily. It's a good phrase. You know, lily, beautiful flower. You don't want to dip it in gold. You don't want to add a bunch of jewels. You know, if you're in a beautiful house, just be tasteful with the decorations. Just a couple of Christmas trees, a couple of carolers.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  Little fake snow, not too much.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Actors acting like they're from the Matrix. Who knows?

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  But. Just the basics.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Just the basics. You don't want to go over the top.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  And you want to keep it tasteful. Uh, did you have any tips, takeaways? The one thing that I noticed from our, from our, uh, our, our guide on how to get the most out of attending a venture capitalist Christmas party that I didn't anticipate was that you not only need to bring a swimsuit to go in the pool, you might also need to bring a chainsaw because sometimes they cover the pool with plywood to put it to dance floor there.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  This was super unfortunate. So John and I showed up to the party, obviously wearing suits, uh, but we did bring bathing suits.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  Um, cause we fully intended on doing the, uh, the whirlpool in the center and, and, you know, becoming the main character like we advised in the guide. But low and behold, they had built this pretty complex durable wood structure over the pool to turn it into a dance floor.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  And that was, that was a wild card. It was like somebody had listened to the guide. They said, hey, they knew, they knew what was coming.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  They knew what was coming.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so we, we made every effort to try to figure out how to get, sort of dismantle it, but we didn't have power tools.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I did try.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  That was another mistake. Maybe next year is

• 4:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  Carry to the party, but then bring power tools in case they cover the pool up.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  There is one trick. You know, imagine you're at, you know, Mark Andreessen's party. You just go up, you find the party planner, you just grab them real quick like it's an emergency. Hey, Mark changed his mind. We gotta get that dance floor out of there. We're opening up the pool. You just shake it, put the fear of God in him, like he was delivered directly. He's gonna be too nervous to go and fact check it.

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  I'll just execute.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  Mark's busy.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  You gotta just do this now.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  Mark's pissed off and he's busy.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  And he's busy.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  You don't wanna double check with him. Hey, of course I want the pool open.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Of course I want the pool open.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  You don't wanna get.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  But unfortunately that didn't work. Didn't get to go in the pool. It was, uh, it was miserable. But, you know, we made it out of there and it was good.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it was, it was, uh, you know, there was a lot of, a lot of venture capitalists had election parties, right?

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, everybody, you know, given Silicon Valley's somewhat, um, conservative leaning as of late. We expected those parties to be very celebratory. But, uh, Saturday night felt like the top, right? Like the vibes were incredible. Everybody was, was, everybody was just on top of the world. Great night, uh, clear, you know, potentially a, a top signal.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  Um, but you gotta like live in the moment and just embrace it, right? Just because, you know, you know, we, we might be staring over the precipice, doesn't mean you should,

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  you know, not have a good time.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  Didn't see any journalists, didn't see any escorts. It's pretty clean, clean, clean party.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Pretty clean, yeah.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  It was well.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  But there was other parties in the general area that seemed like they had that kinda crap more of a journalist.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Journalistic attendee list.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's tricky. Well, there's always next year, folks.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Uh, so let's go to the misinformation or the information as they like to call themselves. Uh, they opened this article saying, worship at epic church in downtown San Francisco last Sunday began in a darkened room on the second floor of a former factory building. The shades were drawn across the tall windows while colored lights cast a theatrical glow on a band. That sounded a bit like Arcade Fire, if Arcade Fire made worship music. A mostly millennial congregation swayed to the harmony, a sea of Apple Watch clad arms raised to the heavens.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  Oof, rough.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  Gotta upgrade those Apple Watches.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  She had to drag them like that.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  She did. It's a little bit of a hit piece.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Just a little bit of a dig.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of a.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  A little bit of a dig. This is a special moment for Epic Church and its congregants. With the opening of a $12 million space just down the street from the headquarters of Pinterest and Airbnb, acquired two years ago to accommodate a flock that has ballooned to nearly 1,000 people every Sunday. Epic's pastor, Ben Pilgreen, couldn't have been more pleased. "We really feel called to this particular place and its people," he said a few days later reflecting on the opening day turnout. "I attended the services as a guest of two of the more prominent people within Epic. Trey Stevens, the Founders Fund Partner and Anduril co-founder, and his wife, Michelle Stevens, Chief Revenue Officer at Felt, a healthcare software startup. People think church is just for the poor, the marginalized, the visibly in need, but the highly rich and famous are just as much in need, Michelle told me." Then she paraphrased a bit of scripture.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  "It's harder for a rich man to pass through the eye of the needle than for the poor man to see God." It's interesting. Pat Gelsinger has this amazing quote where he says, he breaks down Silicon Valley and he calls them a bunch of like, rich miserly pagans. Because San Francisco historically has been one of the most unchurched cities in the world.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  And also has one of the lowest giving rates for charitable donations. And so, I just liked the miserly pagans phrase. It was very bold.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  People from San Francisco donate so much to companies that end up going under that they feel like that is a terrible. It ends up being a write-off too.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  They feel like you need to count that in a little bit, right?

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it is good. They go on to say, "Epic Church is one of the epicenters of a societal shift among the tech elite. More and more Christianity has become a growing constant part of many of their lives. Some of these people are longtime Christians who feel newly emboldened to embrace their faith publicly. Others are brand new adherents. Together, they formed a movement with real breadth that does not have roots in any one Christian denomination. It spans the country, fueled by a swirling mix of different proponents." Traces of this sea change.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  It really is, it really is wild that even 10 years ago, you just wouldn't have seen a high-profile GP. Be involved with religion?

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  And if you did, everybody would be like, whoa, cool of them to make, you know, such a public statement about something like that.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  Like, even though it's just totally

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Jordi Hays?

  Normal, like, people are welcome to.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  For a long time, religion was coded as anti-science.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  And science was essential to the development of Transistors. And technology. And so the idea of, and Pat Gelsinger was clearly like a narrative violation there in the sense that he's like, running

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  The most hard tech, the most science, physics-driven

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  Company and yet a devout Christian.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  But he was never in the spotlight because he wasn't the founder of that company. And so now that you see folks like Peter and Augustus and Trey, who are founders and have profiles written about them in the same way, and people want more of a 360 view of their life, it cuts through much differently than Pat, I think.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Even though he was, you know, fairly prominent in Silicon Valley, I feel like 10 years ago.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  I don't know, he's been the CEO of Intel for a while, but then

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Describing, describing the El Segundo Brothers as, as having developed a form of muscular Christianity is like an attempted dig, it seems, but it doesn't really. Linking patriotism, patriotism, masculinity, and athletic discipline with religious moral character. Wow, what a, what a dig. Got him.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Got him. No, they, they can't find the words to make this negative.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  And that's why it turns out good.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  They would all, like, one of them would post that, "I have adopted a form of muscular Christianity that links patriotism, masculinity, and athletic discipline to form a strong religious moral character." Like, they would just post that themselves.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  It's actually like a good post.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. They, they highlight Peter's tour of

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Of the Antichrist and Peter's obviously warning about the risk of a one world government and what you know AI might lead to that. He's long said that you know AI is centralizing and therefore communist and crypto is decentralizing and therefore libertarian. And I really liked his take on Rogan where he said that if there if aliens exist, they they must be either angels or demons because at a certain point, if you develop the technology to propel something near the speed of light, you can just destroy any planet by just accelerating an asteroid and just wiping them off the face of the earth. So how do you how how have

• 11:23John Coogan?

  we not been destroyed if there are statistically probably aliens out there? Well, either they are angels in the sense that they have a moral virtue that stops them from just destroying everything, or they are demons in the sense that there's that they are controlled by a one world government and and and they they have eliminated terrorism through complete control, which is a fascinating concept that that it must be like your your society must move to the extremes as you develop more and more technology because the technology becomes so asymptotically powerful. I really enjoyed that.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  Even even it's interesting. Do you remember? I mean, it feels like Sam Harris fell off dramatically. I don't know if that's actually true from a viewership basis, but it feels like.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  He turned he turned inward and he went full paywall. So he he'll only post half of his shows on YouTube. So he has an incredibly rabid audience that pays a monthly fee to be part of the community, but he never escapes that little echo chamber. I saw a hot take about him today that Lomaz was saying that he like you. You should never forget that one of his like critical turning points was doing a lot of psychedelics.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  And that was like canonical to his development.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  And I and I just thought it was relevant because like five, six years ago, when I just graduated college.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  I work with somebody that that was just very into the Sam Harris meditation app.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Which is an alternative to just going to church, basically, because it's like, hey, sit and be quiet and just sort of like. Think about these ideas, right?

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  It's like a, almost a one to one.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  It's like church in your pocket, but it's Sam Harris's like church of atheism.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, wasn't it Will Menides who posted about this today that, or a few days ago that like the folks that get one shotted by ayahuasca are also getting like, they'd be so much less resilient. Or they get one shotted by the idea of AI doomerism and.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  You can get one shotted by anything.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but it's a good, it's a good phrase, it's a good turn of phrase. And, and the reason is that, is that because I've always had this interesting thought that a lot of the AI doomers are fearful of a return of God. Have we talked about this? Basically this idea that they live degenerate lives that are highly incongruent with any sort of moral framework.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  And so, but they also believe God is dead. And so that's fine. They won't be punished because they don't believe in traditional God. But if AI becomes a God, AI will judge them and then AI will kill them or punish them or send them to like an AI hell essentially because.

• 14:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  They haven't been living a morally virtuous life.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  And, and so a lot of it is like an anxiety about the return of God. Whereas if you at least believe that you're living some sort of morally virtuous life, it's like.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Yes, there might be an AI that's super powerful, but it will think I'm cool and good and it'll be down to hang. And like, it'll be great, like.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Give me guidance in my life.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, I mean, there are plenty of people that are powerful that you run into and they don't just immediately want to kill you.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Like, because you haven't done anything bad.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  We wouldn't have made it out of Saturday night.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  No way.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  But, but, but there is something about when, when you dig into a lot of the most prominent doomers and you read like how they live their lives, you're like, wow, this is like. Pretty dark and crazy.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting, it is interesting, the.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Sadist.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting that on. I mean, there's, there's so much talk right now about how impact, or sorry, how AI will impact every facet of society.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of people, depending on your industry, like you're going to talk it up as it's going to have this greater impact. Right now, it's popular in crypto to be like, oh, AI is going to adopt crypto rails and use tokens and wallets and it's, you know, it's less regulated, so they can just do this all programmatically. But, but there's such a crazy case to be made of how AI is going to transform how we think of religion, right?

• 15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Kind of what you're getting at, which is.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a guy, Anthony, was it, was it Anthony Levandowski? I believe he was the, the guy who left Google, went to Uber, and then went to jail and got pardoned for stealing code from Waymo.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Pardoned and, and I believe he said that he was starting a church of AI, like, like we will worship the AI god. And, and then I don't know what happened. And I think maybe he just started building another, like, normal company. But, but, but there was, there was this big, like, trend for a while where it was like,

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's interesting.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Just like replacing it.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  So the reason this article coming out now is kind of funny is because I do think you could have written, you could have written the exact same article a year ago.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's not like breaking news. There's this wave of Christianity. Even two years ago, it had become countercultural on TikTok if you were a young man.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  To make these vibe reels that were like religiously oriented and like oriented around like Christian ideals.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  On the feminine side, there was like the trad wife content.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  Ballerina farms, that type of stuff that got really popular recently.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Which is, which is like adjacent, it's Mormon, but it's.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and even Jeremy had a good post, I'm, I'm trying to find it.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:47Jordi Hays?

  That was over the summer.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Well, let me read this while you're looking that up. They say, "The interest in Christianity among some of the Techno Rati comes at a moment when religion has been declining in America for decades, where just a few decades removed from what, from when the new atheism, the new atheism movement, partly led by philosopher Sam Harris, sat at the center of our cultural zeitgeist. Just 68% of Americans described themselves as Christians in 2023, according to Gallup research from that year, a dramatic drop from nearly 90% of Americans in the 1990s." That is so high, 90% in 1990s. I had no idea it was that high. And I'm wondering, are they, are they counting Catholics as Christians there, do you think?

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  I would guess.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  They have to be, right?

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  And moreover, 80% of Americans think religion is losing influence in the country, according to Pew Research, a high watermark since the organization began asking that question in 2001. Still, about half the Pew respondents who said religion is losing influence thought it was a bad thing. Interesting.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, um, Jeremy's post was on July 3rd of this year. He says, "If you can't see that we're on the brink of a religious tidal wave in young people, you have your head in the sand."

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, so.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Say, uh, Bible sales are up 22% this year. Hallow, a prayer app, raised $105 million dollars from investors, including General Catalyst, as well as Peter Thiel. Let's really.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  We love to celebrate large funding rounds. Um, and, uh, it became the first religious app to reach number one in the Apple App Store. And also, there's that, uh, uh, there's that Christian film studio, Angel Studios.

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  And they are producing like HBO level.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  Interpretations of the Bible. They've, and they're also very, very good at, uh, just online marketing. The, the movies go into theaters, but then they have this great mechanism for buying tickets for your friends. So they have this kind of like.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Social viral engine a little bit to amp things up a little bit more. Uh, and the team behind it, I'm like loosely connected them, are like absolute killers, like really, really sharp.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  And it's, it's, it's completely under discussed that they're like probably one of the greatest new media companies. And because they're just like in the religious category. But if you put them against like a free press or something, you'd be like, oh, wow, this is like a fantastic business.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  They're like A24 level, like very, very successful.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Uh, we should do a whole deep dive on them. It's very fascinating. Um, "If there's one person at the center of tech's shift toward Christianity, it's billionaire Peter Thiel, a devout Christian who, like many other techno Christians, doesn't publicly align with any one denomination. Several of the young tech founders and investors I spoke to, from Los Angeles to Austin to New York, told me they had been influenced by direct conversations with Thiel, as well as his frequent talks on religion and his work spreading the ideas of theological philosopher Rene Girard. For me, the logic was simple. It was, well, Thiel is really smart and interesting, and he's pulling from Rene Girard, who's really smart and interesting, and both of them are pointing back to the figure of Christ. Shouldn't I look into that?" said David Perel, founder of Rite of Passage, a tech-focused online writing school who has met Thiel a few times. Yeah. Very, very.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  David.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was, I was talking to Trey about this, like, it's always one of the most, it's one of the most like, you know, countercultural things about Trey's like kind of personal brand and, and I'm glad to see it get more attention just because it is very interesting. You don't want to go too far with it, I think, but, uh, but I think this like really, really nails it down as like, this is just who he is. And it's not, it's not like some, there's not a deck about like, let's, like, let's pick something that's edgy or something. It's like, no, this is very natural.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  So I reached out to our, our friend, the Lone Ranger, uh, to get kind of his take on this. He is a credibly intelligent, uh, young man who, and, uh, has found himself, um, one of the only, um, he is a, a sort of religious advisor to, to many, uh, different people within the tech elite. So I was interested to get his opinion. He said, uh, his first thought was one, um, he'd never seen the author before, which he thought was relevant because, uh, historically, major papers would actually have somebody that was just full-time on the religion beat, right?

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  That they would, um, just write articles like this and that would allow them to just engage in like a higher level analysis of what was happening versus like, this is a thorough article, right? She talks to a bunch of people, Isaiah Taylor, David Perrell, new founding guys, um, but, uh, but she doesn't have the like, um, literary chops and expertise to like, write something like truly groundbreaking, right?

• 21:40John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  And the New York Times, uh, the original, uh, the New York Times misinformation actually still has like religious beat writers.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Interesting. I didn't know that.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so another thing that he kind of went into is he basically says, as of right now, he believes that this is entirely organic, like, there's not one specific organization or public figure that's leading this.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  But he says what comes next is that as this trend becomes more and more obvious, there's going to be people that are going to try to gatekeep it, claim it, like, grift off of it in different ways.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Already, already, it's something that a young founder can put on as a costume and larp.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  To feel more edgy or more aligned with, like, the Teal verse.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  But the people that were covered here, Saya, Augustus, Perel, they're not doing this, to be clear. They're, like, non, they're non-threatening.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, and also, like, I mean, everyone saw that they were doing this, like, years before this article.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  But you can bet that, like, there's going to be people who would take this.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  And they're pretty, pretty clearly, like, not being political about it.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  They're just sort of saying, "These are, these are, um, generally, you know, my beliefs and why I was, uh, got involved in the first place."

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. I like this question here. "Teal, when Teal proselytizes, he likes to dispense little rhetorical riddles, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about one in particular because of what it seems to suggest about the scope of the mindset he and other tech Christians hold. He posed it to The Economist Tyler Cowen when he appeared on Cowen's podcast in April. The millionaire, and the general, and the priest, what do they all have in common? In referencing those three archetypes, Teal was describing a coalition of free-market libertarians, defense hawks, and religious social conservatives that coalesced in the Reagan years, drawn together partly through a common dislike of communism, and it's hard not to look at the tech elite piling into Donald Trump's new administration as a second

• 23:47John Coogan?

  coming of those forces. Tealism can be mind-stretching, can be a mind-stretching form of Christianity, and I think that's part of its allure, especially in a world in which lengthy, digressive, right-leaning podcasts have become cultural cornerstones. Seeing a guy as smart and rational as Peter Teal be like, 'The resurrection literally happened, it's real, there is a taboo that's being broken,' said one person in tech, whose newfound interest in Christianity largely ties into listening to Teal. It shows that faith is valid and real." Yeah, there is a little bit of, like, just breaking the glass and, like, jumping over the, the, uh... The the the threshold in order to make this acceptable like no one uh no no VC can write

• 24:29John Coogan?

  you off as a founder because you're Christian because there are now enough people who are serious. Yeah. That you won't be. You you you can wear it on your sleeve whereas before people used to hide it clearly.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. I I know a guy who is a brilliant brilliant uh electrical engineer and grew up in a deeply religious city in Georgia, I believe. And in high school, he had a like a every literally everyone in his community was religious, Christian, and he had this breakthrough and and wrote his thesis about atheism and decided that he was an atheist because he was so rational and so. Yeah. Uh so like quantitative and science based essentially. And he was essentially cast out of his society and like exorcised.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Literally, they got they brought in an exorcist, which I didn't even know was a thing that existed in like the nineties, I guess. Wild. Um wild. And then and then eventually he came back to it, which was very interesting. While he was like in this hyper rational phase for a long time. Very, very interesting. Like how how difficult that is. And then um and then when he when he started, you know, going back into religion, he uh it it was still like very countercultural in Silicon Valley. And it was very odd. And he was always like seen as like an outsider. It's like been an outsider his entire life. It's it's wild. Anyway, if we go into Isaiah Taylor, one of one of the else. The man himself. Founded Velar Atomics, a nuclear energy startup, sees he sees his and his peers

• 26:08John Coogan?

  turn towards Christianity as a way to reject the tech status quo and eschew atheism, which has essentially been tech's de facto spiritual guiding principle. Yeah, you gotta get out of the spreadsheets when you're deciding what to do. It is tricky.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  You can see it with SBF, just like the whole like, oh, well, you know, this is like mathematically efficient to like steal all this money so I can give it back. Like, he might have been a true believer in his ultra utilitarian philosophy, but it clearly led to like a terrible bad, bad outcome.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's gonna take user funds to invest in Anthropic, which he knew was gonna be a fifty billion dollar company, and he was gonna make it all back.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  He was, he was, but the time on mismatch. Yeah, SBF was on the Tyler Cowen podcast, and Tyler was like, how much of a, how much of a utilitarian are you really? Like, if there was a, if there was a fifty-one percent odds coin, like, the coin is fifty-one percent heads, forty-nine percent tails, and if it comes up fifty-one percent, if it comes up heads, the population of humanity doubles, and if it comes up tails, everyone dies. Would you flip that coin? Like, it's positive EV. The expected value is that the population increases, that means more happiness and utility. So, you know, the, the utilitarian should flip it. And he was like, yes, I would flip it. I would flip it endlessly. I would

• 27:30John Coogan?

  flip it forever. Because he just operates off of positive EV. Yeah, and it's like-

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  He doubles it, doubles it once, he's like, let's go again.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  In practice, obviously, that's not, that's not how it works out. But like, if you're just short sighted, thinking about expected value, well, yes, then it is positive EV. But like, clearly, you need some broader guiding principle than that.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Find God.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, very odd. Um, yeah, where else should we go? I mean, in terms of the driving force, I mean, Michelle Stevens really can't be undercounted. Like, she's, she's put together like a really strong speaking tour and has been a driving force. They highlight here, uh, the ACT-17 Collective, a nonprofit that aims to evangelize tech leaders that Michelle Stevens leads. And she's hosted events with Thiel, as well as Y Combinator President Gary Tan. The name references a Bible passage about Apostle Paul's missionary journey through various cities. She and her husband Trey originally planned to bring, bring the group to seventeen cities, including Austin, Miami, and New York, but their ambition is growing. Just last month, she and Trey ran two ACT-17 events in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the theology

• 28:35John Coogan?

  of AI and defense, and choosing good quests. Yeah, we gotta do a deep dive on choosing good quests. That is a fantastic essay.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Really great. And Trey had another recent post that I think was really great about AI girlfriends. And in there, there was a, there was a little bit of this at the end, kind of saying like, there's this natural force that wants to just, you know, juice reward, find the path of least resistance. Let's just make everyone date an AI. And, and we were, I was kind of struggling with him thinking about the, uh, the, the conclusion because I didn't, he like, the original conclusion was something like, you know, oh, like, you know, go to church, like rebuild the institutions, like meet people in person. But that's very hard and it's very, it doesn't fully align with like the, the war machine that is like

• 29:27John Coogan?

  VCs funding, like the OnlyFans business is just so powerful. Like you, it's very hard to overwhelm that culturally. And same thing with the AI girlfriends thing. Like if the business is just printing money, it's just going to have so much more energy behind it than like a couple of people being like, hey, we should like go to that church and patronize it and like build our community up. Like it's really hard to start those things. But, but I do think that there's like the Angel Studios thing, the, uh, the, the, the Hallow app. There are a few ways that you can align community building, real world relationships, some religion stuff. You can, you can, you can make that align with like the traditional venture capital model. I talked to one VC was, who was

• 30:09John Coogan?

  thinking about incubating a B two B SaaS company for churches, basically like, you know, like,

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  I need to get in on the action. What do I know? I know B two B SaaS.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  And I'm pro-Christian, so.

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  Vertical SaaS.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Vertical SaaS for churches.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  Payment rails for donations.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  Exactly. All this stuff. But then also, I mean, if you, if you go like, uh, we, we do a lot of like content creation, video, you know, recording and stuff. If you want to learn this stuff, you don't go on YouTube and search for like, what do podcasters do? You go to the mega churches. Cause those guys have the best gear. It's incredible. They have all these like behind the scenes things because they're all doing like live streams and switching and stuff. It's like NFL level, but they all talk about it because it's their community and they're giving back to each other. And so it's really, really cool. I've watched like a million of these videos and I'm always like, oh my God, they, they got that gear like sick. I want that. But yeah, I mean, I think that like bringing some of that top tier stuff down and making it

• 31:06John Coogan?

  more accessible for these organizations to run really, really smoothly probably is genuinely extremely beneficial. Anyway, you got anything else on the information article you want to talk about?

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I thought the I thought it was interesting.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  Julia Black, the writer, positions this. I don't know if this is authentic, but Michelle had said she doesn't mind if people use their Act 17 events to pitch their startup to her husband. Go ahead and network, she said. God used everything, anything and everything to get people to turn that way. So I'm totally okay with that and actually welcome it. And Julie positioned that as mixing religion and work, which I guess is like one way to do that. I would just call that mixing community and work.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, churches have always been a place for community and conversations that are not entirely oriented around pure religion. So I like the I like the call out to new founding, a Dallas-based anti-diversity equity and inclusion venture firm anchored by a Christian ethic and worldview.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  So there wasn't much wasn't much more on that. But

• 32:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Echoing that, Pilgreen is continuing to fundraise for future projects like his planned Center for Sacred Vocation. He hopes to create a space where people can come network, find people who are like-minded to start a company. He told me it won't be just for Christians, but obviously as a church, it will be, hey, we believe in we believe we believe God created work to be a good thing.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  We want to help you think about how to do that ethically.

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  I read a great book about it was from this like capital allocator, some big hedge fund guy about Christianity, and it was a fantastic Embrace of Christianity or of capitalism, because obviously capitalism didn't really exist when the Bible was written. So there's this question of like, can you derive?

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  It existed, it just wasn't defined.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Can you derive capitalist principles from the Bible to know like, are we in the good timeline or not? Like, are we doing the right thing? Is there a Christian defense of capitalism? And he had a bunch of really interesting things to say about that. But one was that, you know, God is a creator and created us in their image, and it's our job to create. And the job and the role of creation is the is is business and is is capitalism and is entrepreneurship.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  I keep finding like, you read all these great books, and the conclusion is always like, start a company.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Like, it doesn't matter who what they're like, what their stated angle in is. Maybe it's just me, but like, the Straussian reading is always like, become a founder.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  Become a founder. Yeah, the last thing I would say, I think it, you know, we generally only are on this podcast to talk about technology and business and the technology industry. So that's why we covered this. But generally, I think it's a very positive trend that people within the tech community are feel like they can fully express their personal life itself, right? So the same thing of Trey and Michelle, you know, having their events in church and being able to talk about that. That's great. There's also prominent examples of investors and founders from Jewish backgrounds and like, rap Teflon and they post that on X, right?

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  So like, that's another expression of it. Neither of them, like, it's it should be totally, everybody should be fine with people expressing their own personal belief systems and values and cultures. So, so anyways, glad glad to see it all.

• 34:46John Coogan?

  That concludes our deep dive for this episode. Do you have some DMs over there? I wanted to go through some Q and A. The DMs come?

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  We got some DMs. Let's hit some DMs.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  I got a good one for you here. Let me see if I can find this.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, this is a fun one. "Hey Jordy, as someone with a sole male heir, are you doing anything special to prepare young Master Roman for inheriting the Hayes Estate and continuing your dynastic traditions?"

• 35:14Jordi Hays?

  Great question. We could do an entire deep dive on this, and we should. I am, along with my wife, where he's turning three next year, or in Q1, and we're gonna be gifting him a C corp for his third birthday.

• 35:32John Coogan?

  Get him started young.

• 35:33Jordi Hays?

  And start him building his own enterprise, because as much as I think that all parents should generally embrace nepotism and try to give their children and their communities the advantages in life, I do want him to learn how to do it on his own. And so, yeah, I think one of the best gifts for a third birthday is a C corp.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  Yep, that's great.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  A C corp's malleable, right? They can bootstrap out of it, they could raise capital, could kind of work across any industry. It's a great gift to be like, "Hey", it's not a totally inexpensive gift, right? Stripe Atlas, like 500 bucks? It's like, "I got you." This is the equivalent of 30 Dino puzzles.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  This is a PS5.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and now it's up to you to make it worth something.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  But instead of playing some PS5 game, you're playing the game of capitalism.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  The game of capitalism, which is the ultimate game.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  Ultimate game.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  Every...

• 36:28John Coogan?

  It's much like the Dino puzzle.

• 36:30Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 36:31John Coogan?

  You need to puzzle together the capital.

• 36:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  To create value.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, that's a big gift coming up, third birthday, C corp.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  I have an idea for you. I think that there's a natural inclination for children to rebel, and so you might want to use some reverse psychology. Tell them, "Hey, look, I expect you to become a tech journalist. I expect you to become a DJ in Bushwick."

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  And then 23 rolls around, he sits, "You dad, dad, I know you wanted me to become a DJ and be the first member of our family to play a Boiler Room set, but I want to start a hedge fund."

• 37:10Jordi Hays?

  Yes, that's actually so smart.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  And you're just like, okay, son, if that's what you want to do with your life, I will support it. I will back your first fund.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  But keep listening to EDM.

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the journalism side too. Every, every Saturday morning, the routine is if we sit down, we open the information app on the, on the family iPad.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  That and then he gets exhausted by it and has to rebel.

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  And then he's like, but, but through the process of, of reading the information articles, he learns about these countercultural bad boy entrepreneurs.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  That are like, wow, these guys, Cyia Taylor, this guy kind of sounds cool.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  Augustus D'Arcy, this, that, this guy sounds cool.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  Strong moral character.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  Fitness oriented.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  Um, so yeah, I think that, uh, reverse psychology.

• 37:55John Coogan?

  Don't undercount it.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  And a C corp, and a C corp is a great.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  So he has the entity set up, right?

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  If he wants to rebel.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You're, you give your children entities, so.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  I can't stress this enough.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  For sure. Uh, well, we got a, we got a question and a suggestion from Sean. He says, tech bros pod, have you heard, heard you guys need a tie recommendation? Check out this Burberry. What do you think? Should we do some Burberry ties?

• 38:18Jordi Hays?

  We should get on there and, and shop. Uh, Sean submitted this last night. We just got to the studio this morning, didn't have time to get in there and, and, uh, but it's a great. Thank you for pointing that out, Sean.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  It's really going to be dependent on who, uh, writes us a bigger check to sponsor them from the high fashion world in terms of ties. But we're open if you run a tie company, uh, contact us. It's kind of a winner take all type of situation.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  Winner take all market.

• 38:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  But.

• 38:44Jordi Hays?

  This neck and that neck.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we can do rival sponsorships, potentially.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Hermes over here, Burberry over there, you know, we'll see.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, thank you for the submission, Sean.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, oh, this is good. Um, I work for a billionaire as a chief of staff. What art should I put on my wall to make a statement? What do you think about art for your office? You want, when the billionaire walks in and says, "Hey, I need you to book a flight for me." You gotta make a statement. My recommendation was you go with Peter Paul Rubens, David and Goliath. We'll have to put this up on the screen, but it's one of the most aggressive. It's a, it's a, it's a painting. It's in Pasadena at the Norton Simon. You can go see the real thing if you're in LA. And it's a, it's an amazing painting of this super jacked David just about to behead Goliath. It's like one of the most aggressive, like fire and brimstone types, type paintings.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  Really sets the tone. Yeah, hey billionaire, you might be bigger than me. I might be the chief of staff. You're the boss here, but at any moment, one rock to the head, I'm slicing your head off.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna take a different approach. So if you're chief of staff for a billionaire, you have big ambitions. You don't wanna be, you know, the, the right-hand man or woman forever. And so what I would do, billionaire circuit, you're gonna end up at various art fairs. Art Basel might be one of them. So I think the right approach here is actually to silently and anonymously build an entire career as a sort of provocative modern artist, right? We've seen pieces like the banana that was duct taped to the walls, you know, selling for, you know, significant amounts of money. And so I would take that approach, figure out a way, you know, if you're, if you're hungry

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  and a hustler, you'll be able to do this. Figure out a way to get your own art shown at Art Basel.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  Get it, you know, auctioned by Sotheby's and really get those numbers up. And take your boss and say, "Hey, we should stop by. This artist is blowing up."

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:52Jordi Hays?

  And, and then ask, once you're there.

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  You know, the billionaire is like, we might say like, you know, is the artist here? Like, what do they even look like?

• 41:03John Coogan?

  Pull off the mask.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  Pull off the mask and say it was me all along.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  The call's coming from inside the house.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  Um, but only do that after they've bought a piece.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  And say like, you know, uh, you're my customer now.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would take it a step further. If you're, maybe you don't have the artistic inclination to pull it off yourself. You gotta get on the art circuit, figure out what artists want to sell to your boss. Rent your wall space to display. Billionaire walks in, sees, oh, that's nice. Yeah, it's my friend. It's, it's only this much. Then you become an art dealer.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  Start selling.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, you could even take this a step further is find an artist you love.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  Buy up all their available works.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  Work with Sotheby's to get these works listed. You buy them back from Sotheby's to mark them up to higher prices.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  And then just build.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  Little chandelier bidding.

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  Little, you know, build the market, build the market, build the market. And then have your boss be the bag holder and have him buy the piece and be like, I, I own this entire market and then flood the market and running it to zero.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Here's our recommendation.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  It's, uh, Peter Paul Rubens.

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  What a piece.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  It's, uh, it's beautiful. It's gonna look great on, on your wall. Good luck. Uh, here's a serious one I got from somebody. Uh, do you think there's room in the market for a robo advisor with a modern all-weather portfolio, such that it entails inflation hedging via crypto and black swan hedging via far OTM, near expiry options? It's interesting. The robo advisor market, I haven't followed too much. I know that isn't Wealthfront the main big one?

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so I think what's been interesting is the,

• 42:38Jordi Hays?

  for a long time, there was a lot of robo advisors.

• 42:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  It was unclear if any of them were working.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  And then Wealthfront came out and they were like, we have 200 million of revenue. And like, we're profitable.

• 42:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:48Jordi Hays?

  And like, this is actually like a great business, right? Cause people park their funds and they don't really think about it. And the number goes up and presumably retention is pretty high until maybe. I think there's a certain point where people are like, whoa, I have 5 million in Wealthfront. Maybe I should give this to like a traditional money manager type person. But turns out they're pretty good businesses. You know, we know like the autopilot team, he's built a great business already. Having a more opinionated robo advisor that has like a set strategy. So I think there's a lot, this, I have no way to like analyze on the, on the, on the show, whether or not this is a good strategy. But I think like highly opinionated robo advisors are a great way to get your first 20 million of AUM. And then from there, maybe you can, you know, build.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think you kind of need to abstract it. Like there's one, which is like the actual, you know, backtesting and risk modeling and just making sure that what you're proposing here is a good strategy. And then number two is like, how are you wrapping that and distilling that into marketing language? So I remember there's one robo advisor that was like, every time you make a transaction, it will round it up and it will just take 15 cents. And you'll never really notice, but then you'll save a bunch of money along the way.

• 43:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:01John Coogan?

  And then there's like the, the other one, which is like copy trading. Oh, this one, there was another one that went through YC a couple of years ago. That was like, we just look at the hedge fund, the best performing hedge fund disclosures and we trade based on that. So you're copying a hedge fund. And that's very easy to understand. Okay, hedge funds do well. My portfolio is copying those. I'm happy about that. I'm willing to give it a try, right? And so this like modern all-weather portfolio, like that could be great, but it's not jumping out to me as like a fantastic elevator pitch that you could put in like an Instagram ad.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's, here's another way to.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  I want to copy that. Whereas the autopilot guys, it's like, you're copying Nancy Pelosi's portfolio. That is a meme, people understand that. And so they're, they're in with that. It's very distilled.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The, the last thing I would say, so Wealthfront, if you've ever used it, is very risk off. No matter how much how risk on you basically tell it to be, it's still like going to be a very, pretty stable portfolio and that's part of their strategy. If I was going to make a robo advisor and I just wanted to optimize for users and like attention and potentially volume, I would just say we are the degenerate robo advisor, which is like this is ultra high risk. You might lose almost everything, but the potential content that would come out of that is like you can, if Wealthfront wants to be the stable place where people can earn 6% a year and you're like, hey, you might be go down 70%

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  one year and go up 4,000% the next year and we're going to like, do it. Like there's hedge funds that basically do that.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, there's, there's a crypto trader that our buddy knows who you can essentially give him a thousand dollars and he'll just try and run it up to a million and then he'll be bankrupt after. And so you got to pull out at the right time, kind of push him, but he's just a gambler. Like he's not even a hedge fund. It's just like a guy.

• 45:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  And, uh, yeah, the, the Dgen, because that's going to create a lot of content, a lot of wild, long tail stuff. Uh, people, people want the risk on.

• 46:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So instead of Wealthfront, you'd say, maybe call it the incinerator, capital incinerator.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  How much did you put in the incinerator? I threw a, I threw a 10.

• 46:12Jordi Hays?

  I threw 10, I threw 10 in.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  Throw 10 in the incinerator and see what happens.

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  See what happens.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, should we move on to the timeline? Do we have?

• 46:22Jordi Hays?

  No, I gotta jump in. We got a, uh, so last week we talked about this. We have had so many incredible brothers in the comments, uh, replying. Uh, and so we decided to make Reply Guy of the Month, a weekly award.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Okay, weekly award. And this one was honestly crushing. It was so high stakes for us. I was up all night thinking about this, debating between the choices.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  Barely slept.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  It was, it's one of the hardest decisions I've ever made in my life.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Barely slept. Um, and let's see, let's talk about some of the people that, that almost made. Let's talk about some of the people that almost made the cut.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  I mean, Baldo is still.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  Baldo's an absolute animal.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  On the path to goat hood.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  Brody, Brody's an animal. He had a great comment today, response to our driving gloves.

• 47:11John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  So Brody's been in the running, but the guy that is this week's reply guy of the week is somebody who has to have post notifications on. It's the first comment pretty much every time. He's a true technology brother. He's building, he builds rockets down in Texas.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 47:32Jordi Hays?

  He is friends and I think, you know, partners with Red Bull Futurist and he is none other than Stefan Salai- Salais?

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Salises.

• 47:43Jordi Hays?

  Salises. Stefan Salises, you are this week's reply guy of the week and it can't go to somebody better. I'll drop some of the, the highlights here. We posted yesterday, founders, the next time a journalist is writing a hit piece on your company, buy them a dressage horse. Most tech journalists grew up riding weekly. A gif like this will let them know that you respect their culture and you shouldn't be unambiguously demonized and returned. He says this, that equestrian opulence. I thought was very relevant. We posted about VCs. If you want to count on a VC for a growth check, you should hope that they go skiing places that don't have chairlifts. He says, if you can't drop in on a double black diamond equivalent

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  run with fresh powder, how are you supposed to generate wealth? Fact check.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  It's a good point.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  Later, he says, America isn't fucking around. So that's, that's a deeply American post by itself.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  He just threw that in there. Just that. I love that. Just a little bit of fuel on the fire.

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  He was weighing in on, on Y Combinator's success. Y Combinator is a great.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about being a great reply guy. You don't need to drop a whole essay every single time. You can just kind of, just kind of remix what we're saying, amp it up a little bit. Just give us some juice. We love it.

• 49:03Jordi Hays?

  This one was good too. He said, we posted, VCs with no followers love to yap about how much they value anonymity, which, which, you know, if you've talked to a VC with no followers, they will tell you that. He said, I think it's funny that I see VCs with zero followers. Isn't it heavily in your favor to be able to reach an audience and get your product in front of people? And I thought that was just a good way to position.

• 49:29Jordi Hays?

  Position that and then lastly, we posted, and just like that, venture capital holiday party season is over. Thank you to the LPs that make these events possible and our security for keeping us safe from anti-capitalists. The parties may be done for now, but the back of the napkin deals will echo for eternity. And Stefan said, communists wouldn't even have napkins to do deals on. They have much to learn. And that's true. Anyways, so shout out to Stefan, a great American, a great reply guy, and we are lucky to have you in our community of brothers.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Fantastic. You'll love to see it. Onto the timeline.

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 50:06John Coogan?

  Let's go to Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp. He has been on the show before. He is quote posting Lenny Rochitsky, who says, companies minting the most founders out of their product managers. And Ramp is number four with 14.3%. And he says, we're the youngest company on this list, already top five in the ranking of new companies formed. Sad to see exceptional people leave. Only thing we fear more is no longer attracting exceptional founders in the first place. Just shy of 10% of Ramp's team today have started a company. Yeah, wow. Fantastic. You were joking about the pipeline of like Ramp PM to company founder? And I didn't realize how real it is.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  No, the pipeline is, the pipeline is extremely real. The thing I would say, a lot of people that become founders want to be founders from very early on in their lives. Like, maybe they had a small business while they were in middle school, or delivering papers, or flipping sneakers, these kind of things. And so there's this tendency to once you're an adult to be like, oh, I want to be a founder. I should become a founder immediately. And there's so much value in going and working for a company like Ramp, learning best practices, learning what excellence looks like, learning about the needs of customers. You're not just learning how to work and how to approach business, but you're learning about the problems that businesses have. And Ramp probably benefits from the fact that they serve companies in a bunch, in a bunch of different industries. And so you're

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  getting exposure to a bunch of industries and the problems that are there. So I give this advice all the time to people that are like, I want to be a founder. And it's like, well. You don't need to have started a company before, obviously, to be a founder. Anybody can just become a founder. But a lot of people would be better off going and working two, three years at an iconic company.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  And then taking a crack.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  And most importantly, a fast-paced company that executes on product very quickly like Ramp. This is why, you know, Google, former Google person was really great during the, during the, like, the growth years of Google. Because they would just go and Paul Buchheit would just go build Gmail in a weekend.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:08John Coogan?

  And now it's kind of been like, oh, okay, Google's a place where you just go settle in. Maybe you leave and start a company if you're in the AI group. But like, for the most part, like, the Google PM is not as, as hot anymore.

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the pattern matching.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  Still super fast-paced, so.

• 52:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's not just about what you learn on the job, but it's the pattern matching that, that, that capital allocators will do after you leave. Where they're like, this person's never started a company before, but they were a PM at Ramp and they built this feature. And I talked to Eric about it and he said they're great. And that just can be an extreme catalyst.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's go to Gabriel. He says, this is how Vitalik built Ethereum. And it's a screenshot of a kid in a very awkward pose saying, look at this kid. And everyone was laughing out loud at this. It is funny, Vitalik has been, I think he's been on Tech Bro Trip, but he hasn't done enough. I mean, A, gotta go through a bulking cycle, gotta hit the gym, get jacked. Because it'd be a great turnaround. Everyone would be singing his praises. I'm sure the Ethereum price would go rip.

• 53:07Jordi Hays?

  Get him a, get him a, get him a sports car, get his testosterone up.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  But also, he did that photo shoot, I believe, for Time Magazine or Forbes or something. And they did him really dirty. They shot him really flat. They didn't give him a lot of contrast. The camera was kind of looking down on him and the whole, it was very clear that the whole thrust of the article and the, and the, and the brief for the, uh, for the photographer was make him look like a nerdy kid. Because that was the story they wanted to tell. They didn't want to tell him like a, like a hero. And I was looking at the. The Trump is on, Trump is on the cover of Time Magazine and I saw that they made him look really heroic and everyone was like, this is crazy because the last five Time Magazine covers about Trump have been like, it's a disaster.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  It's terrible, but then they finally shot him. And if you look at the BTS, you can see that it's a really low angle, the photographer's basically on the floor, he's looking up at Trump.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  Angle matters a lot.

• 54:01John Coogan?

  Which is heroic, angle matters a lot. And there's a big soft light and you'll see, you know, we have a big soft light in the studio. It creates more intrigue for your features, more contrast, and it just makes you look better. And that, those details get lost a lot, but hopefully we can spread the word that founders should be aware of the way that they're photographed. Ryan Peterson, when he was on the cover of Forbes, it was a fantastic lighting setup. I was obsessed with it.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  I know. Founders need to, need to build into the shoot that, that, that this is the camera angle.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  I won't take photos in any other angles. I will be smiling.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  Because sometimes if you want it to be a celebratory piece.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  I had the New York Times come to my house once.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  And I, and they, they told me they were covering my launch and they were excited about what we were doing and we did this interview. And then they told me during the shoot, don't smile. And I was like, that's pretty weird. I'm being featured in the Sunday business section.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  I kind of think that's decently cool. At least my parents will think it's cool.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  And then it came out negative.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  And then, of course, it wasn't, it wasn't like overly negative, but it wasn't like the celebratory piece that they had pitched it to me.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  And the main thing is that there's still a lot of people out there that put like PR firms on retainer, but the PR people aren't sharp enough to actually execute that. If you look at the way Tim Cook is shot at Apple, it is so detailed and clearly it's like, he's always wearing an Apple Watch, he's always wearing Nikes, like he, everything is thought out perfectly. The angle, the, the set design of his office is perfect. And if you have someone good on your team, you don't necessarily need to know how to do that as a founder, but you should have someone on your team that's, that's overlooking that and making that happen.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Let's go to. Arvind Srinivas over at Perplexity, he says, "You post about Robinhood, I post about Ramp. We aren't the same." And this post got a lot of likes. He's subtweeting Sam Altman, who was talking about the Robinhood gold card, which is a very cool product. But he's saying, "You're flexing with your gold card tied to your trading account. I'm using the Ramp card to optimize my business."

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  And this is just a crazy ad for Ramp. I mean, we've done some good promoted posts of Ramp, but it's hard to compete with a guy running one of the hottest AI companies in the world to just post his personal Ramp card and brag about it.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  It's great. And I think, once Ramp launches the meteorite card, or the tungsten card...

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. We're working with them to try to get some heavier, more exotic metals.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  The meteorite card is a good one. That's gonna be big when they do that. But Robinhood will have to respond. It'll be the card wars, much like the merch wars going on in defense tech right now.

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  Andro and Palantir, yeah.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Delian. He says, "Thank God, please end this nightmare." And it's an announcement that Donald Trump will use its best efforts to eliminate daylight saving time.

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's been a huge...

• 57:02John Coogan?

  With its strong constituency, but shouldn't. Daylight saving time is inconvenient.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's been a big movement here. Huberman had something, I think he's branding it, he coined it, Huguenot's Law, he understands the value of coinage. I think he'd stop the clock or something like that.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  Stop the clock, yeah. Yeah, Sagar and Jetty is big on this. He's been on this for years, talking about how it's a tax on early risers.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  No, it's a tax on parents. Sun goes down at 5. You're like, "Great, I've gotta entertain children for another 90 minutes."

• 57:33John Coogan?

  Can't just let them play outside anymore.

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I didn't really care about it until having kids.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  Mine go down around seven.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  But, but seriously, like, sun goes down and you're like, okay, we have to keep them indoors.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:48Jordi Hays?

  Like, try to get their energy out.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  It just, it's not, not great.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  It would be exciting. It would just be the type of change where, where it would feel like monumental for like a day. And you'd be like, wow, I didn't even know they could do that. That's crazy. Like, because they used to just like create these things. Like, at some point, it didn't exist, and then it did.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  And they just did things. Uh, and then the thought of the government changing something like that, or like moving us onto metric. Like, we could just do that, but like, it's unthinkable.

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  Frankly, un-American.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  Unless we, and then we basically, if we did a hostile takeover of the metric system and then kind of recreated the history of it and said, look, like, we've actually been using this in many ways for much longer.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  Native Americans actually use, created the metric system.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, let's go to Ryan Peterson. He's been on the show before. He says, inside a Flexport 747, loading this thing to within nine kilograms of max weight today. Nice job by our sales team. This is amazing. This is founder mode.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  So that's, I think I sent this into the, into the, into the stack because this is the, uh, he's been on a founder mode tear recently.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  And it's so cool because you, you see this and anybody who is a customer is like, wow, the CEO is deep in the trenches of his company.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  Like, improving it daily, making sure it's running well. If you work for the company, you're like, Ryan's working harder than I am. Like, that's unexcusable. I should be like, you want to be working at least as hard as your boss.

• 59:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  And then if you don't work for Flexport and you're, you want to work somewhere.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  Founder-led, it's like, okay, this is a company that, um, that, that, uh, has the right culture coming straight from the top. So.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  A couple of years ago, I made a whole video on my YouTube channel about Flexport and kind of broke down his whole history and it, it was great. I didn't even interview him for it. Um, but I was always kind of wondering like, oh, what would be a good follow-up? And when he got the 747, I was like, can we go do an interview on the 747? Like, that would be so sick. Like.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  And the interview and the, the, the bay drops in the back and you parachutes out.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  So cool, right? Uh, and, and we never could figure out the scheduling. It was always really hard. This makes so much more sense for him just to hop on and, you know, I don't know if I want to spend like three days in Hong Kong right now, but. But, uh, but we should definitely do a vlog with him on the 747.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06John Coogan?

  Something like that.

• 1:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and CEOs, it's cost zero dollars to go founder mode. You just have to find it within you.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  That is true.

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  Very, very capital efficient thing.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  That is true.

• 1:00:15Jordi Hays?

  You just gotta become, you just gotta embody the lifestyle.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. The founder mode stuff is, it's like, you go back to Brian Armstrong. It's like this crazy bravery thing. This is not edgy or brave in that way. It's really just being authentic.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  It's the best possible marketing for Flexport to the entire market, capital markets.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  New hires, customers. And it doesn't require some expensive New York, you know, agency.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Like, you don't have to spend 300,000 on a branding package like we did just to launch podcasts.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you literally just have to have a cell phone and just like talk about what you're doing.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  And show that you're deeply.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Engaged.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  And I'm sure there's been discussions on the Flexport marketing team of like, should we do some sort of owned content? Should we start a podcast about shipping?

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  And, and we'll have someone like, you know, non-related to Ryan run it and it'll, it's like, that's going nowhere.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  This is already viral.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  And this took him, you know, a couple of minutes to go and do.

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  And he was already gonna go anyway, so why not? Go for a ride. We got a promoted post.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of founder mode, we got a promoted post from a friend of ours, a friend of mine and friend of the show, Nate Bosshard. Nate says, "Brand marketing within traditional orgs has been siloed, gate-kept and opaque. Forty percent of an average marketing budget is allocated to brand, yet no one really understands what it truly is. It's a services-heavy practice without software to scale it. Brand AI finally solves this." So Nate has, uh, has, uh, incubated or helped start a company called brand.ai. Uh, and what they're doing is like building this entire suite of tools. I know that the guy who did the, the Aurora brand uses Brand AI and Nate. Generated an analysis of technology brothers.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  This is so cool.

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  And so they've built software that that helps you understand your brand from what you're already putting out there.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:05Jordi Hays?

  And so Nate ran TB through brand AI and it gave us ideas about what our brand actually is.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was really good at like distilling what we've already been talking about.

• 1:02:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it just like.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  It was really good.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Psycho analyzed us and the podcast like perfectly.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Jordi Hays?

  We didn't even have to be involved. And so we're getting on boarded right now.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, check it out.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  It's kind of beautiful because like if you put your company through there and it gives you like kind of milquetoast analysis, you can't write it off as just like, oh, it got it wrong. It's almost like, no, you haven't created enough.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  You don't have a brand.

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  You haven't been living the brand. You haven't created a brand. You're not opinionated. You should almost, you know, pull in like, okay, your CEO went on Invest Like the Best. Let's pull that into the brand AI thing as well and then understand, you know, what that is. And then, once you, once you dial it down, like that's kind of your brand book. Have everyone run with that. And, uh, and to the founder mode, mode point, it's like the Flexport brand needs to be, you know, the guy who goes on the 747, the guy who goes to the, uh, to the dock.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  And so what does that mean in, in their, all their marketing language, all their sales collateral, like anything that they do needs to reflect this because this is the brand now. And, uh, and it's not whatever's in some pitch deck.

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Let's go to Ben Hilek. He's been on the show before. He says, smartphones as we know them will be around the next 20 years at least. In the future, people will be using them more, not less. Interesting. I, I do, I do think that there's something about like, we've gone smaller with the watches, the Apple watch, that hasn't really taken off. And we've gone bigger with the iPads and that's still not what people carry. There's something about the, the pocket that is just the, the platonic ideal. And even Apple. Steve Jobs didn't want to go bigger than like four inches. Now we're up to like five, like small changes. But it does seem pretty dialed. And it also feels like as they get more powerful, it's going to be something that drives other experiences. Like you can clearly tell that like the Apple Vision Pro has this power brick.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  Your phone has a battery that's basically the same size. You should really just be plugging a headset into here if you're using that. Like the phone can kind of always be around a power as like the central core of your personal computer. Ben Thompson, Mr. Techery, always says like, we messed up the terminology. The phone should be called the personal computer. Because it's actually the personal computer, whereas the laptop is like a workstation.

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  But what do you like about this post?

• 1:04:30Jordi Hays?

  I, people have developed such negative relationships with their phones and negative feelings towards their phone. And like, oh, what's your screen time? Oh, my screen time's so high.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:40Jordi Hays?

  I always joke around about this. I'm like, I actually spend like 90% of the time on my phone working, either messaging.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:04:47Jordi Hays?

  People that I'm working with, workshopping memes, sourcing posts from the timeline, whatever, talking to founders. And so I'm actually like, I was actually pleasantly surprised to see my screen time go up.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Last, when I got the notification yesterday, I was like, good, I've been working harder.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  But I think people have have developed this thing where, yeah, you're, if you're doing, if you're doom scrolling on your phone, if you're just like doing the anti meditation where you're just injecting new ideas into your brain, just like constantly, which is like what an algo feed does, that's bad, but the way that you use it matters a lot. And I don't think that more screen time is always worse for you.

• 1:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:26Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, what screen time?

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  Even within the apps, like you can be scrolling X and getting all slop. But if you do click the mute, mute, mute on those, like you can get a pretty high quality.

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  We were with somebody Saturday night and they pulled up LinkedIn and it was like time gated.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  And we were like, what are you doing?

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  What are you doing? But it was funny because this founder is like a very hard worker.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Jordi Hays?

  And he was like, Like in it, in it, in it, the, it was like the app notification was like, you have used all your LinkedIn time today.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I think if he doesn't do that, he wouldn't be able to turn off and like enjoy the party, basically.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  He'd be on it.

• 1:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Cause he's grinding. It's great, though. Classic like stated preference versus revealed preference. I want to use my phone less. What do people do?

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Scroll the algo feeds, watch our content. Sheel says, a few folks have asked me, why is 3X, why is the 3X multiple good for a lender like Bridget? Here's an answer. Question for you. So Wealthfront trades at 10X ARR and Bridget at 3 to 4X. Is that just due to net dollar retention being much shorter at Bridget? Here's one way to think about quality revenue. If Bridget lays everyone off tomorrow, people run off with the money and without customer acquisition, there is no ongoing revenue. If Wealthfront lays off everyone tomorrow, the majority of people won't notice and Wealthfront continues to make money off those customers for many years to come. So Wealthfront's revenue is worth a lot more in enterprise value than Bridget's. Pretty self-explanatory.

• 1:06:50Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, great analysis. I don't really have that much.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  I don't know that much about Bridget and I don't know why if they lay people off.

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Bridget, to my understanding, was it was effectively a fintech as a payday lender, right? So they give you these like short-term, short-term loans.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  There's been a couple of those, Dave.

• 1:07:06Jordi Hays?

  So there's like a ton of, a ton of demand for it.

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:09Jordi Hays?

  But not the highest quality customers to have, not a lot of recurring revenue.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  But either way, it was like good, it's just exits are good, right? Like we, they're, they're necessary and it wasn't the outcome that everybody, I think it was quite

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  Down from the highest.

• 1:07:25Jordi Hays?

  What their last valuation was, but ultimately like they created a half a billion dollar company.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Like congratulations to

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:07:32Jordi Hays?

  The team and hope everybody made some money. Boom. Little, little, little size going moment and great analysis by Sheel.

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  Let's go to Gary Tan. He says, vision for 2040, every person should have a robot, universal basic robot. And Elon Musk chimes in and says, they will.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  They will.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  That's exciting. 2040, not too far away.

• 1:07:53Jordi Hays?

  So, so I think it's under discussed. So, so there's a lot of humanoid robot hate right now.

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of people are saying like, oh, it's like the iPad form factor. Like it's not really going to be

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Like what you think is going to be the thing is not really going to be the thing, but Elon's been Pretty intentional guy.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Like, I think he had, like, the fact that he's doing it says a lot.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:08:17Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting to see, I, you know, we've talked about, we've had a, a, a request for robots that goes and uses computer vision to analyze a tree, figure out which leaves are gonna fall and just quietly picks them out before they hit the ground.

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Um, so we're looking forward to robots like that, but hope, I'm, I, I expect like, everybody will have a drone, right? That like, goes and picks up, like, oh, I want this drink from the grocery store.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Like, go grab it for me, right?

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Everybody has, like, their little leaf picker, everybody has, like, a humanoid robot around the house, or maybe it's not that form factor.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of like, how, you know, the first CPU in your house, or chip in your house is probably like, your personal computer. Very expensive, use it a lot, and then, over the last 20, 30 years, like, the chips have just gone into everything, such that you're like, your toaster has one. And it can be very annoying when it's implemented by a non-tech company poorly.

• 1:09:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06John Coogan?

  But in general, like, having tech in things is probably good and inevitable. And the same thing will probably happen with robots. Right now, everyone does have a personal robot, in the sense that, like, most people have Roomba, or something like that. But then there's a question of, like, is the leaf picker next? Is the, you know, is the car after that? And then what else can be, become robot? You know, you get the laundry one, you get the dishwashing one, and eventually, you know, everyone winds up having, or like, the average person has one.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33John Coogan?

  On average, right?

• 1:09:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35John Coogan?

  Uh, I'm excited, I'm excited for the age of personal robots. I don't think they're gonna rise up, and if they do.

• 1:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Watch out.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  I'll be shooting them with an AK-47. Let's go to Kip Mock. He says, "We really have to bring family crests back." I love this. "You should be paying a firm half a million dollars to design the crest that your sons will wear on fat gold rings for the coming millennia." I do love that. I have some friends that have the crest rings that they pass down. "The best day to start a family tradition is today. Go and design this. I don't think you need to spend a half a million dollars if you don't have it. Obviously, if you do, if you're any sort of venture capitalist, that's kind of the bare minimum that you should be spending." But for the folks in the audience who are maybe a little bit scrappier, a little bit more bootstrapped, uh, just, uh, just get in Pigma and start designing.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Calligrapher to make something.

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  You already have them on staff.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Put them to use.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. Uh, but definitely get it in a gold ring and, and pass that down, start wearing it today. Gift it to your, the oldest patriarch in your family. Give it to your dad, give it to your grandpa if he's still alive. And then when they pass away, they'll pass it down to you. And then you can say to your son, this was your grandfather's.

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45John Coogan?

  It doesn't matter that you got it to him when his, when your grandfather was 85. It will still be technically his and passed down.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  And you should do the same thing with Patek Philippe. You should go and buy one and then gift it to the oldest, you know, patriarch in the family.

• 1:10:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  And then it will pass down fairly quickly. It's the start, hopefully not, but hopefully they live forever. But you know, you, you will, we'll expect to have this at some point. But then it will be a fourth generation or a third generation Patek or Ring almost immediately. Which is great. Um, so get creative.

• 1:11:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was funny because I commented on that and I was like, this is technology brothers bait.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  And it works clearly, but he, then he said, no, it's a technology brothers inspired. So I just, the positive thing right now is we have this virtuous cycle of brothers in the community, both, you know, both men and women.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, you know, taking stuff from the show, creating new things. We then recycle it back. Now we're promoting family crests. And so, yeah, this is, it's a very, it's a great cycle that we have going here.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  Yep, it's great. Oh, this is, should we do this one? Quantian. Uh, Quantian says, this was the exchange that Beth said was one of the worst days of his life, Lamau. And it's a big, long fight between Dan, growing Daniel and Beth, based Beth Jesus. Daniel says, so is Beth's company going to ship anytime soon? Uh, Beth says, hardware takes time, not building a GT, GPT wrapper like many out there, wink. And then Daniel says, it's a crypto mining thing, right? That's exciting. And then Beth says, it's not. And then Daniel says, oh, okay. Blockchain something though? And then Beth says, no, there's literally no crypto. It's just hardware for AI. And then Daniel says, oh, right. Everything is AI now. That's going to be big.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Just like, dude, you're so online, Bev. Like, how did you get trolled like this? Come on.

• 1:12:32Jordi Hays?

  Baited by.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  But, I mean, just masterful posting.

• 1:12:36Jordi Hays?

  When two posters collide.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  This is a war. This is a war.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Daniel versus.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  But you gotta, you gotta just post through it. The main thing to Bev is just don't hold a grudge. Like, you know, he, he won this round, you know, you gotta get him back and, uh.

• 1:12:49Jordi Hays?

  The best way to mog somebody is by building a, a massive, uh, you can't really mog Daniel.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Jordi Hays?

  By having a big audience on X.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  This is one of the greatest posters of a generation.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  But you can, you can mog by, by making, uh, X-Tropic.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. A great company, yeah.

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, X-Tropic, you know, uh, an Nvidia, you know, um, close competitor even.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is, I'm pretty sure Bev announced X-Tropic like a couple of weeks before this post. And so Daniel's just like jumping.

• 1:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  It's a hardware company, like, so he's like, is he gonna ship anytime soon? It's like, even like, you know, like hardware companies that people are not skeptical of.

• 1:13:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32John Coogan?

  It takes them a long time to ship things.

• 1:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34John Coogan?

  Like, you know, like, the, the companies that have gone on to become massively successful in hardware, like.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  Anduril took a long time to ship because that's just the nature of these things.

• 1:13:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  And so Daniel's like really ribbing him like, hey, hey, have you shipped that brand new chip immediately? It's like, okay, probably not, but, uh, don't let them get to you, Bev. You gotta just, uh, move on. But, oh, well, one of the greatest interactions, very funny on both sides. And honestly, you know, nice guys.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  There needs to be, there needs to be something. So that was a screenshot, I guess.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  Cause maybe part of it got deleted.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  But there needs to be a, a museum called the Screenshot Museum.

• 1:14:11John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  And it's just a museum that you get to walk around and see the great moments of history that happened online that were screenshotted and then deleted. And I'd pay to go to that. So if you make it into San Francisco or New York, I think you'll have an audience.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need a new segment for like wars, like and we need to like timeline wars.

• 1:14:30Jordi Hays?

  Timeline and turmoil.

• 1:14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, timeline and turmoil, because there's been a number of these where it's been like, okay, we're breaking down J Cal and Palmer and we're going back on like six different posts.

• 1:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  There was the Robert Scoble thing and it doesn't really, it's not, it doesn't really work to just react to one post. You need to really understand the full context. So let's build out a segment for that. And this is related to our next post from Creatine Cycle Atlas. He's quoting Simphore Satoshi. Simphore Satoshi, I am ginger trash, says, "This is becoming a universal slop indicator. Seeing this on your website, plus contact us for pricing, means you know you're about to talk to two of the most obnoxious 23-year-old Stanford grads ever." And it's a screenshot backed by Y Combinator. Simphore Satoshi, among other people, have been talking a lot of trash about YC lately. Very negative. We don't like that. Let's have some positivity. Let's keep, keep all this negativity towards the real, the real villains of our industry, the tech journalists, please.

• 1:15:23Jordi Hays?

  And the communists.

• 1:15:25John Coogan?

  And the communists. YC is clearly on our side.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  China would kill to have Y Combinator.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  They would.

• 1:15:31Jordi Hays?

  They would literally kill us and take, they would leave, it would decimate everything and they'd just take YC.

• 1:15:37John Coogan?

  Yes. And who knows, maybe they're funding all the tech journalists to write hit pieces and take us down.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  That's possible.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  That, that, that would be a great psyop for them. But Atlas.

• 1:15:46Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to break, they won't be able to break that scoop for themselves, but if we can get scoop that shows the information.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  People are worried about foreign money on cap tables through like seven layers of roll-up vehicle and SPV. Maybe the real thing you should be worried about is foreign money in the tech journalists.

• 1:16:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  That's the real risk.

• 1:16:06Jordi Hays?

  We'll be breaking that news.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  It happened in politics. There was a bunch of Russian money going out to, to YouTubers. It was very dramatic. But Atlas says, "This dude is carrying on like that weird guy at the club who approaches women, asks for their number, gets politely declined, and then calls them ugly to their face." Interesting. A little anon on anon warfare.

• 1:16:28Jordi Hays?

  Timeline and turmoil.

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  Timeline and turmoil.

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  No, so I'm torn here. I think YC is great, even though I was rejected by it. I think Sim for Satoshi is a great thinker and has good ideas.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:40Jordi Hays?

  Atlas is right, though. I think Sim for Satoshi was rejected from YC. And they told him his idea wasn't going to work. And then they like, put out some requests for startups. Or one of the YC partners was like, kind of, and so he has a personal vendetta against YC. And he has an audience, so he can, he can, he's, you know.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  And there's a lot of people that want to commiserate over not being a part of YC and want it not to be that cool. So they're kind of rooting against it. So it's good bait, but it's just, it's just kind of boring and played out. You know, just go build, you know, just, just, you know, there are plenty of companies that are great that didn't go through.

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  YC has yet to put a gun to someone's head and tell them, join YC.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Or, or stop building because we're not funding you.

• 1:17:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  They never say that. I just like.

• 1:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they re-invite companies back all the time that get rejected.

• 1:17:30John Coogan?

  I know a guy, I know a guy who applied eight times in a row and got in. And now his company is worth like $500 million. Insane. Like insane. And this guy was like 4.0 Harvard, like super, like, like super high status at every single moment. And it still took him eight times to get in. And now he's running an AI company and they're ripping. It's, it's amazing.

• 1:17:50Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 1:17:52John Coogan?

  Steve Jervitson says, first time on the show, but you know, very famous metric capitalist. We love him. He says, "The Starlink manufacturing line is the closest thing to a fully automated alien dreadnought that I have ever seen. It makes 4.7 million terminals per year and growing. One subsection is the largest printed circuit board factory in America." This is great because we were talking to, we were talking about Aaron Slodov saying, "I don't know if there's a single company in America that builds defense technology that could produce 1 million of anything in a given year if asked to." Well, guess what?

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  No, I think he said 10,000.

• 1:18:27John Coogan?

  Oh, 10,000? I thought he said a million. Oh, anyway, he said a big number and Starlink is clearly beyond that. And Starlink is critical to national security, very clearly. We've seen it have an impact in all sorts of different, you know, war fronts. And Elon's pulling it off. Obviously, we need this in drones, we need this in DJI, we need this in robots, we need this in cars, all sorts of things, but it was, it's great to see that high-volume manufacturing is working in America.

• 1:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Think about how many engineers are working in that facility that can then go work at other companies and run that same playbook back.

• 1:18:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:59Jordi Hays?

  We're doing this in many ways with deterrence. We, the, the two, the two engineering leads on the team were at Tesla and Rivian doing like scaled battery cell manufacturing. And now they're working in a totally different sector, but running back the same manufacturing playbook that they learned at Tesla and Rivian.

• 1:19:19John Coogan?

  And there's always been this question about, oh, how do we bring back manufacturing? Do we just need to like retrain a ton of, you know, CNC operators or, you know, like be very custom and very manual, but clearly, you know, this went from zero to 60 very fast and it's an entirely new system, it's probably built completely differently. And I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, you look in like 30 years and there's like, oh, there's something in there, some process that's maybe protected IP, maybe Elon's not talking about it. Maybe we just don't really understand it or have a word for it, but there's probably something in there that's like the, the Henry Ford, what was it called, like the line? The, the, the assembly line? Like the assembly line is just something that is like so standard now, but it was created at some point.

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  And there's probably something in here that's, that's a new way of thinking about how to mass manufacture that will eventually be canonized and used everywhere and copy pasted. And that, that will be like the future of manufacturing and it will all be new. And that's why we need new companies to build things that even seem like, oh, well, yeah, there are primers, right? Why do we need deterrence? Well, it's because like, there's probably a, when you start fresh, green field, you can build much faster and in a completely different way. That's less, more, maybe more capital intensive, maybe less, maybe less bound by a human capital instead.

• 1:20:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's go to Neil Kosla. This is a good one. He says, son of Vinod Kosla, he's a VC himself. He says, reminder that as you see these VC transitions, that most of the time it's someone getting pushed out or artificially capped in power, not leaving by choice. And Will Manitis chimes in and says, the only generalized solution to the succession problem is murder.

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Taking it back to the, I don't know, like the 1600s, probably Machiavelli, like that

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, so, so we, we posted something a lot. I, I, I don't want to guess and say this was a response to something that we posted, but, um, but yeah, oftentimes when a GP leaves a fund, uh, it's very happy on the surface and everybody's like, congrats, woo, really excited for you. Like can't wait to see what you do next. But then behind the scenes, like they were forced out or like they hate, there, there was a lot of hatred between the part, part, partners or somebody's like the founders of the firm were just like, you're never gonna like truly see your potential here. You should leave. So there's always a lot going on behind the scenes and it literally gets to the surface.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  What do they do next? Like if they're retiring, well, that makes sense, but if they're immediately doing something else.

• 1:22:00Jordi Hays?

  Logan, and he was like, my favorite line is, I'm going to return to my operator roots.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  Did we say that on the last thing?

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  No, we didn't. We didn't. But he says that's a common line if you're leaving a firm, which is another way of saying my returns were terrible and I'm no longer going to be invested.

• 1:22:21John Coogan?

  GP at a major fund is just like the best gig ever. It's so hard to turn that down under any circumstances. You, you don't just leave that. But we'll leave it to you to read between the lines on this show. We'll spell it out as much as we can without getting murdered. Matt Marlinsky, good friend of the show, works with Mike Solana over at Pirate Wires. He is screenshotting a great interaction between Mike Solana and the All In Podcast. Uh, he says, the so-called number one podcast can't think of an original idea. And, and All In launched eight weeks of All In Idol and Mike says, Jason, this is shameless even

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  by your standards and shares a screenshot of Pirate Idol, which Solana has been running for like two months. And so it's a, it's a format. You know, we like to have a lot of different formats here. We got some personnel news. We got the size gong. If you see a gong on All In. Call us immediately because we're going over to Jason Calacanis's house.

• 1:23:24Jordi Hays?

  And we're gonna have to have a sit down conversation.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  We're gonna have to have a sit down conversation.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  And it'll probably be like the average board meeting at Lucy. A lot of,

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  You know, basically an all out brawl.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  I'm wearing a vest.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:35John Coogan?

  I'll tell you which one. It's not gonna be Patagonia vest. But yeah, this is, this is ridiculous. Um, I mean, you know, obviously the pirate idol is a riff on American Idol, but just to like decide a new, a new co-host, like it's very, very similar to what Pirate Wires is doing. And he could have switched it up and just used a different word because there are so many, he could have said, we're doing The Voice, you know, or like, we're doing anything else. We're doing Survivor.

• 1:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Musical chairs.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, or, or just, just take it from a different, we're doing The Bachelor, we're doing the, we're doing, uh, you know, any sort of like, who wants to be a millionaire and, you know, and, and just adapt it, but don't just literally take the exact same concept. Oh, rough. Anyway, Jason, you have a writer's room. Get him to do some more workshopping before you rip Solana again. It's, uh, not happy to see it.

• 1:24:30Jordi Hays?

  John, I gotta stop you right there. We have a promoted post, uh, from my friend Ill Science. Ill Science is actually a GP over at Andreessen. He's on the, uh, consumer, uh, AI front. But today I'm calling him Ill Science because he's also a, uh, recording artist and DJ.

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  And put out a song. Says, very excited to share my new record and first collabora- collaboration with the maestro and molten music label boss Homero Espinosa, streaming on Spotify and everywhere else you get your music. I downloaded the track. It's fantastic. Makes me wish that it was summer already.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, anyways, go check it out. I love when, uh, I love when people are excellent at one thing and then they pursue excellence in another thing. And like, you know, we, we've talked about this before, but for, um, Ill Science, a, a break from investing to do music, even though making music is hard and intense, it's still a break.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  We got it. We, we have to make a playlist.

• 1:25:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  Because you know who else has released, uh, tracks? Elon Musk.

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  Didn't know that.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  He released a track called R.I.P Harambe. With someone else. Zuck released a cover of From the Window to the Wall, Get Low. Remember this? This happened a couple of weeks ago?

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Brian Armstrong, I believe, released an entire EDM album during the NFT craze. And you could like get the rights to it on an NFT. It was just like a promotional thing, but he like loves music. I'm pretty sure it was him. And then Justin Khan, after he sold Twitch, him and his brother, who his brother went on to co-found Cruz, produced an entire DJ set called, uh, they were the Khan Bros. And it was an incredible DJ set. It was on SoundCloud for a while. And when I got to YC, they, he had already like sold his company. So he was like God in YC world. He was one of the first ones to really get serious liquidity. And they put out this DJ set and we would just listen to it all the time when we were grinding, coding. So it would just be Khan Bros.

• 1:26:33Jordi Hays?

  Ben?

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  Khan Bros.

• 1:26:34Jordi Hays?

  We needed an official Technology Brothers playlist.

• 1:26:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Ill Science Track is the first one.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  And there's gotta be more. I just listed off like four off the top of my head. I'm sure there's like 10 others.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  Folks who are, who are in tech and DJs, cause it's very adjacent. I, one of my first businesses was buying and selling DJ equipment. I'd buy it in the States and then sell it internationally, because I couldn't get into important things.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  International businessman.

• 1:26:56John Coogan?

  International businessman at age 10 or something. Uh, but it's very like nerdy. I actually produced an entire EDM album in Fruity Loops, which is like this software that you could kind of like piece things together. I sold one copy to a friend. I found the copy recently. It's terrible, but you know, it was impressive for, you know, I think I was in middle school. And, uh, and something about EDM, it's very, very technical, like Deadmau5 is like a programmer too. And there's a lot of overlap there. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of music people in tech that, you know, need to just be surfaced. And I think our playlist is the way to do it.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  New music festival in tech that's not Burning Man.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Like, we need to, we need to, we should maybe, you know, I don't, I don't go to live music events much, but.

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  And Justin Khan put a, put a song of him, I think it was actually at Burning Man, uh, on his YouTube channel. Let me see if I can find this.

• 1:27:46John Coogan?

  And it was a banger song. Uh, it was him, he's just been putting up like live sets recently. It's so sick. He has, he did like some interviews. He did some other, uh, some other stuff. Where was this? Playing our first EDC Orso at EDC, introducing Orso, which is like, this is like his new, his new band or something. But he put together this whole like vibe reel. And I, this, I, this song like really went hard.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Isn't this good?

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  I listen to this a lot.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  This isn't my playlist for a while. Justin Khan, this guy's fucking sick.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  It's so good.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Finding PMS to this song.

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  At EDC. How is that?

• 1:28:36Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome.

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  You know, you know the words.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  I know the words. I've listened to this so many times. It's really good. And it's just like, he's playing like a massive stage, like, damn, goals. Like, I love that.

• 1:28:51Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, if you're, if you're super liquid in, in tech, do some side quests.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  It's just, you can just do things. Like, go win the boxing match or whatever. Go climb that, like, hit those 14ers, you know? Do a-

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Do the gumball 3000?

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Do the gumball 3000, do a parry to car, you know? Get in the car, drive 3000 miles, do a cannonball, go to the moon, go to space.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  It's not hard. You can just do things.

• 1:29:15John Coogan?

  You can just do things. There's no excuse. Don't just be sitting around your mansion, uh, scrolling or whatever. Uh, let's move on to Jason Way. He says, y'all heard it from the man himself, and it's Ilya Sutskever, talking about how pre-training as we know it will end. Compute is growing, better hardware, better algorithms, larger clusters, but data is not growing. We have but one internet. It is the fossil fuel of AI. Lots of people talking about the data wall. Lots of people talking about how scaling will-

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Scale AI is just somewhere-

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  So excited.

• 1:29:47Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere-

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  I mean, I think the stock is like wild too. It's wild.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's not public, but you mean-

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  No, no, I mean, I think like secondary demand and stuff is like doing really well. And, and, and it's, it's such a mid-wit take to be like, oh, did you know that Scale AI uses third-party contractors? It's like, yeah, that's the whole point of the business. Like, have you heard of, uh, comparative advantage? Like, this is like econ 101, people. Like, you're not like blowing the doors off this thing by talking about it. It's so, it's so embarrassing when I see this take. I'm just like, yes, like, obviously, like, you need to write a bunch of answers and generate a bunch of data.

• 1:30:24Jordi Hays?

  Did you know that Uber doesn't own cars or hire drivers on W2s?

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  It's not a bear case for the company.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, it's interesting. I, I was wondering, like, okay, so what, what, what could drive the next- Era of exponential data growth because it has to come from humans. And I was kind of thinking about what that could be. And I think something along the lines of like a friend AI thing that you're wearing and it's recording 24 hours a day, seven billion people. I think that actually might generate

• 1:31:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  One or two more orders of magnitude of data.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  And maybe that's useful data. I think some of it would be very useful, but it requires a lot of trust because, you know, it needs to be anonymized and

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that could be like a UBI type thing. Like if you wear the pendant, you get like $5 a day.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, the world coin pendant or something like

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, I think it was the, who's the super base guy at XAI?

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Greg or something?

• 1:31:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:30Jordi Hays?

  He was just like, it's not that hard to get more data. You just like take pictures. That was basically or like put up cameras everywhere.

• 1:31:38John Coogan?

  Cameras, video feeds. Uh, I mean, I was talking to Nat Friedman about this and he was like, oh, people are worried about like, you know, will the AI be able to access the New York Times or something? And he was like, based on the data budgets of these AI companies, they could just buy all of the New York Times and just, or they could just pay, you know, way more journalists. They could hire every single journalist, double their salaries and they wouldn't even be scratching the surface of their data.

• 1:32:04Jordi Hays?

  They could give every journalist a billion dollars

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  And still have $200 billion left over.

• 1:32:09John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 1:32:11Jordi Hays?

  UBI for journalists.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  That, so much heartache could have been avoided with the, uh, New York Times lawsuits. If they, if OpenAI had just sent over some dressage horses.

• 1:32:20Jordi Hays?

  And they would have avoided a death potentially.

• 1:32:23John Coogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Oh, rough, rough, rough, rough. Uh, Andrew Huberman is saying lock the clock. We discussed this.

• 1:32:30Jordi Hays?

  Lock the clock.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  We love it. I like that he's coining a phrase 4K likes. People know it. You gotta have

• 1:32:35Jordi Hays?

  Lock the clock. Yeah, I said stop the, I thought he said stop the clock.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  Lock the clock is better. And he cites, uh, Stanford Med, Laura Weed says, uh, S time is one, uh, is the one to lock in standard time year round gives people greater opportunity to get morning sunlight necessary to shorten the period of their central circadian clock from Twenty four point two hours to twenty four hours to maintain synchrony with the, I presume, the sun. Um, cause it says show more here, but he breaks it down. Uh, yeah, this is great. I really hope this does happen. It'd be so cool. I, I mean, like, I'd probably enjoy it like practically, but I think I would more, I would much more enjoy just the fact that we did something and the fact that something has changed.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Made something.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  Uh, even like the Pluto thing, like the Pluto demotion. It's like you, you get to tell your kids, oh yeah, well, back when I was a kid, like there were more planets and then we learned more and we decided that there's less.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  I signed the petition.

• 1:33:26John Coogan?

  You wanted to keep Pluto?

• 1:33:27Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Or you wanted to remove Pluto?

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  I was in favor of removing it. Yeah. Don't give them the franchise.

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  Don't give them the franchise.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  It's like we've talked about, you know, there's people that wanna take over Canada, but they don't wanna give them a state, you know?

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's real regulatory capture for the rest of the planet. It's just reducing the oligopoly on Planethood. It's good. It's power law. This is the way. Next step is get the gaseous giants out of here. You're not landing on those. What are you doing? Get them out of there. Unless it's a rock.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Just push them out.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Third rock from the sun, not third cloud from the sun.

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Get some landmass.

• 1:34:01Jordi Hays?

  Get some, get some mass.

• 1:34:03John Coogan?

  Neptune. I think Neptune's a gas one. I actually don't remember. Okay. Word grammar. He's been on the show before. He says, I think.

• 1:34:12Jordi Hays?

  Emerging poster of the year potentially.

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. Potential rookie of the year. Uh, I think I have done a complete one eighty on Y Combinator's business model in the past twenty four hours. All of the economic gains from AI startups will be made by pre-seed investors. Any good AI product will be extremely hard to build, but easy to scale. Interesting. Distribution's the bottleneck and moat. Put a little asterix here behind the Frontier Labs, but they are a special case and not representative of the average startup. The funniest thing is that like, of course, the number one Frontier Lab like came literally out of Y Combinator.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43John Coogan?

  Um, but I, I, I like that.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  So the reason that this is a good take, the reason that I think this is a, is a generally a good take is that there's, we've seen this a lot with, with AI companies that... Raise pre-product and then generate so much revenue.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:59Jordi Hays?

  And are making so much money so quickly with such a small team that by the time a next financing happens, the company's raising 20 on 200.

• 1:35:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:07Jordi Hays?

  And it's just really hard to make like truly great returns doing that.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:11Jordi Hays?

  And so, because these companies oftentimes are not needing to do that intermediary, oh, we're gonna do four on 16 or something like that. They literally get the one YC round, maybe another two on 20, and then they're just making all this money.

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:25Jordi Hays?

  And so if you can buy a basket of those companies super early for pennies, it's like, yeah, but, but I don't think, uh, the critique of YC, everybody, everybody, like the, the primary way that people try to critique it is by saying, what's an important YC company that launched in the last like three years?

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Six months.

• 1:35:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's like, but the critique has never been, this is not a good business model.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh yeah, totally.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Some people try to critique it of like, oh, well, you're just having, it's a Ponzi scheme because you're just trying to have this company buy from this company. And it's like, that's just like fundamentally like true.

• 1:36:00John Coogan?

  It's just business.

• 1:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, of course they sell to each other early to get feedback. If you're enterprise, you should, or B2B, you should sell internally.

• 1:36:07John Coogan?

  Let's do one more promoted post. We'll close with this and then we'll get out of here and hop on with Rome.

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  I can't think of a better, uh, ending promoted post of the day than from our friends at DuPont Registry.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:36:19Jordi Hays?

  They have a 2024 Ferrari Purusangue presented in blue Corsa. This has an asking price of only $679,000, 908, yeah, $679,000. And I gotta say, these have been floating into the 700s frequently.

• 1:36:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  This is a fantastic spec. It is powered by a naturally aspirated V12.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:43Jordi Hays?

  Delivers over 700 horsepower, ensuring thrilling performance and a 0-60 time of around 3.3 seconds. Not as fast as my Turbo, but pretty good to be able to fit a family. In it and it's just a great looking car.

• 1:36:56John Coogan?

  And you know

• 1:36:56Jordi Hays?

  Started seeing these around LA and

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  The thing about the Purosangue is it is an expensive car, but think about what you're get. It's a performance car, it's a luxury car, and it's also potentially a family car. But it's something you can do business in. If you're a VC, you can take the whole founding team. It's not just you and the CEO. Throw the CTO in the back. Throw the chief operating officer in the back.

• 1:37:16Jordi Hays?

  Chief of staff even.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  Go out to Nobu, get some sushi, irashimase.

• 1:37:21Jordi Hays?

  Irashimase. Don't say it though.

• 1:37:23John Coogan?

  Don't say it.

• 1:37:23Jordi Hays?

  Don't say irashimase.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  But, but you know, bring the whole team and fundamentally, it is a lot of money, but it's a lot of car.

• 1:37:30Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:37:31John Coogan?

  And so, you know, you get what you pay for in this life.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34John Coogan?

  You gotta have money to make money.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if you're buying, if you're buying Ferrari, if you've bought an SF90 aftermarket and over the last couple of years, you lost

• 1:37:42John Coogan?

  You lost 700K.

• 1:37:44Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Make it all back on a Purosangue.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I don't know if you're gonna make it all back if you daily drive it, but you'll make it all back spiritually.

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Jordi Hays?

  By being in a, in a truly great.

• 1:37:52John Coogan?

  Well, you will show the Ferrari dealer, you'll show your dealer that you're committed to the brand.

• 1:37:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56John Coogan?

  You took the bath on the SF90, you're, maybe you're prepared to take another bath.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00John Coogan?

  But when the, when the F80 comes up, you're getting an allocation.

• 1:38:03Jordi Hays?

  Program.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  You're getting an allocation and that's what it's about in this life.

• 1:38:06Jordi Hays?

  That's where you'll make it back.

• 1:38:07John Coogan?

  It's great. Let's close with Rat Limit. Rat Limit has a fantastic bait post.

• 1:38:14Jordi Hays?

  Thank, thank God for posters with great usernames.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:38:20Jordi Hays?

  Because it would make, the show would be much less interesting.

• 1:38:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, if it's just Steve.

• 1:38:23Jordi Hays?

  Steve.

• 1:38:25John Coogan?

  Uh, Rat Limit says, that Polly impulse to hack relationships with tech. I printed QR codes on my GF's panties. Her playmates get instant access to an info sheet on my and our boundaries. A bit nerdy? Yup. But what won her over? I 100% trust you. I want to trust your sweeties too. And it's a picture of some underwear with a QR code on it and I mean, I, this is one of those things that I'm like, I'm 90% sure this is a bait post, but it's like so real that it could be.

• 1:38:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I don't, I'm fortunate that whatever side of tech X that we're on, this stuff doesn't pop up for me, except if somebody's dunking.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:05Jordi Hays?

  This was a dunk.

• 1:39:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:39:07Jordi Hays?

  This was a screenshot. I think it's probably deleted.

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  But I think it was, I think it was designed to bait. And I think if you look at the rest of the posts and, and some of the replies were like crying, laughing, like, okay, people get it. Obviously, you know, polyamory is very popular in the Bay Area. This is kind of a play on that. But why I want to highlight this is, is not for the culture war debate over poly, but instead, the, the beauty of the virality here that there's a picture of an item with a QR code on it. And when you scan the QR code, you actually get taken to this info sheet, this website that this person built that has more content about this post. And again, I think it's very funny.

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  I don't know if it's real, but, um, but it's, it creates this cycle where you have to scan the image, but the image is on your phone. So it's kind of tricky. You need like a second phone or something to scan the QR code. But then you're taken to this website. And I think that there's something here from a format perspective that could be very viral marketing for a company. And so it like, if we did a drop and we were like, we're dropping these coffee mugs and the coffee mugs have our logo on one side and a QR code on the other side. But then when you scan the QR code, they take you to some video or some website that we designed. It becomes this like online to offline to online experience.

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  And then people are going down this rabbit hole and then they will screenshot where the QR code takes you.

• 1:40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  And share that. And it becomes this like rabbit hole for these people. And I think that's a big part of why this went so viral was that it wasn't just, there's a QR code and I blurred out the QR code. No, it's like, QR code's there. You can see, and if you went on there, there were all these other jokes and stuff baked in. It was very high effort and I thought it was a very good marketing stunt. Uh, if it's a marketing stunt, even if it's, even if it's real and it's cringe, um, there's clearly a lesson in there for.

• 1:40:59Jordi Hays?

  I respect the innovation.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  I respect the innovation. Exactly.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Do your thing, Rat Limit.

• 1:41:03John Coogan?

  So let's wrap up there. I gotta hop on with the Vatican, so I will talk to you later. Merry Christmas.

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  Merry Christmas.