How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, Some Personnel News, Absolute Dawgs, Build that Ego

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

• 0:04John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are covering Max Meyer's latest edition of Arena Magazine. You've heard us talk about it before. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Literature.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  Literature that you can buy. Quarterly magazine from Max. If you don't know Max, great guy, great follow on X, some great posts, talks about a lot of different things, works with Joe Lonsdale at 8VC and has started publishing this beautiful magazine all about techno optimism, technology companies, business.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  Making the moon a state.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Everything. He covers tons of stuff and the, and it's just beautifully, beautifully made. You really have to go and pick one of these up. He has a deal, it's not that expensive. I think it's a hundred bucks a year, 25 bucks a pop. And it's something that you could just have on your coffee table and people could leaf through. And, and it's, it's just, it's so well. And you know what the best thing about this is? Monetize from day one. Beautiful ads in the very first edition.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  See that Ramp ad in there?

• 1:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic. This Ramp ad's great. There's a great Levels ad, there's tons of, tons of beautiful ads in here, which we love to see.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is just a good example of even if you're monetizing through your users, you should still, you know, directly via subscription, still run ads, right? I want to see more Substacks, paid Substacks, running ads, right?

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And he said, he said something interesting where he's like, kind of building this community of advertisers. I think one third of the tech stack that he uses to build the magazine and run is, is an active advertiser. So it's kind of like a one hand washes the other situation. But there's just a beautiful layout. You can just see that you just don't get this in any other magazine. It's just, it's just very, very rare. And it's just so, so fun, so many interesting pieces.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  It's the same level of, I don't know, when you were, when I was a kid, I subscribed to Popular Science.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  Which these days is probably like popular propaganda. But the same level of excitement that I used to get as a kid, getting Popular Science in the mail, which was just like euphoria. I get this with Arena now.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  There, there is one, I have to take one issue with this. It's printed in, in Kanada? Some.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  Kanata.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Ca- Canada?

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Where?

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is some far off place and so hopefully they can clean that up because I don't know what's.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  That actually feels a little off, off.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  But it's beautiful.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  You wouldn't want it to rub off.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  No, no, no, definitely not.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, put on some gloves.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  But, but a ton of, a ton of interesting articles in this edition. They have a whole deep dive on Rahul, who you might know as.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  Ligma?

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Ligma, yes.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Ligma?

• 2:51John Coogan?

  The Ballad of Rahul Ligma, Rahul Solwakar.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  And how he built his company and it goes through his prank at X, formerly Twitter, Outside with the Box, one of the greatest moments in tech history.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  The reaction time on that is incredible and only a real poster could have done that. Cause oftentimes when a news breaks, you have 20, 30 minutes to get a banger out.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  And he didn't even just get a banger, he physically got there with a box.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  I had dinner with him the night before this happened.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  And he was not playing, he wasn't talking.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  No, it was out in the moment.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  He just woke up and just did.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Just like most, most posts are created in the moment, right?

• 3:29John Coogan?

  And the acting, like you can see it on his face that he's just like so sad that he got fired.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  Incredible actor, yeah.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  It's so funny. And there, there was a time when that, when like these types, there's a whole movie about this, the, it's called like the Other Guys or something.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Where this, this, this comedy troupe basically figured out how they could go on the BBC and they would, and they would act like they were oil executives and be like, yes, we're really sorry for what we did. We're giving away $10 billion and the stock would drop. And they would get sued if they didn't have any money because they're just trolls. And it was like amazing and this was like that, this was like that level.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, the, the funny thing that I remember that happening and I, and I knew Daniel, like I'd, I'd met up with him. I'd actually, funny enough, met up with him at Arowan once. And so watching that unfold live, I was like, wait, this is, this is like obviously not real. But even a large part of X like didn't know that it was a prank.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  Everybody was pranked at once and it took like a while for people to be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. These are posters, these are not.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  He was texting me as like, as the day went on, kind of talking about like, hey, all these journalists are like hitting me up now to like, tell my story. We were like, do not say anything, just like let the meme live, you crushed it. And it just led to all these incredible meetings. I mean, here's a picture of him with Jensen Wong. Here's a picture of him with Elon Musk.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's amazing because they both parlayed that into building like very unique, very interesting businesses.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. They didn't get hooked on the stunts. They didn't become content creators, but, um, but it's just fantastic. And I mean, there's a bunch of other cool articles in here. There's one, I mean, look at this there and back again, celebrating the SpaceX catch.

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  The greatest catch of all time.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Um, just so, so nice to see these in print, then a beautiful ad for Intercom. And some questions about.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess the question is like, if you're running a scale up or even an early stage company, why are you not advertising in this magazine right now? Because it's such a way to signal, uh, to the tech elite that you get it and that you're cool.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, even if your brand isn't even that cool by itself.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's a really, it's a really lovely tour of like the new generation of tech founders, like Nora Siddiqui's in here for Orchid Health and she, and you will see her and other people mentioned in this, in this article, also in like the Jason Carmen S3 video series. But then now this lives in like the print world as well. And there's a few different, um, kind of like, it's almost like the media junket. When you're doing like a promotion for a movie, you'll go and you'll do like Jimmy Kimmel and then Fallon and then Colbert or whatever. And the, the, the tech version of that is like, you do a Jason Carmen S3, you do, you, you go on Dorkesh or you go on to, you know, some other podcast and then you, you know, write an article for Max in Arena.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If I, if I was a series A stage founder right now, I'd be trying to get a feature in this magazine at all, at all costs. Cause how do you get in front of a more curated, uh, group of, of people in tech?

• 6:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. San Francisco strikes back and just like wonderful layout, wonderful, wonderful to, to look at. Open Source Defense Capital, Mission to Europa.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  Just beautiful. I love this. I'm excited to read through this more. I just received it in the mail two days ago. But we wanted to do a deep dive today on kind of the lead hero piece of this edition. And did you read the, did you read the actual letter from the editor where Max writes Americapunk? The whole thesis of this particular.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  The first page here?

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Edition, the second page. So the first page is Max introducing the corporation name. A message from the president of the Intergalactic Media Corporation of America. Very bullish on making humanity multi-planetary. But what I found interesting was his article on Americapunk, just this idea that, that you can wind up. And this really struck a chord with me because his basic thesis is like, is like, good things are good. But it's sometimes boring to say that. And so he kind of walks through like capitalism is good for a bunch of reasons. It's lifted 2 billion people out of subsistence poverty and it's the greatest engine for human flourishing since we've captured fire.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  And people will say, oh no, that's bad. Going to space will be very expensive. The idea of learning is racist. Western medicine is racist. And so there's these wars between like, you know, bad things are good, good things are good. But at a certain point, it becomes boring to just say, good things are good. It's boring, like really boring. It's a tautology. It's what your dad believes. And once you admit that good things are good, then you have to spend your time making and defending good things, which is hard because good things are often hard to do.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Funny because it actually became countercultural to be like, no, capitalism is amazing, right? Like, I feel like as a 28-year-old, I grew up in a school system in which the teachers, which ironically, the American public school system. The teachers were saying like, here's all the issues with capitalism and like really fixating on the issues. Not talking about the advancements in medicine, education, housing, all these different things that have allowed for human flourishing.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so Max argues that.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  But even if defending good things isn't very interesting, it's still important. And so, good things need to be made cool again. America needs to be made punk. America needs America punk.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  And so, as one of the world's best things, America has a problem. It's currently very boring to defend America. As of now, supporting America means your dad waving a flag on the 4th of July, your mom scolding you to be more grateful at dinner. Defending America means a solemn forced Flag Day singing in elementary school. But if you wanted to defend America in a cool way, how would you go about doing it? And his answer is that you'd celebrate rebelliousness, the spirit that made the country. There's nothing cooler than a rebellion, and that's America punk. And so, he wants to separate it from these visions of the future that are like steampunk, cyberpunk, atom punk, that are too narrow around a particular technology, and refocus on the spirit of the American people, which I think is very, very interesting. So, grab a flag and a magazine, tell your friends to join the party,

• 9:53John Coogan?

  because if good things are good, then defending good things is better together. And then he says, "Thanks."

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  And it's just a very, yeah, it is an interesting thing that like techno optimism has become consensus. There's this idea that, you know, everyone is posting like, "Oh, the next four years are going to be amazing." Unbridled techno capitalism.

• 10:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that is very much a, we are in somewhat of a bubble, even though it's overlaps with the real world.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  But we still need to continue doing it, even though it's mainstream within technology now.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. But there's something about like when you're, when you're on top of the world and you're, you know, just winning and it's very consensus, like there's nowhere to go but down.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  And that's very risky. So, I think he's, he's right to identify that we need to think deeper about what like rah rah technology actually means.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  Which I think is good that he's thinking now, instead of in a year when people are like, "Oh yeah, it's boring, like I'm not into this, I'm not motivated by this."

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that ties into Joe's piece though, which is it's not enough to just be excited about technology. You actually need to, and I think a lot of our, a lot of the technology beaners out there are starting to realize that. There is, you sort of can reach a level of impact in the private markets and then to have the next order, you know, of magnitude of impact, you need to get involved with government.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  Because it's a huge, huge, critical aspect of our society and, and the people that run the government and the decisions that they make have a massive impact on our, on our quality of life. And so many different systems from mental health institutions to prisons.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  This is a massive shift from a decade ago where Balaji gave that talk at Y Combinator called Silicon Valley's ultimate exit. Are you familiar with this? So there's this, I, I forget what his name is. There's some philosopher and he basically said like, when you're, when you're living within a society that has a particular government, you have a few options, voice, exit, and something else. I'm blanking on all of this, but, but basically it's like, you can stay and fight and try and reform the government, or you can leave.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  And Balaji was part of the, you know, libertarian crew that was like, let's go to maybe New Zealand, let's do sea steading, let's do ice steading, let's, let's do, you know, interplanetary colonization. Let's leave because things are so broken, we can't fix it. And that was the dominant thesis of most Silicon Valley elites for a long time.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  And only recently, I feel like people have shifted.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I, my personal, sort of personal anecdote here during COVID, living in LA, things were getting so dark.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I mean, it sounds silly saying this, but like, they couldn't, they didn't let you go to the beach.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  You really basically couldn't be outside.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  It was crazy.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  So I was like, why am I living in California?

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  If I can't go outdoors and be away from people.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  And Joe left California during that time.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  So, and I, and I got very caught up in that.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  Like my, my experience in like April of 2020 was like on Zillow, looking at property in Austin and Miami and, and getting very caught up in, up in that. And fortunately, I decided to stay in California and sort of like try to have a small impact. So I, and that ended up having being like, you know, I ended up backing like a city councilwoman who had came in and made a tremendous impact on the west side, right? Ended up more recently, uh, supported, uh, our new DA Hawkman, who is, uh, you know, gonna do it, have an incredible impact, sort of cleaning up the city, making crime illegal again.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  Doing things like that. And so I decided to say like, no, I was born and raised in California. I'm staying here.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna make it better, even in small ways.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  And if, if, if people with agency just decide to leave.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  Things will just get worse and worse and worse.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  So we need.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  It's Albert Hirschman, exit, voice and loyalty. So you can leave the government that you're under. You can have a voice and try and change the government, or you can just be loyal to the government. And I think no one in tech wants to do the last one.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  That's why I couldn't even think of it.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Because no one's advocating for that. But it, but it is interesting that Joe went through a period of exit with regard to California, but has chosen to opt for voice within the confines of America.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's also, he didn't exit the United States. Yeah.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  He didn't exit the United States.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  And he started whatever, University of Texas, or what's the name of it?

• 14:21John Coogan?

  University of Austin.

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  University of Austin, which is like, hey, we actually need to.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  You know, create these sort of like hideouts where we can build the movement without, you know.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  So you can think of him as kind of like long America, short California.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Which is like a totally reasonable trade.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  And so this is fascinating because, you know, you think of him as like, you know, Palantir, like almost PayPal mafia-esque guy.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Very libertarian. And yet he's writing this article that's literally called, "How to Spend a Trillion Dollars."

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  And so you, you know, the, the drumbeat of the technologist and libertarian for so long was just spend less, spend less, spend less. And he's completely reframing this thought experiment to.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  Say what happens if you get a dozen top entrepreneurs in the United States together? And just tell, just ask them, how would you spend a trillion dollars? Not, he's not talking about buying artwork or planes, the type of things lottery winners might spend a new fortune on. Rather, how would they spend public money to strengthen the future of American society? And suppose further that you could skip the red tape? How would it be different than the way we currently spend trillions? And so he breaks this down into nine parts. And I love all of these. They're very pragmatic, but they're also very techno optimistic. And it's just a fascinating tour of all the different problems in America right now. And how you could go about solving them if you were very aggressive with the spending, but also very like laser focused.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  So the first proposal he has is for $200 billion.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  A small price.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  Crushed traffic and the cost of living in our 50 largest metropolitan areas. And so his, his argument here is that the average traffic, the annual cost of traffic congestion in Texas has reached over a thousand dollars per commuter in wasted fuel and time. With the average commuter, commuter losing 54 hours in traffic each year. And LA residents, as you well know, lose over 80 hours in traffic per year. For you, it's probably 80 hours a month.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  80 hours a month. No, for me, I wouldn't say I lost it because I'm either doing deals or listening to founders podcasts. Right? There's no in between.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  It's all about frame of mind.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, frame of mind.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Or, or charging $10,000 an hour on intro.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  So if you're making money while you're on the call, then you're good. But basically, you know, he's saying, Los Angeles can't build a subway tunnel for less than a billion dollars per mile. How could 200 billion meaningfully improve 50 cities? The answer is competence. Here I went, I once wrote the mayor of Austin about new technology with proven economics, tunneling. And so he's advocating for building more tunnels, most likely through the Boring Company.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is like, so the Boring Company is like that sleeper company in the Musk portfolio.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Everyone hates it. Dude, if you go on YouTube and you search like Boring Company update, it's just all of these communists posting videos of Elon Musk with a clown nose on and they're like, it's not working, it's not working. And it's like, you don't realize that you're giving him the attention. Like you could have made those same videos about Tesla for 10 years when they like were barely shipping any cars.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  It's like, you don't understand how this works. Like he spends 20 years on something and then all of a sudden it's like, fuck, there are tunnels everywhere. Like there are maybe too many tunnels. It's like, most people would say like, there's too many Teslas out there now.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So my, my, uh, my roommate, uh, worked for the Boring Company.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, my roommate, the first year I lived in, in LA out of school. And, uh, yeah, he ended up moving to Vegas because that was like where they could get a deal done and they, they're building out a bunch of, uh, tunnels there. So I'm excited. I mean, that'll be.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  And people love to harp on, oh, the tunnel got some water in it. It's flooding, it's failed. And it's like, maybe, maybe, but maybe not. Maybe he'll just keep working on it and he'll just fund it forever until it works. And, but the, the, the very like fundamental, like economic physics, like the laws of physics around the project, to me are just so obvious because it's like, you have a, a, a resource, which is essentially land underneath cities that's extremely valuable that no one has access to.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  And so if you can get access to it, that's just incredibly valuable.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, theoretically, there's way less laws if you go 100 feet underground than above ground, where it takes a billion dollars to make a mile of track because there's so much regulatory burden and, and approvals needed. And, and, oh, we need to buy, we need to like buy this person's property for some egregious price because like, you know, 10 square feet of it, like touch where the track would be.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  All that kind of stuff. So just the, the, and the solution is just like go underground.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  And I think there was this, there was a, there was a change in the law where you used to, if you bought property, you used to own. Like technically, essentially, everything from the core to the earth, all the way to the sky.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  And then eventually they said, no, there is a cap, so planes can fly over you and stuff.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And they did that underground. It used to be that if you owned a piece of land, you could pull as much water from the aquifer below you as you wanted.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  And now everybody's like, no, this is actually a shared resource. Like you, you can't just pull as much as you want.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Well, have you ever been on the red line out to Harvard in Boston or Cambridge? It's the craziest thing. So you're on this train that's just going straight, like subway, it just works really well.

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:31John Coogan?

  And then all of a sudden it slows down and starts screeching as you're pulling into Harvard. And the reason is because in seventeen seventy-six or something.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  George Washington wrote a letter to Harvard and said, I am granting you this land permanently, no matter what, cannot be revoked under any circumstances. And so they own the land like forever and all the way to the core still.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  They have some like tech, they have some like different definition of what real estate means for them.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  And so when the subway came, they were just like, no, which is really stupid because it would have been so much better for everyone if they'd just been like, yes.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  Self-own.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  But, but, but yeah, it like, it like screeches around the corner to get there because because they were like, no, like you can't, you can't dig under us.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's our dirt.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  We own everything.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  And, and, and our proof is a letter from George Washington.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Like, because they were there before, before the country.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  It's older than the country, I'm pretty sure. I think it's like sixteen hundred. Uh, it's crazy. So, uh, Joe maps out a couple more stats. Um, he says, uh, he says, while saving over ninety percent versus above-ground infrastructure with costs of a single tunnel about ten million per mile, add, adding a second direction in some places as well as stations and egress about every mile brings the total cost of twenty-five million per mile. Uh, in twenty twenty, we mapped out a sample Austin system for one billion connecting the airport, several downtown locations and the Q two soccer stadium. The project has more connections than the proposed five billion above-ground rail line at a fifth of the cost. For five billion, it connects a much larger area.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the interesting thing with tunnels is it's actually like a very good fit for. Uh, like robot taxis.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  Because it's such a more controlled environment.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  You're not gonna have like a dog run through the tunnel.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  Or like some kid come out of school.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Or like cars doing crazy stuff.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  The current Tesla, like.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  Could do it.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  Full self-driving system could easily do that, no problem. And, and is like, that's kind of what's, what's happening in the Vegas.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and, and every time you think that, uh, like, I, I would love to see like the Walt Dis- Walt Disney had his like, you know, master plan multi-year of like out how all of his companies interact.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm sure Elon has his version of that.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  It's like, we're building the robot taxis, which will be ready when like all of my tunnel networks like come online. And then like all, every, you know, 50% of people that move in the United States will be in like a, in one of our tunnels.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  Or like one of our cars or both at the same time.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  It really is just like Musk, Inc., 100%. Uh, so let's go to number two. Joe Lonsdale says, for 100 billion, take back our prison system from incompetent bureaucrats. Says, America has two forms of Stockholm syndrome in its approach to criminal justice. Coming from the extremist left, there is a desire to coddle violent criminals and allow repeat victimization in the name of social justice. But across the political spectrum, there's another problem. The total capture of the prison system by bureaucrats, unions and corporations whose incompetence we tolerate. Speaking of Stockholm, when the American criminologist Francis Cullen won the, won the Swedish government Stockholm prize, he proposed to spend $10 billion in new prisons. His framework was as follows. 10 prisons will be developed, each funding, each funded at 1 billion each.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  The competition of proposals would be undertaken in which states would partner with criminologists and prison experts from around the world, as well as from private enterprises to set forth a model for prisons. Each prison proposal must be shown to a rational scientific and to nourish the development of prisoners. In each proposed prison, each prisoner must be engaged every day in activity, education, work or treatment. And there would be ongoing process and outcome evaluation by a team of researchers. The Cullen framework is a fine start, but if a bit idealistic, not all prisoners need to be nourished. Some are hardened killers to be locked away, but approximately 600,000 people leave prison each year. And an estimated 95% of prisoners will eventually return to our society.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this this segment on like paying for, there's been a few, well, yeah, paying for performance, like, almost like recruiter style, where if you work with a recruiter in tech, and they don't find you anyone good, and you don't hire anyone, you don't really, you know, maybe you pay a little bit, like a small retainer, but you don't pay much. And the same concept is is being, has been applied, it was applied in, he talks about how it was applied in Arizona, where the state allowed county governments to collect up to forty percent of the cost savings to the state when fewer people under their parole and probation supervision went back to prison. And so that incentive just allowed, made the institutions actually care about,

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  care about the long term outcomes of their prisoners, which I think is fantastic.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Palmer Lucky actually said that he was thinking about doing private prisons before starting Andorol. And Andorol was just like a much bigger, much more important job, but he thought that there was an interesting, yeah. And it is crazy that he, I mean, he mentioned that like, maybe five years ago. I'm surprised that no one's run with it. And we haven't seen like a venture backed prison startup, but I think-

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  That's, that sounds like a task for Will Monitis.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, and Theo can do that, before their next, their next big one.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like, if Palmer's throwing out ideas like that, you'd think, but it's not enough to just say like, oh, Palmer like validated the idea, so I'm running with it. Like, it's clearly like you need-

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  It takes a very special person to be able to do that and thread the needle. Yeah, the, you know how-

• 24:50John Coogan?

  I'm sure it's a very rough, like, industry to work in. Like, my mom was a nurse in prisons, and it, like, it's just brutal at every level. Like, from like, the sheriff department, like, while she was there, I think the sheriff like went to prison because like, he was like super corrupt, like-

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, what about all those, there were, there were a handful of, of tech elite that went to prison because they were paying to get their kids into schools. And so we need to go after those people who like, experience the prison system and be like, hey, like, let's make a change here.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Martha Stewart, Angel-

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  You understand, you understand the product, right? Like, let's like, make this better. But, you know when people will, will post a picture of like a Nordic prison, and they'll be like, it'll, they'll try to like, critique it and be like, look how nice this prison is, like, like, I'm sure that people just want to go to prison. It's like, nobody wants their freedom taken away. We, our prisons should be places that- Allow, in general, like, there's people that are too far gone, I strongly believe that, that just need to be locked up forever. Like, they just, you know, didn't fail the test, like, you, you know, you should be gone. But then there's this whole contingent of people that obviously should be in an environment that is conducive to personal growth, to learning, to even just being in a mental state that

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  allows them to think more positively about life, right? And like, build their self-esteem back up, because, you know, going and being thrown in effectively a dungeon is not going to be conducive to the mindset that you want those people, when they are those 600,000 people that are released every year, you want them to be in a mindset where they don't hate the system, right? Because then they're just going to continue to rebel against it.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  I wonder what Martin Scully thinks about prison reform. I bet he would have some very interesting takes.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  He talked, I mean, he talked about, he talked about, at Hereticon, he talked a bit about his, his experience in prison and why you have Diddy and SBF in the same, in the same prison in Brooklyn. But, longer, longer conversation there.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's move on to part three. Joe says, "For $100 billion, build 21st century mental health institutions." So, very related to the previous point. We'll, we'll read the lead-in here. "At the peak of institutionalization in 1955, nearly half a million people in the United States were in mental hospitals. The 1962 book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the movie Two dramatically changed how Americans viewed that system. And not totally without reason, the system had obvious defects and needed reforms. But generations later, after we ended nearly all institutionalization, we have a serious crisis in our society. Many people with serious but treatable mental illnesses that would have benefited from institutionalization have been left to prison and the street."

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  So, this, this was the thing that stood out here.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  This guy, Christopher Ruffo.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  Found that in his home state of Washington, the per capita number of state mental health hospital beds had declined by over 90% since the 60s. And anybody who's been out in the real world, like, would, would probably guess that, like, our, our mental health issues have not, sort of, reduced by 90%.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  And you can see that on the streets.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  On the streets.

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, I know...

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  I was talking to a CEO that like a very successful like founder CEO talking about his you know families like battles with you know bipolar and how alone you feel when you're dealing with that because there's no it's literally like it is 100% on the family to provide that level of care and there's almost like no quality resources that can help kind of like address that it's incredibly challenging to deal with.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting because at least in California, there's this story that might be somewhat apocryphal that like all of the mental health institution closures are due to Ronald Reagan.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  And I'm not sure how true that is. I'm sure it was like a process, but it's fascinating because it's it's actually a very libertarian and and and somewhat right wing philosophy. But if you look at a political compass, there's like left wing libertarianism, right wing libertarianism. They're kind of two different things culturally. But there is a libertarian argument to say, you know what? Keep the government out of everything. Keep the government out of my mind. Keep the government out of what I do. If I want to sleep on the street, that's that should be my freedom. But the argument that I've heard that's much better and much more convincing to me is that no, like as a society, we have a duty to step in and help people who are suffering and and it

• 29:30John Coogan?

  is unacceptable to let someone do drugs to death on the street and we have a moral duty to step in, even if that does have a little bit more of an authoritarian bent relative to the libertarian, like you can just do whatever you want. But it's odd that like libertarian position has kind of been adopted by the left to some degree because you would normally think that of someone who's like, well, no, I don't want my tax dollars going to a mental institution. And no, if I go crazy, I want to be able to do whatever I want, like stay out of it. Right? That's kind of a that's kind of a libertarian position. And yet it's become like the standard on the left very oddly.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which is why I mean, I think this entire piece is is a very interesting perspective from Joe, who's very libertarian.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  In general, to just like, take an opinion of like, okay, like, I'll, you know, run this exercise of how you might, because the money's gonna get spent.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  One way or another.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  It's like a venture-backed startup, like, if you raise, like, the United States raises, like, five, six trillion dollars a year, like, they're gonna spend the money.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Let's go to number four. Uh, number, proposal number four is for fifty billion dollars, uh, you can make our, our inner cities a place where children thrive. Lonsdale endorses, uh, Brad Gersner's idea to give every American child, oh, whoops, that's the wrong one, uh, Lonsdale proposes spending fifty billion dollars to replicate successful community programs like the Harlem Children's Zone. I hadn't heard about H C Z. Have you heard about this?

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Because it's funded by, uh, Geoffrey Canada and Ken Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller. And it, it, it covers an area of a hundred blocks in Harlem, and apparently, um, it's been, it's been remarkably successful and very, very high ROI. And so his argument is just like, we need to scale this, the, the one program that's actually working, basically just like, put more wood behind fewer arrows.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Um, confronting issues directly, such as a need for male role models and addressing maternal drug use, the program has significantly improved test scores and future income prospects for participating children. And there was some stat in here about, uh, yeah, I love this one. The benefits to the public are enormous. Converting a high school dropout to a high school graduate is worth more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in public costs over a lifetime.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  So, um, like, huge, hugely, hugely, this is exactly like where the government should be investing.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Um, so I love that. Scaling such models would involve rewarding programs that achieve measurable positive outcomes, aiming to reduce intergenerational poverty, and creating environments where children can succeed. Love it. There's some great pictures from the Harlem Children's Zone.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Uh, step five is for one hundred billion dollars, give every American child a stake in our economic future.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this has been something that Brad, over at Altimeter, has been, um, talking about for years, and is actually making some substantial moves on, because it's, it's really not that great of an investment to give every new child in America a thousand dollars in an index fund the day that they're born.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  And over time... You know, through compounding, it'll become like a very meaningful amount of money that would help them buy their first home, pay for college and teach them about the power of compounding growth, which we understand here on this podcast because we went from zero to a thousand followers on X in, you know, a few weeks and we're going to get to that second, you know, thousand follower mark, 2000, you know, in about seven days. So people like the more that we can educate the youth in this country on compounding growth and be able to not just like learn about it, but experience it directly. I think that'll be very powerful.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is really hard to get hooked on long-term compounding growth.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Like it's so easy to experience the euphoria of buying a lottery ticket. Like I still remember the day I bought my first lottery ticket and I was like, I'm going to win. This is happening for me. It was the only lottery ticket I ever bought. But for that like week while I was waiting for the numbers to come up, I was like completely delusional. And I was like, of course I'm not going to win. Like this is so stupid. I should never do this. But, but it's very hard for something that grows slowly. So imagine if like over the first 10 years of your life, you're just watching this account go up and up and up.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  And not being able to touch it.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  Because like the other, the other thing is.

• 33:43John Coogan?

  Ingrain this psychologically at a very young age.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  We're, we're, you know, we obviously love bubbles and speculation and, you know, being risk on, but kids are getting exposed to meme coins in like middle school now, which is like an unregulated lottery. Like they, you have to be 18 to buy a lottery ticket, right?

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  So these kids are able to go in middle school, buy Solana meme coins and, you know, they think they're going to turn $17 into $3 million like that guy did with, with Peanut. But it's teaching this sort of like experience of instant gratification and low effort for potentially extreme ROI. But it's basically just encouraging, you know, gambling or.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Lottery ticket buying, so.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  It's a big issue.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Step six in Joe's plan is for $50 billion, restore the American industrial skill base.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this, this, this, um, this reminded me, a few episodes ago, I was talking about a guy that I use for like handyman stuff.

• 34:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  He was telling me like, oh, I'm learning how to like build websites.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  And I told him, I was like, that's great, but like, you realize there's, there's infinite other things that you could do that you're probably already like more competent in.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  That if you just really specialized, you could make a very meaningful like six-figure income and have like very little competition in doing that. We don't need people that, we don't need more people that know how to build websites, right? We need more people that know how to do like, you know, I think somewhere in this article.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  The example is tooling engineers. So he opens with, "Apple CEO Tim Cook once remarked, 'In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.'" And this is why they're kicking, kicking our ass on, on, you know, iPhone and electronics manufacturing.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  Manufacturing broadly.

• 35:33John Coogan?

  Because there's so many integrated parts and there's so many, you know, little CNC engineers, little, uh, you know, all, all sorts of little tools that need to be made. And the tools that make the tools, like, there's like 20, 20 layers deep in the supply chain and we've just lost so much of that.

• 35:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think we're in this amazing moment in time where we have like a bunch of friends of the podcast that are building, you know, people like Aaron, um, the Dirac.

• 35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  Kid, uh, I forget his name.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Phil.

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  Phil, right? So people like Aaron and Phil that are, uh, building manufacturing company here in the US. Hadrian, deterrence.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  There's so many.

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  So many important companies, but what they're going to run into, like, a big challenge is not even just making these new manufacturing systems, but is a talent thing, right? Like, how do you actually find people that are qualified? And a lot of these companies will end up in a place where they're like, "We have six open roles that are all six-figure jobs and we don't know where to find these people." Right? And it's actually good for the people that do know how to do it, but a lot of those people are retiring, right? And they're not, we need a new influx of manufacturing talent and, uh, these are very like.

• 36:42Jordi Hays?

  They are jobs that require you to like use your hands and use your body, but they're jobs that will give people real dignity over going and working at Chipotle.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  You know, or going and working in the McDonald's drive through because you're being very productive. You're like producing things that matter, not just producing junk food.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:01Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  There are some risks. Have you heard of the Sonoran Desert Institute, SDI? Have you ever heard of this?

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Okay, so it's a very popular sponsor on gun YouTube. So gun reviewing YouTube, they often say if you're interested in getting into like the manufacturing gunsmithing, you should go to the Sonoran Desert Institute, which is an online college blew up during COVID. And they teach you like the basics of how to use machinery and use tooling to become a gunsmith and go work in the arms industry. Very cool idea. And the economic model works very well for them because they're GI Bill compliant. And so if you come back from the military and you have GI Bill dollars that you could put towards college, you can put that towards SDI. Now, there was a bunch of criticism recently about SDI not actually driving better outcomes and kind of just giving you like very basic high level stuff.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  Because like gunsmithing is such a, you need to do, like a lot of these things like are better suited for an apprentice model. So I want to see trade schools.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  That have government incentives.

• 38:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  That then feed you and do apprentice programs.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  And people, like I always tell, you know, I told, you know, my handyman buddy, I'm like, go find somebody who's very talented at one specific thing.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  And offer to work for them for $30,000 a year.

• 38:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  And do 12 hour days and do that for two years and you'll come out of that being close to an expert, right? Like you'll learn enough during that period.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, so Joe's solution here, he points to Texas in 2014. They aligned incentives and funding for its technical colleges and started paying the schools based on how much the student earned. They can fake graduation rates, they can fake teaching skills, but they cannot fake the results income. This approach resulted in a doubling of the total amount of money being made by students in just six years. Money that goes back into Texas through local taxes. When bureaucrats have a strong financial incentive to deliver better results, they will. And I love that.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of, you know, just like there was an explosion of like effectively trade schools for software engineering. The same exact thing, you could do that for machining, plumbing, electrical work. All those sort of like, you know,

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  Specialized categories.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  So let's go to number seven for $200 billion. One of the bigger ideas, create better funders of science in America. Lonsdale proposes allocating $200 billion over 10 years to establish new competitive funding bodies for scientific research, challenging the dominance of institutions like the National

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  Institute of Health.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  He argues that the NIH has become risk averse and bureaucratic, often stifling innovation by creating alternative organizations that reward high risk, high reward research and empower young scientists, the US can invigorate scientific progress. This is something we were just talking about in that group chat.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think venture capital has like stepped in here to some degree.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  A little bit, yeah.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  Cause they'll be like, you know, the, um, the long journey team will like find, give some like researcher basically like 200K to two cap to be like, just work on this like weird idea for a couple of years. And that's like, cool. And we need that, like, that's risk capital, but our government should also be giving like basically risk capital.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  To like important sort of scientific pursuits.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  It goes to that discussion we were having in that group chat about like invention versus discovery.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Just this idea that, you know, some of the biggest breakthroughs in, in science have been more discoveries than inventions, not very diligent. It wasn't really us working at something.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  Like lizard venom.

• 40:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, lizard venom is a good example with Ozempic, but even penicillin, I think is it's this, uh, our friends were referring to it as the gentleman scientist, the, the person who's just experimenting and testing things and then just locks upon something really, really remarkable.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  So many important discoveries.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  And it's, and it's very hard to facilitate that these days in the traditional academic institutions or the typical tracks where it's like, there's a certain amount of time you have to publish a paper, you have to get this many reviews and this many citations. And it's become, uh, too rigid. And so he definitely wants to pull it back from that.

• 41:00Jordi Hays?

  So one thing that, you know, he suggests is saying that, um, like a, a public scientific funder would be. Filling in and funding research gaps where innovation isn't profitable.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  And so there's so many, there's so many drugs that potentially have impact in like areas that they weren't initially like approved for. That are non-profitable to fund research in because you might have to spend 20, 50 million dollars like proving out that something works. And then it's not, it's a generic drug.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  So there's no like margin to be made or like edge or like IP that you can create. And so there's so many different areas where that applies and honestly, it's like the oftentimes like bro scientists that are like doing this like research like on themselves. Right. In many ways, like Brian Johnson is doing a lot of this on himself where he's just like, I'm going to spend millions of dollars like figuring out how to sleep like 5% better. Because that's going to deliver like the best.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  Some of the, the greatest, I mean, we're seeing this all over the place where I think Gorn is probably one of the most respected like researchers on stimulants. Josie Zainer developed like her own vaccines during COVID and was like testing stuff on herself is crazy. And then Ayla has like one of the most, she has one of the largest data sets on like sex related social science.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  Can do, can put out research that's like way, way more robust than anything you'd see.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  So there's this weird, there's this weird model shifting to just like these independent researchers and, but yeah, I mean, I, I, I think Joe's, hopefully it's, it's, it seems like he's optimistic about.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Retooling some of the funding that does come from the government to drive innovation within these organizations. But let's go to number eight. He says for $100 billion upend the energy future and put degrowthers out of business. And his argument is that if you invest to $100 billion to revolutionize the energy sector by promoting abundant clean energy production, particularly through nuclear power and carbon capture technologies. He criticizes the nuclear regulatory commissions, obstructive processes and advocates for its reform.

• 43:10John Coogan?

  And I've heard this so much from all the nuclear folks that there are, like when you're getting a new reactor design approved, you have to have an actual hearing for things that are completely uncontested.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, there's um, they had a funny quote in here where the uh, NRC was bragging and they said, "The 12,000-page application took less than 42 months to review." Can you imagine being the guy like building something and put together this like 12,000-page application? That probably like could have been, it probably could have been an email, you know?

• 43:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  And then you wait 42 months, uh, you know, just to figure out if like you're good to go.

• 43:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, that is just like criminal, in my opinion.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  It's terrible.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  Um, and uh...

• 43:59John Coogan?

  And he includes this incredible graph here of the uh, the cumulative nuclear construction permits and operational plants over time. And you can just see that after the 70s, the number of new operational plants just completely flatlines. And there's just no new development. And I think it has started to tick up again, but it's nowhere near like the asymptotic curve that we thought we'd be on with energy too cheap to meter. So, very, very, very depressing, but hopefully there can be, um, you know, uh, really significant overhaul of the NRC. Um, Joe advocates for "starting by abolishing the NRC's awful incentive structure, conceived as a cost-saving measure,

• 44:40John Coogan?

  but which has backfired awfully. Congress forces the NRC to fund its budget through fees paid hourly by the very companies it regulates, not unlike a law firm or consultancy."

• 44:52John Coogan?

  If you were funded to regulate by the hour, how long would you take? It's like the worst possible incentive.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  Same thing with like the cost-plus model within defense, you know?

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very bad.

• 45:01Jordi Hays?

  If you're getting paid based on how much something costs, like you run up the costs.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Yep. And let's go to number nine.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  Personal favorite.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  For $100 billion, give back the rest of the money.

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  What a statement.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  In his final proposal, Lonsdale recommends returning the remaining $100 billion to the American people, emphasizing the value of individual liberty and economic freedom. He believes that citizens are better equipped than central planners to allocate resources efficiently. By giving the money back, perhaps through tax rebates or direct payments, individuals can make their own choices stimulating economic growth and just demonstrating trust in the populace.

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he positions this very well, which more people should understand is that when the federal government does things like a quote-unquote stimulus check,

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  they position it as a, as a payment or a tax rebate. And that effectively implies that the money was never yours in the first place. But it was. It was your money that the government effectively took from the citizens and the businesses, institutions in our country. And it, you know, I think that the government should position that more of like, hey, we're giving you back. We sort of overtaxed. It's your money.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  I always like to joke that-

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  You know, spend it how you wish.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Did you know that every single year, the United States government collects enough money in tax revenue to give every single citizen a 100% tax rebate?

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  Is that-

• 46:19John Coogan?

  They could give every single person 100% off their taxes, but they keep all the money for all these projects. It's just, it's just a total, it's just mythology, because obviously, whatever they take from you, they could give back. But it sounds shocking.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. It sounds very shocking.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  It sounds like one of those, one of those stats that's like, oh, you know, if they, they could give everyone a million dollars. But no, it's really, it's really like, whatever they're taking, they could just give back. But so they have to justify what they're giving, and it has to make sense. And I think he has some great proposals there.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people don't realize that like, income tax was illegal for a while in US history, right? It was like, it was something that the founding fathers were very against. And the foundation of the country in many ways, because it was like us telling the Brits, "Hey, look, like, we don't, we don't like these taxes. Like, let's, let's end this."

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've kind of like wound up with such a hodgepodge of like corporate taxes, income taxes. There's taxes on all over the place, and people wind up moving around the country to find like their optimal blend, but-

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  A blend.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  I think, I think it's, the most interesting thing with, with this is definitely to, to close on is that there's a shift from just burn it all down, stop everything, to let's be more efficient with the money.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I honestly like that, I, I think Balaji-

• 47:37John Coogan?

  It's more incremental.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  Balaji's like consistently had extremely interesting ideas and been right on a lot of stuff.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  And the area that I just strongly disagree with him on is he's like very like pro like exit, like let's just leave and like rebuild from the ground up. And I think that experiments like that should be run. At the same time, we want the best and brightest in America to be focused on how do we make this place a better place-

• 48:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  -for everyone.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  So it's a great movement.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thanks to Max for publishing that in Arena Magazine. You can go pick it up and give him a follow because it's a fantastic publication.

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  Subscribe to the magazine.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  Subscribe to the magazine.

• 48:14Jordi Hays?

  Before we dive in, should we indulge in a beverage?

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  Always have a bunch of-

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Oh, and thank you to Enchilada Surf Borders. We received some beautiful koozies that we're enjoying very much. They're certified for milk only, but we're drinking Celsius in them, so we'll figure it out. Hopefully it works.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  So today we have organic coconuts. We always, let's see, it's a product of Thailand, so it came off the boat. I like that they send it in the nature's packaging. And, no, you pull that off and then you go like that, so you break it, and then you can pull this little thing off.

• 48:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  Pull off the top, then you got a little straw here, little microplastics.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  Take this off, and we record for many hours here in the studio, so it's good to have a little- We're like endurance athletes that need a little like sugar boost along the way. So, these are delicious.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  I think I got a little coconut meat in mine, so it's a-

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Me too. I'm pretty jammed up.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  Jammed up, but we'll make it work, and thank you to Melissa's Organic Coconuts.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  That's good. Delicious.

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  Delicious.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  I love that.

• 49:34Jordi Hays?

  Do we, I think we have some-

• 49:36John Coogan?

  Let's go to some DMs.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Do we have some personnel news?

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. So we have a new segment on the show, Some Personnel News, where we are tracking the biggest moves, the biggest pickups, who's entering free agency, who's getting long contracts in tech, and our first deal or move of this show is-

• 49:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, this is breaking news in the tech world, folks. We have a major move happening and it's shaking things up as we speak. Brandon Jacoby, yes, that Brandon Jacoby, former product designer at Square and Cash App, the guy who's had his fingerprints on products used by millions of people is officially making the leap. And after an absolutely electric stint as a first hire at Party Round where he built a product that was the talk of the town, Brandon Jacoby is now joining, you heard it here, second X. You heard it first on X. That's right, X just landed, an absolute stud. And I think it's worth telling you a little bit about Brandon Jacoby. This guy is a grinder. We're talking 20-hour days in Figma every single day. If it's 1 a.m., if it's 4 a.m., Brandon is there, locked

• 50:40Jordi Hays?

  in, pixel perfect, making magic happen. Nobody, and I mean, nobody, knows their way around Figma better than this guy. His taste, impeccable, attention to detail, unmatched, low ego, high output. We're talking about a technician, a craftsman, a relentless perfectionist.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  An absolute dog.

• 51:00Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog. So what does this mean for X? Well, they're bringing in a player who doesn't just make products, he makes phenomenal products. He's been in the big leagues, building for millions of users, and now he's suiting up to take X's game to the next level. This isn't just a hire, this is a franchise-altering move. An absolute dog by every definition. Watch out, tech world. Brandon Jacoby's coming and he's ready to dominate. You have any details on the contract?

• 51:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, he's an absolute dog. I think, you know, the deals weren't released, the details weren't released of this deal, but you probably think it's a, you know, four-year deal, maybe one-year cliff.

• 51:33Jordi Hays?

  Seven, eight figures.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  Big, big deal for him. I mean, just look at the stats he's picked up. Former Rookie of the Year contender, potential future Hall of Famer, pushed millions of pixels every year, in, day in, day out. Extremely technical, extremely detail-oriented, and I'm really excited to see what he does this season.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  He's coming to a platform that we all use and love.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  It's the foundation of this podcast and our, you know, livelihoods, and we're excited to get this level of talent working on the product that we spend hours in that feed every single day. So, thank you to Brandon for this move.

• 52:08John Coogan?

  And congrats to X on the pickup.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  Big pickup, big pickup.

• 52:11John Coogan?

  That's great. Let's go to some Q and A. We got a DM. We got a question from Mickey with the Blicky. He says, hey, guys, VC Mickey here. I got some great advice last week about angel investing and starting small. I decided to take your advice and basically put my entire net worth into XRP. It's now up almost 80% over the last week. Can you guys offer any tips for risk management?

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  Man, my only advice here would be rotate out of that.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  Is this real? Did XRP really moon?

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I don't know, Mickey. I love the.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  It's up like 100%. Here we go.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  I love that risk on attitude. Here's what I would say. If I were Mickey, I'd be rotating into other risk assets like early-stage startups. But and the reason for that is I think that illiquidity is a feature. When you've got something like XRP that's moving 100% in a week, get into something that's illiquid, get into something that's marked on maybe like an annual basis, something like a seed-stage startup, just so you can go focus on other things, right? A lot of people get caught up into day-to-day price action with crypto, and that can be a huge distraction from actually creating enterprise value in your job, in your, in your company. And so anyways, get into something illiquid, lock it up, lock in the gains.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  I like that. I think that's a good move.

• 53:32Jordi Hays?

  And go long.

• 53:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Good luck out there. Our next DM comes from an anonymous poster who writes in, "Hey, do you have some time to enlighten me on your experience with creating a consumer packaged goods company? How do you validate the market? I have a group of talented individuals that hit me up about an idea I shared publicly, and I'm evaluating taking next steps. What do you think? How do you validate the market for a consumer packaged goods company?" I've been through this a few different times, and I, and I kind of broke it down as there's two different ways. One is kind of the Brian Johnson way. You start talking about the idea and the problem that you want to solve extremely publicly, become the face of that problem.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  So for him, it's longevity. For Jaco, you know, it's performance in the gym, this like athletic militaristic style. And then that fan base will, will buy kind of anything from you. The other is more product-led, more product-driven, where you're doing real R and D, locking up a supply chain, kind of like what the Ridge wallets did. A lot of our early stuff at Lucy was around like FDA applications, patents, stuff like that. It took a long time to get it going. We weren't the face of nicotine.

• 54:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  To some degree, we still aren't, but we have like a very narrow set.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  You're kind of the face of.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:51Jordi Hays?

  It came later.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it did come later. It wasn't like we, we, we, we, we went like, you know, influencer or brand first. And then kind of were able to sell a commoditized product. We had to do something unique. So I think a lot of it's like, well, what's your edge in this product? Can you be like an operational beast?

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  And then grow slowly. But what do you think?

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  Another, another example. So launching Aurora water filters actually tomorrow.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  That's an example of validating that opportunity was looking at the market, you know, consumers are already spending billions of dollars on water filters. So it wasn't a question of do people buy water filters? Are they going to want one? And so what we did with that is we took a popular water filter called,

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  called the Berkey, and we looked at it and we said, how can we make this better on 10 different dimensions, right? So we made it way, way, way more effective. We went and did the hard work of getting it. It proved out that it actually works. And then we made the design better, the usability better, all these different things that we knew consumers cared about. And so we've spent somewhere in the seven figure mark on testing and R and D to get the product where it is today. But we know that the product is going to be a hit because we took something that was already out there that consumers liked generally. And we made it dramatically better.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  And so I think if you're, most consumer products, you know, a friend of the podcast, John Vio has made products over the years that were like first of a kind, something like he made like the gravity blanket and something like that's much more binary of like, people weren't really buying weighted blankets. Like they weren't really a thing until he created it. But a lot of consumer products are like, you know, even, you know, looking at this on the table, it's not like people were already buying coconut water. It was like, hey, can we sell them the same product, just like in the, in the original packaging, basically?

• 56:44John Coogan?

  One of my favorite stories from Theo is when he, when he launched the Moon Pod, which is a, it's basically like a big bean bag.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  But it's even bigger and softer. He realized that he, he shot some video of, I think it was like a woman falling backwards and getting caught by the bag. And just like falling into this really comfy bag in slow motion and. That one asset probably drove like a hundred million dollars in sales on Facebook.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something crazy.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  And he just knew that like, that it was just a few frames.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  It was like, it was like, almost like an animated gif.

• 57:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  And it was, you know, a few seconds and it just stopped you in the feed. And so having that, like, what is the hook? What is this one thing? So there's a bunch of different ways, but to, to validate the market, it can be like, it's so big and so obvious and you have some innovation. Or you're so charismatic and you're this, you know, heroic influencer who's gonna have millions of fans buying whatever you sell. Or you have some hook that you just know will go viral. There's a lot of companies that have done like stress tests or some other stunt. Uh, Liquid Death, good example of like, the brand just stood out so much that I'm sure.

• 57:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  If you ask them, how did you validate the market? Those guys would, behind Liquid Death would just tell you, well, like, we looked at our brand deck that we built.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  We were laughing and we knew that it was gonna be good because it was.

• 58:02Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  It was unique.

• 58:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  And it was, and it was just gonna pop. Like, they just knew.

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every, um, uh, my wife invested in a company called Grazza. Have you seen them?

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Which is like a squeeze bottle.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Olive oil.

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  Olive oil.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  And she invested in that company pre-launch. And she looked at that being like, I know people like olive oil.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  They have this like new form factor that was popularized by chefs. They're gonna put it into this new form factor.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  And it's gonna work really well on social because it's such a like dynamic way to use olive oil. And so that was, and, and they got to, I, I don't know what their metrics are. They'll probably do like a hundred million next year.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, something big.

• 58:37Jordi Hays?

  Some crazy number. And so, um, you know, sometimes with, with consumer products, like I've found it's very binary. Like, sometimes I look at something and I'm like, this will not work. They launch it and it flops.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:49Jordi Hays?

  And then sometimes I look at something, I'm like, this will not work. And it launches and it just rips.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, timing has a big part to play in it. But then you need to look at like, what is your edge with the product? Like with Lucy, it was like, early focus on like the regulatory aspect. Uh, with Rora, it was like, let's just spend longer and be more obsessed with design and efficacy than any other company. And testing than any other company in the market.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  And then something like Grazza was like even more simple of like, let's just change the packaging, sell the exact same thing. And it'll work well on social.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of like, I mean, you should be able to boil it down to some sort of elevator pitch that just makes sense. And you have a lot of confidence around.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  Like, what, what are you doing that's actually different?

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  And if it's just like, oh, we want to launch this because we think it's cool, like. You know, yeah, get out of there.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  You need to be able to articulate it much better.

• 59:33Jordi Hays?

  Also, like, people that are considering building consumer products, like, you need to go into it. Like, yes, there, if you have a hit consumer product, you can scale it very, very quickly now. Like,

• 59:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:44Jordi Hays?

  Theo is like a good example of that. Once it works, like, he scales it very quickly. But more consumer products, like, company like Ridge, ridge.com, they'll do like 200 million top line this year.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  Just operational beasts.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  But just operational excellence over almost like a decade.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  And the fir-, you know, in like the third or fourth year was like a $5 million business, I believe.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  But it's like, what, what game are you playing?

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have to understand, like, are you still gonna want to do this product if in the first year you do 500K? The second year you do a million, the next year you do 3 million.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  Literally the story of Lucy.

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  The next year you do 3 million, and then the next year you do 10, and the next year, like, are you still gonna be wanting to play that game if it's not a rocket ship?

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  And it probably means less venture capital, and it probably means higher ownership for the founders over the long term. You look at the stories of like Red Bull, Monster, like, these guys, they grind for years and years and years. And then they pop because they're in a big market, and they do have the, the branding and formulation correct. But they're, but they own enough to make it worth it. And as long as you get, I, I think the real key for those consumer goods companies is like, you have to work super extra hard to get the first, to get over that first hump where you can actually be taking a salary that makes your life like worth living, basically. And then once you're flying business class and like covering your expenses, your kids are in good schools and stuff. Then it's like, okay, well, I can grind and, and compound for a very long time.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  But those first years where you're just making no cash flow and it's just brutal, it's just talk.

• 1:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think that,

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  But if you get through it, it's very valuable.

• 1:01:09Jordi Hays?

  I think that the, the category that is, is the biggest trap is beverage. Because people look at a beverage like Celsius and they're like, oh, Celsius does billions, billions of dollars a year. They're like, oh, it's so simple. I can create an energy drink.

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  Little do you know that the founder probably went to every single CrossFit gym for like four years straight.

• 1:01:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and did tastings for 12 hours a day.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was laughed at and like had product defects and problems and all this stuff.

• 1:01:32Jordi Hays?

  Anything that looks easy, I can guarantee you, it's like deeply competitive. And beverage is an example of that. It's like the most cutthroat industry.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Exactly. So we have a new segment on the show, Reply Guy of the Month. Let's go.

• 1:01:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  Every month, we're gonna try and give an award to the biggest reply guy for the show. So get out there, reply to every post that we make, quote tweet us, retweet us, like us, all on X, send it around, give us your best replies because you're gonna wanna win, the Reply Guy of the Month.

• 1:02:04Jordi Hays?

  This is a great honor. You're gonna be on the wall here in the studio.

• 1:02:08John Coogan?

  So this month's Reply Guy of the Month is an intern at Red Letter AI. He's 18 years old. I see great things in his future. Says he's ex-future founders. He's at the University of Houston studying econ and finance. Love that. He says he's right EAC, views are my own. And I didn't even know EAC would have, there was like left EAC or right EAC, but cool for clarifying.

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  Hardcore.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  He's out in Houston, Texas, and he has a wonderful, wonderful header image of Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, and Tim Cook hanging out together.

• 1:02:38Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. I could see him in that same group at some point, you know, if he keeps accelerating like this.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  For sure. And so this month's Reply Guy of the Month is Amit Balashe.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Congrats, Amit. You are the Reply Guy of the Month. And he's a member of the...

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  It's a great honor.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  I love this about his profile. I mean, good, good numbers for such a young kid. He joined in April of 2024. He's only been on X for a couple of months. He's already got over 1K. This is the Reply Guy territory.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  You, you gotta be the Reply Guy to get to 1K. Then you can start doing the inside jokes, grind your way up to 10K. Then once it's 10K to get to 100K, it's gotta be the cringe threads. And then once you're past 100K, it's just fake news all the time.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  He's on, he's on the path.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  He's in, he's in some community that's highlighted on his profile that just says the Thielists, and it's only two members. He has like a community. It's just like him and one other dude.

• 1:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Him and his dog.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  His absolute dog. His absolute dog. Like, could just be a DM, bro, but I like that you're publicizing this.

• 1:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  And he's followed by another friend of the show, Red Bull Futurist.

• 1:03:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  You know.

• 1:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Also a great future.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  So, congrats to Amit. You are the reply guy of the month.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  There's never gonna be another first honorary reply guy of the month for, um, yeah, and to be clear, reply guys is a spiritual thing. Like, you can be a woman.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:04:01Jordi Hays?

  Um, whatever gender can be a reply guy.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  Your, your thing could be quote tweets. You don't actually have to reply. You could also just be spamming our DMs constantly.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep. There's a bunch of ways to get here. Um, and there will be many more.

• 1:04:13John Coogan?

  Many more, many more. Let's go to the timeline and then we're gonna start working in some promoted posts. Uh, we, because we ran a, a poll and you guys wanted at least 60 ads in every episode, so we're gonna do our best.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Try to get there.

• 1:04:26John Coogan?

  It's gonna take us some time to get there, but we're gonna do our best. Let's go to Nicole Wiskoff. She says, "The gift that's starting from rock bottom affords you is having an insane appetite for risk. You've been there before. You can crawl your way out again if you need to." I like that. I don't know. Yeah, she, she, she talks about coming from nothing. What a badass story. Now she's running, what, 50 million AUM?

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, that's the last fund.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  That's the last fund, so it's more.

• 1:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Quite a bit more. Yeah.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, goes back to the, the Josh Wolfe quote.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  Chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. Let's go.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  We need a big Josh Wolfe.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Quote.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  Yes. He's going on the Matt Rushmore of, of pithy, uh, thought leaders.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, uh, the, the, I, I honestly resonate with this so much that at a certain point, uh, you need to know when to not go risk off, but like not continue to risk at all.

• 1:05:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  Um, cause, cause when you're.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Post YC, our burn rate was 3K a month for three people. Isn't that insane?

• 1:05:34Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Because we paid our rent a year in advance. Because we were just like, ah, just take that out of the bank balance. So we don't even have to think about it.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  And I think we were like a credit risk.

• 1:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were like, you need to.

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  And I think our, I think our rent in, in the Tenderloin, in this like, complete disgusting hovel of a apartment. It's technically a one bedroom. It had a closet that one guy was living in. I was sleeping in the living room. And, and it was fifteen hundred dollars a month. And every time I sell something in San Francisco, they're like, oh, fifteen hundred dollars a month per bedroom? Like, that's not bad. I was like, no, fifteen hundred dollars a month for the whole thing.

• 1:06:05Jordi Hays?

  For the whole thing.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  In San Francisco.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:08John Coogan?

  But it's like, if you're willing to go down to living on three K a month for three people that can write software and build stuff and just get stuff done and call people. Just willing to do all of the different problems. It's like, yeah, there's just no way you can be stopped. Like, because you can get three K a month from so many different places.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think more like, it becomes really challenging when you have a family.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 1:06:30Jordi Hays?

  Kids are in school, like, there's like real fixed costs. Uh, and I think people don't really recognize that. I, I, I tell founders this all the time. Like, if you're like, if you're twenty eight and you want to like, start a company and you're deciding, well, should I work for like this company? It's like, no, like, go like, so risk on right now because four years from now, you're gonna have a kid or something like that. You're gonna be getting married and like, your fiance's dad is gonna be like, sitting you down and be like, alright, like, the startup thing was like cute, but like, you're about to like, marry my daughter. And like, you gotta like, you know, really get it together. But more, more founders should like, raise a fifty thousand dollar angel round and like, go live in like, the middle of nowhere.

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  Seriously.

• 1:07:10Jordi Hays?

  Just like grind and grind and grind and grind.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  I mean, my first, my first fundraiser was seventeen thousand dollars. And me and my co-founder made it last six months.

• 1:07:17Jordi Hays?

  We almost wanna, made me wanna hit the size gong for a second.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  With the tiniest little.

• 1:07:22Jordi Hays?

  For that, a little.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  There you go. The tiniest little size gong. But yeah, I mean, we made it work. Like, we spent a lot of it very quickly and then stretched it out ever so slightly towards the end.

• 1:07:32Jordi Hays?

  No, I remember running the calculus, you know, coming to, to LA, being like, if I don't make this happen, like, I have twelve hundred dollars a month to spend.

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:40Jordi Hays?

  I have exactly until this date to like, be profitable and like, be like, able to pay myself more. And if I don't, like, I'm dead.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, let's go to Gabby Goldberg, second time on the show. She willed it into existence.

• 1:07:54Jordi Hays?

  I think third.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  I think maybe third, but.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  She's a regular at this point.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  But yeah, she's a regular, but uh, we, we love Gabby here. Uh, she says Partifull deserves more credit for making random gatherings great again. And it's a photo of the Jeremy Allen White lookalike crowned in Chicago. There was a Jeremy Allen White lookalike contest, including a toddler dressing up like chefs from the TV series The Bear. Have you watched The Bear?

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  I have not.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  I watched the first season, it was pretty good.

• 1:08:24Jordi Hays?

  Not a huge uh,

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  TV guy.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Mostly founders podcasts.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Unfortunately, no video.

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Jordi Hays?

  So I can't stream it. But um, no, it, Partifull has gone like extremely mainstream.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Jordi Hays?

  Like you have this like, it just should be a tech thing and like, it, it kind of proves that like tech is mainstream. You can start something and like build it like for the tech audience and then expand out from there. I think even like, a lot of things like Whoop and Aura Ring were like very like ins- installer like tech community products. But um, in many ways, this is, I think, we should go dig up like the VC thought part, uh, leadership of like, blog posts, like it's time to unbundle Facebook, right? Because I think about like Facebook events.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Where that was the thing. That was the alternative to Partifull and Partifull.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Should pick them up and roll that in.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  X should pick up, X should absolutely pick up Partifull.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  Be great.

• 1:09:18Jordi Hays?

  Partly because uh, I think it would be a, uh, I don't think they're monetizing yet. Uh, last I checked and the, and the CEO is like jokes about this quite a lot online. She's like, you know, we're just like giving this thing away. We're glad people like it.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  Do you know, like, uh, Paperless Post, which is like, kind of like the, the billionaires, Partifull, um, is extremely expensive.

• 1:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  You have to buy tokens to invite everyone. They have some sort of like digital currency that intermediates things.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  Paperless Post is like boomer posts. It, when I see that, like, if I, if I'm getting invited to like a VC dinner and it's Paperless Post versus Partifull, I'm like, oh, okay, like this.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  I think it's gonna be some ballers. It depends. It could be some boomers or some ballers.

• 1:09:58Jordi Hays?

  Boomers and ballers. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  It's one of the other. Let's go to East Village guy. He says, why are you a grown man telling me which AP classes you took? So he's talking about like accounts payable classes, like to learn how to do ramp stuff?

• 1:10:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, to learn how to ramp better, to close your books.

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  Okay. That seems totally reasonable. I would love to know what AP classes people take, especially if they're gonna be working in a finance org, like high performanceing, a high performance finance org.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Ramp should, should actually do more to get into the college curriculum, right?

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, you should be able to take AP.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  That's the number one. If you're in finance.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  AP, AP.

• 1:10:30Jordi Hays?

  AP, AP.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  Advanced Placement Accounts Payable.

• 1:10:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  This is what we need to be taking.

• 1:10:34Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. I can honestly say I've never, I've never had anybody tell me what AP classes they took. It's kind of an interesting thing to know, though. I wouldn't be mad if somebody told me.

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  Especially if it's something interesting.

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  We're, we're, we appreciate continuous learning. So if you learn, if you took some, you know, AP dinosaurs class and like you're still obsessed with dinosaurs and now you're getting into dino excavation.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Expedition.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Investing in dinos.

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Then that's cool. That's cool.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  I like it. I, I don't see a problem with it. East Village guy. Take it easy. Aaron Slodov, repeat guest on the show, says, I'm convinced that basic business economics money education should be mandatory in middle school. Here we go. He needs to be taking advanced placement accounts payable. And it's a quote tweet from Union Maid who says, I worked eight, an eight hour shift today on register and made a hundred and, a hundred and sixty-eight dollars before taxes. I rung up thirty-five hundred dollars in sales in those eight hours in my little cafe with no seating in South Brooklyn. And so they're kind of complaining about what's happening.

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  I hope he was wearing gloves for all those receipts that he was touching.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Unless his T is really high, and then in that case, he should use the receipts to kind of bring that testosterone down from the PFOs.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, people always say this, that like, oh, they should teach, you know, how to do your taxes in school, and I couldn't disagree more. I think that you should definitely just be studying like the great books and Shakespeare and the Aeneid and the Iliad and the Odyssey.

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cuz there's nothing in life that.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Those are timeless.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Education is like a, needs to be a force. Forcing function for learning things that you're not going to have to learn in life.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  And most people will graduate school and never think about Shakespeare again.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:12:12Jordi Hays?

  When it couldn't be more important.

• 1:12:13John Coogan?

  Yes, and and there's a million ways to pick up this on the job very quickly. There's so many other resources. There's there's a million different ways to consume basic business education through nonfiction.

• 1:12:25Jordi Hays?

  And there's so many great startups that will do your taxes for you.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Exactly. I I I actually very much disagree with this take and and I and I think that uh schools should focus much more on uh I I think this is a little bit of what's happening at the University of Austin, kind of a return to the classics.

• 1:12:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  I mean, I have the great book series right there.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and just facilitating like.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  It's very hard to find time to read Tolstoy.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48John Coogan?

  Like, that's not something that I'm forced to do every April.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  But I will be forced to learn a little bit about the tax code.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  And I can figure that out.

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  So I yeah, I'm I'm I I I'm fine with going back to.

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  And school is like a forcing like like let's force people to do things that are that are like interesting, right? My my dad was a high school teacher and he taught a class called Project Make, which was some combination of like robotics and programming and wood wood shop and things like that. And so they would like build and launch rockets like out on the football field.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Jordi Hays?

  Like do things that like maybe the the nerds will do on the weekends, but like the average student should be exposed to that kind of thing.

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  Yep, that's great.

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Um and schools, you know, have a have a role to play there.

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the Sales Bull says we fire HR and pay the sales team double. And it's the picture of Don Draper.

• 1:13:36Jordi Hays?

  This would be this this is funny coming from the from the sales guy. He's like, he's like, give me it's give me a raise. Give me a raise.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh but anyways, usually paying your best salespeople double is like pretty good uh good way to spend money.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. It really resonated 12K likes. People are really into this.

• 1:13:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm unsurprised that his following is.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, but but I think this is less how much people love sales guys and more how much people hate HR.

• 1:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  Cause HR is always seen as like a drag on the company. But I mean, it's getting easier and easier with more like automated HR tools like you can you can build a pretty sizable company without a dedicated HR person uh for a long time.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're on Rippling and then.

• 1:14:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh you know, it has so many bugs that you wanna, you know.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I think I think you could uh. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that there's not more like there's the the outsourced CFO like partial CFOs. It's weird that there haven't been more of those for HR.

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  No, there are.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  There are. Because because that seems like much more like in line with like the startup ethos than bringing.

• 1:14:42Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of like $300 a month. You get the software and we'll help you.

• 1:14:46John Coogan?

  And there's a person, a consultant that comes in.

• 1:14:48Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because like Chamath got like so much shade for being like HR should be like your legal team. But like the but like the biggest HR issues that people have like tend to be better suited for outside counsel to like deal with.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  It's like end up being like extremely charged.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Jordi Hays?

  You know, issues with with employees.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  I wonder if there'll be a little bit more of like a re restructuring of where HR sits in the organization as we go into like the next generation of companies, like how a lot of marketing teams have technical people on their staff now. Like recruiting is obviously super critical in the HR function and then the general counsel, the legal stuff is super critical. So maybe you should kind of disaggregate it into a finance person that does the compliance stuff.

• 1:15:35Jordi Hays?

  Team building.

• 1:15:36John Coogan?

  Legal person. Yeah. And then the team, the team person, the team building honestly should just be an extension of the CEO. And the culture. So I would want, I would want a CEO's chief of staff to decide we're doing a happy hour. Because the CEO likes this place and and this would be great for the CEO to come and meet with all the employees. And then the recruiter should honestly be living within the functional units of the engineering team. And be live right there.

• 1:16:00Jordi Hays?

  And there's.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  Technical.

• 1:16:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I don't know. I could see like the HR function kind of just diffusing without throughout the organization. Instead of building up like this massive longhouse in the organization.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Massive longhouse.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Go over our, our, our HR team is over at the Long House Building. You can use the map. It's like.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  That'd be a good name for the for the outsourced part-time consultancy for HR.

• 1:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25John Coogan?

  Just like Long House Consulting.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  Like, let us be your longhouse.

• 1:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Longhouse is a service.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  To says new life goal, having a tweet printed by the tech bros pod. Well, congratulations, To. It's happened. Today is the day you got your post printed. I don't know how to pronounce X eat.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  I think we live online. Is it zit?

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Zited?

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  We live so online that like I couldn't pronounce cryptox either.

• 1:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Somebody pointed out.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  I don't even know T O, T A O, who knows?

• 1:17:00Jordi Hays?

  Former like Dylan who'd been on the show pointed out, you know how you could say like, oh, I'm on tech Twitter. I'm on, you know.

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  Like, like.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Crypto Twitter, fin twit.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  There is not that same language for X.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Like I'm on tech X.

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  Tech X, so FinX.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm on FinX. It doesn't exist and it's actually a key barrier to growth right now because we, all of us on tech Twitter.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, tech X. Maybe we just make it tech X.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Tech X sounds like Ted X, you know?

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  Really, really dumb version of Ted.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  I mean, the base version's already really brain dead.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  We actually need to add Ted X to our enemies list because a bunch of, there's smart people that have gone up there, but um.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  By and large.

• 1:17:44Jordi Hays?

  By and large, some of the worst takes of all time.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  Blue pill shit I've ever seen.

• 1:17:48Jordi Hays?

  The worst, the worst takes of all time.

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  Oh, did you know cancer was cured? Every single time, every year they have someone stand up and say cancer's cured. It's like, come on, it's not cured. We're not there yet. Let's go to Jen over at Andorol. She says it's live. Andorol exclusives.com. So they did a drop. Andorol has selected eBay for charity to host this auction. 100% of the proceeds will benefit Blue Star families. And so, did you see this? They're, they're auctioning off pieces of, of wreckages from tests that they've run.

• 1:18:18Jordi Hays?

  So amazing.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  It's basically loot crate drops. Uh, there's different tiers. There's, you know, rare, epic, legendary tiers.

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  And they're not using it as a profit center. They're using it to give back, uh, which I think is really cool.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  I don't know. Maybe they should be using it as a profit center. I think I'm, I'm actually pro profit.

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  I just think, I just am in favor of companies that generate so much, so much profit from their core products.

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:43Jordi Hays?

  That they're able to give, use that same skillset to give back.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  And obviously, Blue Star families are fantastic and it's a fantastic charity.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  We love Blue Star families.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  But, but I, I just love that it's a very unique, uh, a very unique drop. We, we've been talking about this, how like every company has a t-shirt.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  But only XL nicotine pouches has a briefcase. And a watch.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  And a Rolex.

• 1:19:06John Coogan?

  And and more more brands and more companies should lean into understanding like, what is the expression of your brand in terms of merch? I was I was talking to another founder of a of a unicorn who I was I was saying like, like, you're, yeah, you're a tech company, but like, what if your tech company was a car? Like, what car would it be?

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:27John Coogan?

  And don't tell me it's a Tesla, because that's what every single person says. I'm a tech company, so that the avatar of my brand is a Cybertruck. And it's like, that's fine, but that's also just the avatar of the Tesla brand.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38John Coogan?

  You need to express yourself differently. And are you an F one fifty? Or are you a Corvette? Like, those are two wildly different cars. And you should be able to immediately say, based on your brand, oh, we're more of a Corvette than a F one fifty.

• 1:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50John Coogan?

  Or.

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  The Aurora Systems of Porsche nine eleven of.

• 1:19:53John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Of water filters.

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  There you go. And so and so this this is a this is a merch drop that feels uniquely Anduril.

• 1:20:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  As opposed to just a T shirt, which I'm sure they'll be selling and they'll sell other other merch. But when I think of like, the merch that I want from Anduril, I think of like, hiking gear, like, almost tactical gear, not like, fully military.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Stuff you can wear on the range.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  But something that's like that. And I and I honestly don't even care if it's just them going and finding a great brand and just like, honestly, just throwing like an Anduril pin on it. That's what Founders Fund does a lot. They'll they give out these bags and there's just a pin on it. But they're really nice bags and I really like them.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  You're much more likely to use them.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Exactly. And you can always take off the pin if you want. It's not they didn't have to go and get like, some white labeler to like, make them a fake version of the bag. They just give you the actual bag with the pin on it. But it's like, the it's still like an avatar of the brand and it's still an expression, which I think is really, really cool.

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and brands need to know what they're actually doing with like, non-core products like merch. It's like, you want to be building connection to the broader community and like, likability.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  And usually Assured is not the best way to do that.

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  You can get a lot more coverage by doing something like this where somebody's like, oh, I actually own a piece of Anduril's drone system.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  That they made and blew up.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's really cool. And I always love artifacts. We have a lot of artifacts in the studio here. And a lot of the investors at Founders Fund have like a whole set of artifacts from like, oh, this commemorates like the SpaceX deal.

• 1:21:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  Or the Anduril deal. And I think that's really, really cool.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I like this too, because if you're very online on X and like accelerationist, you know, defense tech oriented, getting a piece like from here would be amazing.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  But they can also go give this to a politician and be like, you know, throw it on their desk and be like.

• 1:21:41John Coogan?

  It's paperweight.

• 1:21:42Jordi Hays?

  Don't forget about us.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  This was blown to pieces.

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  It's a great paperweight, yeah.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Well, let's stay on defense tech and go to Ben Coleman. He says, quote, "We have a five-star general on our board of advisors." True story. And it's the inglorious bastards meme of the guy holding up three the wrong way because Germans do the three this way. You know this meme?

• 1:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  And so it's, you know, detecting that you're not one of us.

• 1:22:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  And we know that it's not real. Because of course, you can't have a five-star general right now because it's not a time of war.

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  So very embarrassing for whoever did that. And you really revealed yourself.

• 1:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what I've seen in defense tech is like a lot of, there's people that will be publicly out there of like, oh, I'm a general. And then they'll use that to like get sort of advisory opportunities. And then once they're actually in the deck, then they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, actually like put this like very specific title like.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:33Jordi Hays?

  Eighth Brigadier, you know, blah, blah, blah. And it's like ends up being much more specified and it doesn't sound nearly as cool. And so bless their hearts, they're sort of like using that like high level title to like land private market opportunities.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how valuable having a four-star general is on your board? Because we hear stories about. Some really helpful people like Chris Bros and Andorol like was McCain's Chief of Staff, came in, like really runs that organization, like full-time employee, like very, very beneficial. But then you also hear stories about like the, didn't some general join the board of, I think Mattis joined the board of Theranos and like, it was like, what does he know about that? It was, it was very controversial at the time and like if you're a board member, like you should know. I, I, I think that was, that was the story of Mattis or something, but.

• 1:23:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Before we dive into the next one, on the subject of Defense Tech, we have a promoted post from Allen Control Systems. They say, "Looking for a fast-moving, high-growth opportunity in Defense Tech. We are hiring for several roles across engineering and operations. A few of our featured openings are Senior Mechanical Design Engineer, Electrical Embedded Engineer, and an Unreal Systems Developer. You can view all of Allen Control Systems openings and apply at allencontrolsystems.com-company/numeralsign/careers/ImproveYourLinksACS. You guys can do better than that." But anyways, fantastic company. ACS is building AI gun turrets and

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  gun systems for counter-drone use. So they basically have built a product that can take out, you know, without any human intervention, drones that are, you know, fast-moving across the battlefield. And so, amazing opportunity. They have, their, their first product is very defensive, but gonna save many lives on battlefields across the world. So, thank you to ACS for innovating in this space.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  Thanks to ACS. Let's go to Jason Liu. He says, "If you stayed in Canada, were you truly that ambitious?"

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Got him.

• 1:24:42John Coogan?

  I love, I love some hate on an un-American country like Canada.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Very un-American.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's objectively one of the, the most un-American because-

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  So close. They could just say, hey, we want to be part of this awesome team. We want to join up.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Fifty-first.

• 1:24:56John Coogan?

  Let's come over here.

• 1:24:57Jordi Hays?

  I, I would be surprised if Canada doesn't try to front-run the moon to become the 51st state, right?

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  Is that be kind of like, you know, the moon's gonna get a lot of attention once it becomes a state?

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, be the first new state in quite a long time. The 50 is like a nice round number. Being that 51st state- Big opportunity. I can see a lot of competition for it.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Jordi Hays?

  That slot. In Canada, we would welcome you with open arms. I know, you know, a lot of friends of the podcast, Jeremy Giffon, Sam Poirier.

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Jeremy's from Canada?

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because he was at Tiny.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  No idea.

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  He was at Tiny, remember? It's Vancouver.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. But he like grew up there? He's born there?

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  It's brutal.

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Based in New York now.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  Okay, good, thank God.

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  Thank God. We got a good one.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  So, so he, he is ambitious. He didn't stay in Canada.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  No, but there's something to be said for like, at the same time, we would welcome Canada, but I respect all the Canadians that are staying there and trying to make it better and fix the place.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I agree. We love our Canadians.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  All my, all my favorite Canadians are US residents, but that's also because I spend more time with them, so.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Exactly. And Shopify, fantastic company from Canada.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic company.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  And University of Waterloo, fantastic engineering.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Also good.

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Lots of respect. And a lot of companies have like engineering hubs there.

• 1:26:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:24John Coogan?

  And it is a beautiful country, so we love Canada. Let's go to unusual whales. They say, Ken Griffin of Citadel says he's invested in nuclear and it's the future.

• 1:26:34Jordi Hays?

  I love these accounts just show, they just like say something that's just like, could potentially be like very out of context.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Because it's a big account, like it's just like fact.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, fact.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  Ken Griffin is long nuclear. I want nuclear power to high-frequency trading, right? Like I want, like, I want to be giving these high-frequency trading companies, we need to be giving nuclear power to market makers, right? To, to increase financial innovation and the speed at which money moves.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  I actually wonder if energy is a big. Big issue for the high frequency traders. Like, I know that Jane Street is advertising on Dorkesh Patel's podcast, trying to recruit, I believe, CUDA engineers and machine learning engineers. So they've done a lot of AI stuff, but I'm not sure how scale bound they are right now. Like, a lot of their early stuff was very deterministic. It was written in this programming language called OCaml.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, and a lot of their strategies were location based. They were like, how do we, how do we get to within 10 feet of where the trade is being executed?

• 1:27:34John Coogan?

  You know that on the, on the NASDAQ, they have a rule where even if your server is closer, there's a thousand feet of cable between you and the, and the main server, no matter what. So that everyone has a level playing field.

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  Laws don't work, so we're gonna like physically enforce this.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, uh, I mean, the, the, uh, it's Flashbores has a great anecdote about like digging this huge tunnel across.

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Probably a good business to be selling that.

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  Commodities exchange to stock exchange.

• 1:28:02Jordi Hays?

  It's probably a good business to be selling those like thousand foot cables because they probably need to be replaced all the time. Cause it's like,

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, it's too slow.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  To grade or whatever. It's gotta be fresh.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, if, if the, if the trading algorithms wind up moving to something that looks like an LLM where it's very scale bound, like you're gonna see huge data center build outs to, it's gonna be a new race, just like the LLM stuff. But I haven't heard anything about that. We should dig into that more to see. I, I mean, I think at this point, he's probably just making the bet on the fact that the LLM companies and the consumer AI companies will need energy for their data centers. So he's investing in nuclear. But this is interesting because, you know, a year ago, people started talking about, okay, what's after Nvidia? Nvidia's pumping.

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  Energy is clearly key. Maybe nuclear is, is the next thing, but it was very much like a cocktail position. People talked about it, but they weren't actually moving the market. Now the market's starting to move and some of the nuclear stocks are starting to go up.

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, we talked about this before, but it's.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  But they're still not as crazy as Nvidia.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  It's worth bringing up again. Four years ago at Hereticon, nuclear was a heretic, you know, being pro-nuclear was still heretical. Now it was the, the most normie take that you could have. So, uh, yeah, Ken Griffin is just kind of putting a stamp on that.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's go to Sarah Hess, second time on the show. Can't beat these margins. And it's a screenshot of the rare Anduril relic, recovered crash component from Anduril R&D tests. And the bid, I mean, it hasn't even ended. There's still three days in this and it's already over $1,000. It's pretty awesome.

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:29:34John Coogan?

  And yeah, margins are fantastic.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Going to those families.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, because it's, you know, essentially free, since it was just wreckage anyway.

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I wonder if anybody figures out that like the actual metals, like if you got the right piece, like the metals itself would be like worth the like more, yeah, tungsten, break it down.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Melt it down.

• 1:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Some enterprising, you know, very online person.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  You know, they do that with like hypercars. Whenever there's a crash, there's a community that will find, okay, yes, like a LaFerrari crashed in this place. Let's go and dig through the rubble and like, figure out if like, maybe some random piece got thrown clear and you can take that and sell it.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  And it's like a thousand dollar piece.

• 1:30:16John Coogan?

  It's like, it's like diving for treasure, essentially.

• 1:30:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  There's like a whole, whole community because like, if you get one, you know, like clutch or something, it'd be really valuable, because they don't make them that much or something.

• 1:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  It's great. Do we have a promoted post?

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from Nico, runs a company called Default. 76% of qualified leads book an inbound meeting with Default. We try to help customers think of demo requests as ones who fall into two buckets, demo qualified and two not demo qualified. Most of our customers only show a scheduler to leads who qualify for a demo. So Nico's building an amazing platform, an enterprise product called Default, that helps other enterprise companies, you know, sort of like sort and qualify and book demos. So he's been at this for quite a while, backed by Kraft, and now is starting to see some pretty fantastic

• 1:31:13Jordi Hays?

  results. Became buddies with Nico, you know, a few years ago at this point, and their execution has been fantastic. So if you're dealing with processing inbound leads, go over to Default, hit up Nico, DM him on X, and he will get you. He's the kind of guy that if you DM him right now, he'll jump on to do a demo of the product with you like in like five minutes.

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  Well, if you're demo qualified.

• 1:31:38Jordi Hays?

  If you're qualified. So he'll qualify you. That's part of his, his, uh, his job and what default does. So thank you to default.

• 1:31:48John Coogan?

  Let's go to Val. He says, something that would let us buy and trade seconds from future ad slots would be lit. And so he's, uh, he's pushing us to, uh, let the average viewer and fan invest and profit from our enterprise.

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  Future ad spots. That's actually kind of interesting. Like if you want to, if you want to go long technology brothers, you should be buying up our 2026 Q4 in- inventory and then reselling it when the time comes.

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:32:16Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, maybe, uh, if somebody wants to create a platform market for this, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll.

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  Well, I like the idea of like a dynamic auction side where it's like, we could be doing the show live on spaces.

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  And we're like, oh, we actually got a higher bidder. Hit the printer.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Hit the printer, print it out.

• 1:32:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. You can buy, if you buy the ad slot within, you know, it's kind of like a car auction or like after the two minute thing gets down. If nobody like does it, you can buy the slot, but then you buy the slot and once it's physically printed, like it is.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  It's locked in.

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  It's locked in. Price is locked.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. He was saying he wanted to, uh, invest and they said, would he prefer a SPAC or a shitcoin or both?

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Both at the same time hasn't been tried yet.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Not really.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, could be a new.

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  Well, Trump is kind of experimenting with it.

• 1:32:58Jordi Hays?

  Liberty coin and Truth Social.

• 1:32:58John Coogan?

  Liberty coin and Truth Social. He's kind of got both.

• 1:33:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  And then also lots of merch drops.

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  We might.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  He doesn't do ad reads though. He should, he should, he should have an ad product.

• 1:33:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually, so.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Just in the middle of the state of the union. This is brought to you by MyPillow.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Is there something, is there a reason that Trump has not done his own podcast? Because the guy clearly likes very profitable.

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  This is the future. I'm telling you, the future is the president will have a podcast.

• 1:33:21Jordi Hays?

  The president will have a podcast.

• 1:33:22John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:33:23Jordi Hays?

  We should create a poly market for that. We're like, will Trump have his own podcast by 2027?

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Well, I think JD will.

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  And I think JD will bring on his, his like, uh, associates and whoever he's thinking, like, think about all the buzz that's been happening around like, who's going to get Department of Transportation? Who's going to get Commerce? Who's going to get Defense? And it's, and, and the way these people are introduced, it's usually like a screenshot of a press release that goes viral. People are like, who's this? There's like a couple of mainstream media write-ups and then a video clip will go, will go viral from whatever that person said on some other podcast. So like, they'll be like, this is the new Secretary of Defense, like so based or so terrible, depending on who is posting. And it's just a clip from them on a podcast, but how much cooler would it be if you could just watch, you know, Trump or whoever the president is, sit down with

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  the person and say, hey, American people, I'm thinking about this person for Secretary of Transportation. We're gonna talk for an hour.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  And then you're gonna roast them. Roast them in the comments.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, roast them in the comments. We'll have a poll.

• 1:34:25Jordi Hays?

  But Trump, Trump, if Trump had his own podcast, he could get that podcast to a hundred million dollar run rate just on ads.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which would be, which would be a hundred times the run rate of Truth Social.

• 1:34:39Jordi Hays?

  And maybe he could take, it could be the first podcast to go public, right?

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  He could.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  And then you could just have, like, you could just be, you could have all of America own a piece of, uh, so anyways.

• 1:34:49John Coogan?

  I mean, this is the thing, like, didn't Churchill, no, it wasn't Churchill, it was, uh, FDR did like the fireside chats. Those were really popular.

• 1:34:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know how there's like.

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  Weekly things. I think even Obama did stuff that was like weekly dispatches about like, here's what's going on.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, there, I feel like these are less of a thing now, but isn't there like presidential accounts for, there's like, there's an X account that's for the first lady.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  When you're the first lady.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  There's at POTUS and there's at Donald J. Trump.

• 1:35:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  And at POTUS changes hands.

• 1:35:17Jordi Hays?

  Exactly, exactly. So Trump's like, I'm not gonna blow this. If Trump, if Trump was actually on the at POTUS account, just ripping bangers, that account, he's like, I'm not gonna 10 X's for my future. Like, for somebody who's gonna use that audience against me, like, in like, four years.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I would, I would love to listen to a, a podcast.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  I could see, I could see JD like booting up at POTUS again, though, and really.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  I mean, I think Vivek Ramaswamy is gonna do it, because he's already doing vlogs and he's clearly understands like the modern media stuff. He's buying BuzzFeed. He can use all the BuzzFeed, you know, resources to kind of craft his own media strategy and really level up from there. Go to John Fio, he's been on the show before, uh, the Fiorentino family.

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Made their money in.

• 1:36:02John Coogan?

  Hospitality.

• 1:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, hospitality, yeah.

• 1:36:04John Coogan?

  He's quoting Tony Segura, who says, President Trump, at Real Donald Trump, is requiring Volodymyr Zelensky to wear a coat and tie when he meets the president going forward. And John says, in the same way you weren't trusted if you didn't show up in a slouchy hoodie to a meeting in the last 20 years, we're about to snap back to suits as a filter. Speaking my language.

• 1:36:27Jordi Hays?

  Speaking our language.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  You'll want to make sure you're wearing a Fiorentino label soon because he has a suit company.

• 1:36:34Jordi Hays?

  So John came in very clutch at Heretic on. I didn't have time to get my own suit sort of ironed and dry cleaned at the hotel. So I was able to wear a Fiorentino label suit. It was fantastic. Got a lot of compliments. Turned a lot of heads and was all thanks to the fine fabrics and fit of his label. But yeah, I think it's kind of funny that you remember these like memes where like if your VC is wearing shoes like this, like they're gonna like try to buy 50% of your company or like if your VC like is even wearing a suit at all, like you're fucked, you know? And I think that like trends obviously oscillate from one side to another like very dramatically.

• 1:37:19Jordi Hays?

  And it became like the thing to wear like Albirds and joggers and like hoodies and that so clearly is just like wrong. Right? It's the same thing when you're-

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  If you have over 50 million in AUM, you need to wear a tie.

• 1:37:32Jordi Hays?

  You were, you called me like very upset the other day because you sat down in business class on a flight next to somebody and they were just dressed like very sloppily and you were like physically ill from just being like in their presence saying like this is so wrong. You should know that if you're flying business class, you should be wearing at least a collared shirt.

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  At least.

• 1:37:51Jordi Hays?

  And you know, we hope that we're on the forefront, you know, with people like Theo and you know, our own podcast. We hope that we're on the forefront of a new movement in tech to just like dress, dress for the, for the, for the job that-

• 1:38:06John Coogan?

  So if you see a tech, a capital allocator out there in casual clothes, maybe on a podcast, just send them a nice note in the replies. Just tell them like, you know, love what you're saying, love your business model, but would it kill you to put on a suit?

• 1:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  Let's go to Josh Miller.

• 1:38:21Jordi Hays?

  Capital allocator, not an HVAC technician.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  Exactly. Let's go to Josh Miller. He says, I've said before and I'll say it again, from antitrust to AI agents, 2025 will be the year of the web browser. More and more signs by the day. Interesting.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  So I think this was in response to news. I think that they were actually, yeah, Chrome potentially being forced to spin out, which is, which is very, potentially very wild, just because Google is so, and all of Google's products are so deeply integrated into Chrome at this point. It's hard to imagine a Chrome that's not, that's sort of like account agnostic. It's probably not that hard to build, but you know that Alphabet has spent, Alphabet's strategy was like, hey, like, search is our golden goose. Let's build up these sort of like walls all around it via Android, via Chrome, so that like we have, we're building

• 1:39:17Jordi Hays?

  up this sort of like fortress. And if it gets spun out, that'd be cool. Like Chrome has probably billions of users and-

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  The perplexity CEO was joking about buying it.

• 1:39:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which would be funny. Which would be, which would be a great scene of the simulation. But, um, but yeah, like, you know, Josh and the browser company, like, it's called the browser company for a reason. They were set up to like innovate in this area and like-

• 1:39:40John Coogan?

  Oh, he's the CEO of the browser company?

• 1:39:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Oh, that makes sense now. Okay, got it.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he, you know, they built a fantastic browser. They're now focused on, they're now focused on building sort of a Gentik browser products. Like-

• 1:39:51John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:39:51Jordi Hays?

  I, I'm at, you know, they haven't shared a ton yet, but it's, uh, you know, products that will browse for you on your behalf.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  Well, then this is kind of interesting because just recently they, they said that they were kind of pivoting away from Arc as a core browser product, but he's still very bullish about, about the web browser broadly. He just wants to find a different way to-

• 1:40:08Jordi Hays?

  So here's what the browser company needs to do. Find a SPAC. There's like hundreds out there. SPAC, buy Chrome. And suddenly Josh doesn't have to compete with the big bad Chrome. He can just be the Chrome.

• 1:40:20John Coogan?

  I wonder how much Chrome's worth?

• 1:40:22Jordi Hays?

  It's probably not, not, not cheap.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  Because if you buy it-

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  As a standalone business.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  I mean, I'm pretty sure the, isn't, isn't the deal for, doesn't Google pay Apple? Like-

• 1:40:33Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. So you buy Chrome and then you license-

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  Just to be the default search engine on iOS?

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was 20, I thought it was 20.

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  20 billion. And so think about Chrome's got to be like almost in a similar install base size and even, maybe even more valuable or somewhat valuable. So like you have 20 billion dollars of- Essentially infinite, just net income. Like you run a multiple on that, like it's a $200 billion asset? Like something in that range, like it's a lot. It's not, it's not.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Hard, would be a big stack.

• 1:41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's gonna be tough. I mean, I guess they could just do like a demerge and just have two tickers and they're just.

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  I think that that will what it would be have to be, but then what isn't then? The new companies like if they're beholden to their shareholders isn't the most profitable thing that you could do? Just go re-license the product back to Google like you're talking about.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's exactly what I would do.

• 1:41:27Jordi Hays?

  If, and if you can't do that, then it's worth way less, right? You'd have to look at like Mozilla and some of these other big browsers and be like, well, what is this actually worth?

• 1:41:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Very interesting. Let's go to Jason Carmen, fantastic filmmaker, a good friend of mine and of the show. Jason says, most people don't realize how big of a deal Starship is. Ahead of today's Flight Six, here's a first look inside a new series I'm working on called Frontier Films. The first one is all about new space and this actually got reposted by Elon. And it's, I mean, it's amazing. Jason has crushed it and he's making like, the documentaries are better than Netflix stuff now. Like it's funny.

• 1:42:06Jordi Hays?

  No, if Netflix is smart, they'll go and say, hey, the next series you do.

• 1:42:09John Coogan?

  They should.

• 1:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Just give it to us.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  HBO honestly.

• 1:42:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  Because.

• 1:42:13Jordi Hays?

  No, he's on that path and it's honestly the path that all media is going on.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  To get to actually break into traditional media and like get the Netflix or the HBO or be on TV.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  You gotta do.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be big online first, otherwise like you just don't understand attention and like it's just too risky.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:27Jordi Hays?

  So Jason is, and yeah, I think like he's carved out his own niche of like, I am a filmmaker.

• 1:42:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:34Jordi Hays?

  In technology, which like the fact that when you think filmmaker and technology, I think of you and Jason. And in many ways like you were like a YouTuber, right? More of a YouTuber, he's like filmmaker, multi-platform.

• 1:42:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, his whole background is filmmaking. He, he, I, I kinda like chose YouTube because it was some white space. Like, a lot of people had Substacks and I was like, I wanna do something different. I like, I'm kind of a camera nerd. This guy's been like making films his entire life, like dreaming of making films. And so, uh, super excited for where he's going with it. And it's funny because there is already a Netflix documentary about SpaceX. But it wasn't made from the perspective of someone like Jason, who's actually worked inside of a space company at Astronis and really gets it and really talks to the founders and the investors and understands the whole three. So it's just gonna be so much better and you just know that it's gonna, it's gonna rip. And he has a whole, he has a whole bunch of different products now. Like, he started with the S3 series, doing these like, some kind of micro company

• 1:43:31John Coogan?

  deep dives on like pretty early stage companies, uh, but they were really, really polished, really great interviews. Then he did his interview series. Then he also did some flashback stuff where he did Bell Labs. And now he has these frontier films. And so, he's, he's like fully building a, a new movie studio, essentially. Like, truly going into this.

• 1:43:51Jordi Hays?

  And showing like how efficient it can be. Like, he doesn't have some massive production company.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  Well, it's because he's actually an individual contributor. Like, he knows how to use a camera. He knows how to use a microphone. Like, he doesn't need to spend, you know, a hundred thousand dollars on every single thing because he knows how to do it himself. He can do it solo, but then that allows him to hire the best. And so, it's gonna be massively successful.

• 1:44:09Jordi Hays?

  He embodies the Technology Brothers mentality, which is doing it for the money, right? He's doing it for the love, but like this guy is gonna make millions and millions and millions of dollars making important films, pushing humanity forward through, you know, he's like basically a marketing channel for a lot of really important companies. So, thank you to Jason for doing what he do and doing it for the money.

• 1:44:29John Coogan?

  Thank you, Jason. Uh, let's go to Gary Tan. He says, "This company went from zero to 500K ARR in the last eight weeks." Lots of people do AI due diligence for private equity, but this is the first one that outputs all the analysis natively in Excel files that analysts slash principals can understand and modify from formulas up. Uh, and it's a repost of YC congratulating one of their portfolio companies.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this makes a lot of sense. Like, any, anytime you can go after, like, this company is replacing people that today make between like 80 and like 250,000 dollars a year, doing like, just like keyboard work, like modeling. And it's one of those things, like, it will probably, maybe already is, or very soon will be. Better outputs than like the humans that would do it and for like a 10th or like, you know, even 5% of the cost, something.

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  But importantly, it still allows you to have a tunable model at the end of the day. It's kind of like, what was that company that Tegus bought that was, it was Canalist? I think it was the name?

• 1:45:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  And Canalist would allow you to download a DCF that was kind of pre-populated with the metrics. There's always been Excel templates for various, for various public companies. You can get like a CAP IQ or Bloomberg integration to pull all those formulas in. But allowing, allowing a company to do this in the private markets with just like the proprietary data. And so much of the work is just scraping stuff out of differently formatted PDFs, differently formatted Excel sheets, just doing the translation. And that's where AI is like so valuable right now, just taking a bunch of messy stuff and copying it over and cleaning it up. Like that's where AI really, really flourishes.

• 1:46:03Jordi Hays?

  If you're, if you're an analyst or an associate and you're worried about AI taking your job, you should be looking at this being like, no, it's not going to take my job. I'm just going to do more deals, right? So before it might've taken you a week to build this model.

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  Or 24 hours, now you're going to be able to build it and get on to the next one, right?

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:18Jordi Hays?

  So it's just going to increase the deal velocity.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  It's everything that we're seeing in, in art and filmmaking where you can accelerate with some AI-generated music or some AI-generated content where I fill in the background. Like there's still artistry, there's still going to be creativity.

• 1:46:32Jordi Hays?

  You need the right image for a certain slide and you can generate it.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And it's going to be the same thing with, with, with building these models. It's going to be something where you're, you're, you're, you're just using this to fill in all the, you know, annoying problems that you would normally have to grind at for nights and weekends. And you can grind on nights and weekends on more deals.

• 1:46:53Jordi Hays?

  More deals.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  We love that. Go to Pavel, Delian's brother. He says, "Very misunderstood by tech outsiders. A low-intention meeting with a successful person is net worse for you than not meeting with them at all. Networking is default harmful, makes you look like an NPC unless you have a clear agenda." That's a good point. Never heard this before.

• 1:47:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so anybody that meets Delian go, "Oh, you're Pavel's brother." So do that.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  Pavel's his own man. But, but anyways, yeah, I, I think people don't. There's this obsession in tech of like trying to like climb the ladder and oh, if I just meet this person and get in the room with them, I can like do something and it's like, people even use cold email to a fault, like use cold email when you have a specific thing that you're trying to do with somebody, or you have a specific way to like add value to what they're doing, or something you can offer them, or something you can ask. Just i- i- it's a total waste of time to like meet people when there's no thing to do together.

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  So like, don't, nobody wants like, people in tech are generally like friendly, open to, you know, outsiders, whatever, it's awesome. But don't like waste somebody's time by just being like, hey, I'd love to talk. It's like, nobody wants to just talk. We want to do things.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  Naval talks about this, like what, like you have an extremely high opportunity cost. There's that idea that like, you know, your coffee meeting should be worth like $10,000.

• 1:48:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  And, and it's okay to come in with like, hey, look, I have a, I have an opportunity that together we could make a million dollars. There's 1% chance that it goes through. So yeah, this is, this is a $10,000 meeting. As opposed to just like, I want to just pick your brain and figure it out.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also important to understand, like if you're, if you're at a conference and there's like somebody, like a bean ear there, right? And you're like, oh, I really want to meet this person.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33Jordi Hays?

  There's going to be like 20 other people like crowded around that person.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:37Jordi Hays?

  And you have to understand that all those 20 people are like kind of making that, that person's life worse.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Because they're just coming at them with just like a bunch of bullshit.

• 1:48:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:44Jordi Hays?

  And it's better to just be like, you know, not approach them then and cold email them or get a warm intro. Months later and be like, hey, you know, we overlapped at this conference, didn't get a chance to talk. Social proof right there that you were in the right room. And then you can launch into your like, I'm building this thing. I'd love to like run it by you. And that's going to be a lot more effective of like actually building a relationship than just like, you know, coming on to them and be like, oh, I want to be friends.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there's something like a fine line about like being too transactional, like only talking to someone when there's something to be done.

• 1:49:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I always, I always talk, you know, I was talking with Sebastian from Rappi yesterday. And I told him something that I believe pretty strongly is like, If you're a busy person and the person that you're meeting is a busy person, you're only going to spend a lot of time with them if you're actually working on something, right? Like, the best friendships are usually founded on like, something for doing something productive together. And so, I don't think it's wrong, i- it's not even necessarily transactional, but I don't think it's a bad thing that, there's a lot of people in my life that I'm like, if I work on a specific deal or company, or even in this situation, we spend like 20 hours a week hanging out, and we, we wouldn't be doing that if we weren't making this podcast.

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  And like, there's nothing wrong with that. Like, we were friends before and we're friends now. But, um, it's great to find reasons to be friends.

• 1:50:10John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's go to Liz Wessel, noted angel investor in Ramp.

• 1:50:16Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:50:17John Coogan?

  Secondary to that, I think she's a general partner at a big venture capital firm, but

• 1:50:21Jordi Hays?

  That's cool, too.

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  Less important than just ripping an angel check into Ramp.

• 1:50:25Jordi Hays?

  Big one.

• 1:50:27John Coogan?

  She says, "Why do so many people become investors slash partners and suddenly grow enormous egos? It's so obnoxious. You're not the only one who's special. Your founders are." I mean, I gotta disagree with you there.

• 1:50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:39John Coogan?

  I mean, you're incredibly important.

• 1:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Capital allocators are very special.

• 1:50:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:42Jordi Hays?

  Imagine if all the capital allocators in the world just ceased to exist. Our entire global economy would come crashing down.

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. We always say that, uh, yeah, the, the working class gets far too much credit, and so do the, so does the founder class.

• 1:50:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50:56John Coogan?

  We need to, to

• 1:50:57Jordi Hays?

  There's so many, with businesses that are R and D intensive,

• 1:51:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:01Jordi Hays?

  they cannot exist without. So I don't care if a founder has a pretty deck or a good idea or great pedigree.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:07Jordi Hays?

  If they don't have a $5 million seed round, they're never going to achieve their dreams, which makes the venture capitalists absolutely critical to the process, and they should have a colossal ego. I don't think you should have a big ego if you have like a micro fund like $400 million or something like that. But if you're getting up into the, the billion dollar AUM range, like build that ego up.

• 1:51:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  You're just as important, uh, as

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  Like, jokes aside, there is something very valuable about being a young founder and interacting with an extremely high ego investor. Because at least there is some alignment there, most of the time. So you can kind of get some reps in, deal with some sharp elbows, and deal with like, it's almost lower stakes than, than Dealing with a high ego, public company CEO who's going to buy your company or something like that. Like you've gotten the reps in and just realized like what, what a big ego is and how to deal with it. And, um, but yes, obviously it's a little silly, um, especially if you haven't actually earned it. And you've just become a partner because of your career.

• 1:52:09Jordi Hays?

  I actually tell, I, I, I tell there, there's a specific investor friend of mine who has a few billion AUM. And he like hide, like hides a lot of his like material success from his founders. And I'm like, dude, you realize that like people want to work with other winners, right? So like, if you're a winner and you're crushing it, like other people that are already winners or want to be will want to work with you.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:34Jordi Hays?

  So I don't, I think it's important to just kind of like shatter that wall.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, obviously having a huge ego is like not like, there's no, there's no need for that.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  But I do think that ego is an edge and we went through a period of business history where ego. Like go ask like Michael Ovitz, like, hey, like, what do you think, you know? Did you have a big ego when you were building CAA? And he'd be like, yeah, I have a big ego. Like that's what drove me every single day.

• 1:53:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  But the key is to have a big ego and be kind.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course. There's also a big difference between like materialism and like having nice things and having a big ego. Like those can be very different. You can have, you can have a hundred thousand dollar watch and still have an appreciation for a really interesting Casio that costs a hundred bucks. Right?

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  And being, and being a, someone who, who, uh, understands like taste and, and, uh, and opinionated decision making. Even, and not just saying, oh, like this person has like a really expensive Hublot.

• 1:53:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34John Coogan?

  That's not going to cut it, right?

• 1:53:36Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  So.

• 1:53:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing is there's a difference between, you can have a huge ego and still be very respectful.

• 1:53:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:41Jordi Hays?

  So a GP that's managing billions of dollars. They can have a huge ego because they're managing billions of dollars. They can still be respectful of founders, respectful of their time, kind in when they pass.

• 1:53:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  You know, or kind if, you know, and respectful if there's a tough situation. So the key is to build, build the ego.

• 1:53:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:00Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, become a better, kinder person.

• 1:54:02John Coogan?

  I really wonder who this subtweet is about. It's clearly about some investor partner, someone who just made partner on like, you know, for no reason. And is now just like running around being like, you fucking work for me.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  Uh, hopefully it's not happening at her fund. Um, Bucow Capital bloke, he's been on the show before. He says, I heard someone say, here for the income, not the outcome today at work. And that pretty much nicely sums up what happens in tech when stocks really start ripping. 2021 vibes everywhere with 1K lights.

• 1:54:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people have been talking about, I mean, just the general, we're just, we, who knew when, when 2021 and 2022, early 22, 22 were happening.

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:46Jordi Hays?

  It didn't feel like we'd reached that level of frothiness again for at least a decade.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:51Jordi Hays?

  And we prayed for a bubble.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, how many, how many hours, right, were we praying to have another bubble and to get AI this quickly? And in many ways get, um, you know, there, there's even a bubble in tech podcasting, right? No, but I, I do think it's this thing where these companies get to a certain size and suddenly it's become so hard to sort. Like I, I was talking to a founder today who's starting about, thinking about starting his own company. You know, interviewing and would likely get an offer with OpenAI. And he was looking at it as like, well, I could go to OpenAI for a year, invest like a couple million dollars of stock. And then be an OpenAI shareholder and then just build my company.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Jordi Hays?

  So that's like the reality of like here for the income.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:35Jordi Hays?

  Not the outcome. He doesn't necessarily, like, he's just getting it as like a call option, basically.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  Mercenary.

• 1:55:39Jordi Hays?

  Mercenary. Um, but he's going to start a company. So good.

• 1:55:42John Coogan?

  That's great. That's great. Uh, let's go to Megan Nivold, first time on the show. She says, so, once Ozempic gets to be cheap, will rich people start being fat again?

• 1:55:53Jordi Hays?

  So you know how it used to be a status symbol to be overweight, like in the early, you know?

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  I have a joke with some of my friends when they get fat. We say, "Looking prosperous."

• 1:56:02Jordi Hays?

  Looking prosperous, my friend.

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  Looking prosperous.

• 1:56:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the real contrarian move here-

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, Peter Paul Rubens painted fat people and it was, yeah, the luxury. It showed that you had enough income to afford nice foods and full calories.

• 1:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the real, the real edge, if you're a capital allocator out there, add pronouns to your bio-

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:20Jordi Hays?

  And get overweight and you'll really stand out and kind of make a statement of like, "I am contrarian."

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. I wonder if there will be a future where, just like we discovered this miracle pill in Ozempic, there will be a miracle pill that will allow you to be extremely obese, but suffer none of the health consequences?

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  That, that's alpha.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  That's alpha. So you can just be physically intimidating?

• 1:56:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  Just walk around at 400 pounds?

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  You're having to go to Patek and get like customized like bands because like it doesn't fit around your wrist?

• 1:56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do, I do wonder-

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  Have you been through like a heavy like mass gaining period?

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, many times.

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  There was a period when I first started going to the gym when I was 18, I would eat at the, at the college cafeteria three times a day. I would wake up, have a protein shake, go to the gym, go, go to the cafeteria. Then I would get two peanut butter sandwiches-

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:57:14Jordi Hays?

  That were bread with a puck of peanut butter. It was like a burger size and I would eat two of those before lunch.

• 1:57:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:57:20Jordi Hays?

  At lunch, I'd go back to the cafeteria, eat a whole meal, and then I'd get two more sandwiches and then I would go to dinner and then I'd have one more sandwich and one more protein shake. So I was like literally having like 5,000 calories a day. Like, it was just absurd.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  And everybody should go through that. It's character building to go through because you're, every single bite, you're like, "I'm gonna throw up. I feel sick."

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, you wanna look prosperous.

• 1:57:43Jordi Hays?

  Look prosperous, everybody.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Prosperous. And then go through a cut, convert it all the muscle and become a mass monster.

• 1:57:49Jordi Hays?

  A mass monster, a size lord.

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  And then, and then take Ozempic and get peeled and walk around at 5% body fat. We have a huge move in the talent world.

• 1:57:57Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 1:57:58John Coogan?

  This is actually massive. Fred Ursom, the founder of Coinbase, is welcoming Jeremy Baranholz, who doesn't have an X account sadly, as a co-founder of Nudge, link to his post before, below. And so Jeremy Baranholz is a former Elon Musk associate at Neuralink, and I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he was truly one of the most impressive people I've ever met.

• 1:58:21Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 1:58:22John Coogan?

  An absolute dog. Really, really incredible.

• 1:58:28Jordi Hays?

  And Nudge is building an alternative to Neuralink focused on, you know, improving...

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a non-implanted device.

• 1:58:35Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:58:35John Coogan?

  So I think it's a headband that improves memory or something with the brain, interacts with the brain in some way, electrical stimulation. But fascinating, fascinating guy. Went to Stanford, was in the military, and I met him, and he looks just like the typical, like, San Francisco, like, thin programmer guy. And he was telling us that he's like extremely goal-driven.

• 1:58:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  He sleeps for like two hours a night. Insane. And I was like, this is fake. Like, there's so many red flags. Like, I just don't buy this guy, what he's saying. And he was like, no, I'm extremely goal-oriented. Like, when I want to work on something, I just work on it constantly. And if I sleep, I'll just wake up and be like, I need to keep working on this. It's insane.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  And he was like, yeah, one time I got really into working out, and I got in this incredible shape, and I looked like a professional bodybuilder. And we were like, yeah, right, dude. Like, you're so skinny. Like, this is impossible. And he showed us a picture, and he was like the most jacked dude I've ever seen. It was insane.

• 1:59:31Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  Insane. And so he just...

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, I hope they make the Nudge headband.

• 1:59:35John Coogan?

  He was working with the FDA stuff, he's electrical engineering, working on neuroscience, working on programming. You can go look up his GitHub, he's written a bunch of programming code. Like, he is totally the real deal. Like, really, really fascinating person. And so huge pick-up for Fred.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  I hope he leaves his mark on the Nudge. Like, I'd love to just put on the Nudge headband and just like get some, you know, even like 60% of that, like, you know, mindset.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  It really, he really is like a special, special person. Like, I laughed being, it was a, it was a big, like, it was the Founders Fund CEO Summit, and there are a lot of very impressive people there. But he was someone that really, really stood out as a very... Very interesting, like, long-tail person.

• 2:00:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  And I was very bullish on him, so.

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Big pickup. I'm excited to see more about this company.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  To see what he does. And I hope, I hope we learn more about him. He, he's very quiet and he's, uh, he was featured in one Ashley Vance article about, um, about Neuralink. And hopefully there's more because I think the way he thinks about artificial intelligence and math and everything, it's like extremely valuable. And they're just, there's not enough of this like intellectualism that actually boils up. He's a very, very interesting thinker. Um, so rooting for him.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Big pickup.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  Let's go to Andre. He says, "A preview of my new book, preorder for $39.99," and it's two screenshots. It's "How to Build Generational Wealth on X.com." And the first page is, "You can post the plane with red dots. You can quote tweet anything with this picture of the plane with red dots. It always does numbers." Even if people have no idea what it means, they will like and retweet to feign that they understand what's going on. And I, I, I think I replied to this, but like, I would, I would actually read this book. I think it's amazing.

• 2:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  There are so many of these formats that are interesting. He should charge more. He should actually do it, or he should do it at least, at least a huge thread of all the most viral slop.

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  I do think, yeah, viral slop.

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  It's the, it's the iPhone. This is the best, this is the best feature Apple ever made, and it's, uh, filling in the text message two-factor authentication code.

• 2:01:31Jordi Hays?

  And the book could come with like a down, like a link to like a, a, a Dropbox where you could download all.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  But they're not like high-res. They're all like reposted, like burnt-in JPGs with, they're just super compressed and grainy.

• 2:01:44Jordi Hays?

  No, I do think this is, the, the, there's a lot of people that go on X and just start, like, posting and just like, otherwise, like, very intelligent people that just do not understand how the platform works.

• 2:01:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:01:56Jordi Hays?

  And like, couldn't for the life of them, like, create a banger, even though they have good ideas.

• 2:02:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:00Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, this, this could be like, you know, a book, a cohort-based course, like in-person events, summits.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Get on WAP.

• 2:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, three, getonwap.com.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  Get some wifi money going.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. There's a 360-degree business to be built here.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and you'd help a lot of people get, uh, post-economic just from posting.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  I think so. I mean, we've seen some of those creator paths. They get pretty big.

• 2:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  Pretty big. You could fund your whole startup on it. Let's go to Keshav. He says, Paul Graham's whole life. I need money to paint. Learns programming, falls in love with Lisp, works briefly at Interleaf, starts Viaweb to fund his painting lifestyle, sells to Yahoo for life-changing money, moves to California, then New York, tries painting, can't focus properly, feels lost, discovers writing essays online, creates YC. This is temporary, then I'll paint. Builds Hacker News, gets stressed running online community, leaves YC to paint, tries painting in 2014, gives up mid-painting, codes Bell for four years, returns to essays in Lisp, moves to the UK, quote-unquote, "for a year", never leaves. It's so funny. There's so many people like this where it's like, they have this idealized passion of themselves, like what they could be, but they're just like

• 2:03:07John Coogan?

  born to allocate capital, or born to post, or born to write or code. And he just clearly has so many, so many fantastic skillsets. PG.

• 2:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Painting was always a fever dream, but thank, thank God it stayed a fever dream, because otherwise we wouldn't have Y Combinator. And we'd live in a world where if you made a good app, you'd never have 50 competitors launching next year.

• 2:03:31John Coogan?

  And you wouldn't have 50 VCs lining up to write your seed checks.

• 2:03:35Jordi Hays?

  You never would have gotten the safe. You never would have gotten the two-on-20 seed round.

• 2:03:40John Coogan?

  Think about this. The impact he's had. I mean, I always think about YC as more, less of an, less of an investment vehicle. Like, they've had the impact on the investing space, obviously, but YC has become essentially a union for startups.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:53John Coogan?

  Because if you are a VC and you fuck over one YC company, you go in their database, every YC company hears about you, and instantly you're ostracized from the entire, in such a large community now.

• 2:04:06Jordi Hays?

  And the collective bargaining approach of going, everybody goes out for two-on-20.

• 2:04:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:11Jordi Hays?

  It's like, that's just the price, my friend.

• 2:04:13John Coogan?

  It's funny you say two-on-20, because like, when I went through, it was like one-on-10, and then it was like one and a half on 15, and now it's two-on-20.

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  But even back in the day with one-on-10, that was probably, felt like people were like, well, this is like egregious.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  100%. It's always been, it's always felt egregious.

• 2:04:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  It's always felt egregious, but...

• 2:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, no, the money supply has expanded when, when YC companies are going out, where they're like, yeah, we're going for 10 on 100.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  There was one company in my batch who raised at 80, and everyone was like, wow, this is wild. And there's always like one company that just gives...

• 2:04:41Jordi Hays?

  How'd they do, though?

• 2:04:42John Coogan?

  I don't think they actually did that well, but their numbers were crazy. It was like this company, Vi Rule, they did like viral videos, and I think they had a ton of revenue. Because the guy, the guy who did it had been building, like... Online advertising tech since he was a kid and had like a bunch of like just made a lot of money through like online advertising. So was able to get the business to like a pretty big size. Do we have a promoted post?

• 2:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from our friends over at Ramp. Why settle for individual ingredients? When Ramp gives you the full financial operations sandwich. They have corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, procurement, travel. Look at this sandwich. It looks fantastic. We haven't eaten yet today.

• 2:05:23John Coogan?

  It looks fantastic.

• 2:05:24Jordi Hays?

  It's making my mouth water.

• 2:05:25John Coogan?

  It is a great way to articulate like the value of Ramp that like it's the CFO suite. It's a bundle of tools. It's a, you know, it's a compound startup. It's multiple products all wrapped up in one. But my problem is that I don't think Ramp's a sandwich. I think it's a nine-course prefix with a wine pairing at the French Laundry. I think it's, I think it's premium. And, and when I think of Ramp, I don't think just some sandwich that your, your mom made for you and threw in a plastic bag on your way to school. I think, you know, begging for a reservation, greasing the Mater D, valet parking your Turbo S, walking into the French Laundry, shaking hands with the chef, sitting down and enjoying an Omakase.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:06:08John Coogan?

  So Ramp, good post, but step it up with the, the, the classiness because I want Ramp to be a premium brand.

• 2:06:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, their social media manager is fantastic, always good for a laugh. But yeah, nine, nine-course meal, wine pairing. And the chef will even, you know, the chef will even come out and say hello. Kareem will send you a note and say, thanks for being a Ramp customer.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  This is true.

• 2:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Eric will send you a note.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  Eric really will. Eric really is the CEO that comes around.

• 2:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Eric will come and sit down at your table and, you know, have a conversation and make sure that your, your, your NPS score is a hundred.

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  I've always said that about the way Elon runs Axe now, where if you have a banger, he will come around and like just drop like a crying face emoji in the replies. Just be like

• 2:06:53Jordi Hays?

  And then it'll break your phone.

• 2:06:54John Coogan?

  And it'll break your phone. But but it feels like the chef coming out and being like, is everyone enjoying the meal? Is everyone enjoying the bangers today? Like, here's what's going on. And I just love that about the way he uses the product. Because no previous CEO, not even Jack Dorsey, who was like totally in founder mode during his whole career. Like, he didn't use the product that way. And Elon really used the product where he clearly consumes the the stuff and comes out and is like, oh, is the soup good tonight? I'm tasting it. Oh, like, let me have some of this whiskey, too. Like, we'll share some of this. Like, is the wine working? Oh, it's a little cork. Like, let's adjust the algorithm.

• 2:07:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  It's good.

• 2:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Jesse Hook.

• 2:07:30John Coogan?

  And I think I think the Ramp guys are doing the same thing.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  Let's go to Logan Bartlett. He says, MicroStrategy has now passed its dot com bubble stock price and is an $82 billion business. Get him on the podcast, Logan. This is an $82 billion software company. You interview the largest public company tech CEOs. You got to get Sailor on the pod.

• 2:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Get him on the pod.

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  Get him on the pod.

• 2:07:57Jordi Hays?

  No, MicroStrategy has a fantastic business model. For every dollar Bitcoin they buy, they get $3 of enterprise value. And so if if they're smart and they're serving the shareholders, they'll just do that over and over and over forever.

• 2:08:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  And then if Sailor's like really bullish, he'll do a take private.

• 2:08:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:14Jordi Hays?

  At a nice premium.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:16Jordi Hays?

  Because he's just like, I'm so long, I'm happy to pay, you know, 3X.

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Because I could use more leverage on the take private.

• 2:08:23John Coogan?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, it's wild. There, I mean, the funny thing is that there are a number of companies that have done this exact chart. Akamai, do you know Akamai? The networking company, they invented like, like IP routing and stuff. It's like this MIT company, fascinating. And they were worth like 20 billion during the dot com boom. Couple of the guys sold. They only worked there for like six months during the run up. Just became generational, generationally wealthy. And then it took the company like 20 years to build back up. But it was a solid business with solid technology. And so they finally got to their peak like more recently.

• 2:08:57Jordi Hays?

  It's good to have a

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  A different story with MicroStrategy, but respect, respect.

• 2:09:01Jordi Hays?

  At least like, you know, having that up and down, like you get like a nice, you know, the number that you have to hit again to get any level of respect, right?

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. We go to TCP tech CEO Pepe. He says, daily affirmation, I will fire an intercontinental ballistic missile.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  I love this. I believe you'll be able to do it, although the ICBM might not be holding a nuclear weapon inside of it. It might be a, it might be SpaceX point to point. You might be riding on that. You might be going from New York to Tokyo in thirty minutes.

• 2:09:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:35John Coogan?

  But ICBMs, I saw another post, SpaceX is just a wrapper around ICBMs. I like that. Make the ICBM useful again. We need to be firing these things off. They can't just be sitting on nuclear submarines doing nothing.

• 2:09:49Jordi Hays?

  I know. Total waste.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  Total waste.

• 2:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, you can just, you, you know, in the same way that you can just do things.

• 2:09:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:54Jordi Hays?

  You can just manifest things and you can just affirm things.

• 2:09:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:58Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a very, uh, you know, it's been well studied to this point. Like you should be leveraging this in different ways, but don't do it in the ways that, that, uh, you know, that, that people in L A do it where they're like, I am healthy. I am happy. I am like, I.

• 2:10:13John Coogan?

  You step it up.

• 2:10:13Jordi Hays?

  You step it up. You know, I will, uh, find the hundred million dollars hidden in my computer.

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:18Jordi Hays?

  I will find the hundred million dollars hidden in my computer.

• 2:10:21John Coogan?

  Oh, speaking of that, let's go to Atlas Creatine Cycle. Uh, it's a screenshot. It says, there is a hundred million dollars stuck in your MacBook. Your job is to figure out how to get it. And he says, there is a hundred million dollars stuck in SF. Your job is to break up with your GF, move there with your best friend and start a GPT wrapper.

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:10:39John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  More rappers. There aren't enough rappers.

• 2:10:42John Coogan?

  There are enough.

• 2:10:43Jordi Hays?

  Genuinely.

• 2:10:44John Coogan?

  Genuinely.

• 2:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Just go. If you don't have a good idea.

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

  Just start there.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Go make an app in the App Store called Chat GPT.

• 2:10:52John Coogan?

  Chat.com GPT.

• 2:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Or something like that. And it's just Chat GPT reskin, put in the app.

• 2:10:58John Coogan?

  No, it's not even Chat GPT. It's Llama probably.

• 2:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  Llama on a.

• 2:11:01Jordi Hays?

  And just charge, just charge, charge the most.

• 2:11:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:05Jordi Hays?

  Have some, you know, put it, put some good branding on there. Spend a ton of money on paid ads.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  If you spend a dollar on paid ads and you generate a dollar and one dollars of revenue, just keep doing that forever.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  Scale it.

• 2:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Till you're, you know, till you're a beaner or a centee.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's nothing stopping you. Uh, you don't need to be that creative. You just need to work harder.

• 2:11:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  I love it. Thanks, Creatine Cycle. Always good to have you on the show. Let's go to Isaac. Isaac says, "This time, two years ago, my timeline was filled with business banter, hot takes, bad takes, random shitposts. Now it's crickets. I came to Twitter for business shenanigans, and more and more, it feels like it disappoints. I won't be leaving, but I hope it changes." Well, I mean, you're disrespecting X by calling it Twitter. That's your first mistake, Isaac.

• 2:11:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:52John Coogan?

  Also, be the change you want to see in the world.

• 2:11:55Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  Why don't you start posting business banter instead of complaining?

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  So Isaac is a friend and fantastic entrepreneur. He actually made his first million selling swords.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:06John Coogan?

  Oh, sick. Okay.

• 2:12:07Jordi Hays?

  So he has a company called Mini Katana that he bootstrapped using these like crazy viral hacks.

• 2:12:14John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:12:14Jordi Hays?

  On YouTube, making original content. He's now building a candy company. I think that Isaac, I've said this before, but he's really like the Willie, like he's the next Willy Wonka.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  So if you have all the VCs out there that have like a Willy Wonka thesis, go find Isaac. His company's awesome. His facility where he manufactures everything is like only a few miles from here. But yeah, I haven't necessarily experienced this, like the for you page, like definitely.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  It's a little messy, especially during the election.

• 2:12:43Jordi Hays?

  It's messy. There's a lot of slop.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  But that's why we're doing the show. Like, follow Tech Bros Pod. Like, we are posting business hot takes. We never post bad takes. A lot of random shitposts, but there's a lot of content.

• 2:12:55Jordi Hays?

  No social commentary, no political commentary.

• 2:12:57John Coogan?

  We never talk about politics.

• 2:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Purely business and technology and finance. And so the comment section, even on this post, I'm, you know, when we quote tweet this, there's going to be a lot of like, you know, hot takes.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:09Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, you know, good to call this out, but use the not interested button. When they try to put some slop in your for you page, say, "Not interested."

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Block, mute.

• 2:13:18Jordi Hays?

  Not interested.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  It does require curation. You're building a Zen garden. You want to avoid some things. I mean, I have a series of lists now. I have, I, I, I often look through the for you page a little bit. I find that like the first 10 posts are usually pretty good. And as you go farther down, it just gets sloppier and sloppier because it's just randomly sorting. But then switch over to the following tab. Got some good people in there. I also have a list just for the people that I know post great stuff. I want to see everything that they post. So I put, I put that in there. Also, just spend more time online. That's probably the problem. Do we have a promoted post?

• 2:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from our friend, Jackson Dahl. Jackson says, I'm excited to announce.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  Oh, this is big.

• 2:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Dialectic pod, podcast, an interview podcast with the sharpest, most creative and original people I know. Says, I like to spar with people on their ideas and push them deeper, ultimately to understand what makes them themselves. He's already got episode one out. He's got a cool graphic here. And Jackson is somebody that has, uh, one of those people where you talk to like very high like in, in insights per minute. Right? So if you're having like a 10, 10 minute conversation with him, you're going to have like a bunch of interest. He's going to give a bunch of interesting point of, point of views and takes. So. Podcast is awesome. Listen to a little bit of the first episode. Um, and, uh, anyways, very, uh, I, I think this is just like, he, he's one of those things.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  It's very strong, like, uh, founder market fit in the context of like a podcast, like looking at this as like a media business, like he's going to have, um, no problem, just like making the show fantastic.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Is he monetizing already?

• 2:14:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I hope so. I hope so. Maybe we should be the first advertiser. Cause as much as we like to, um, juice our show with ads, like we should be advertising quite a bit. So. Jackson, uh, if you don't have any advertisers yet, uh, we'd love to, uh.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  Make something happen. Let's go to Adam Graham. First time on the show. He says, the amount of high quality content that Tech Bros Pod is putting out is insane. Banger after banger. This is why they're, they're the most profitable podcast. Hell yes, Adam. This is exactly why we do everything that we do. We do it for the money, really.

• 2:15:27Jordi Hays?

  The money. But if there's bangers as a byproduct, then that's, that's fantastic.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. And high quality content.

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  If that's what makes the money, we'll do it. But just to be clear, if low quality content's more profitable, expect some low quality content.

• 2:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Here and there.

• 2:15:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. But good to have you as a fan, good to have you as a follower, good to have you on the show. Welcome to the tech bros community.

• 2:15:52Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:15:52John Coogan?

  Thanks, Adam.

• 2:15:53Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Adam.

• 2:15:54John Coogan?

  Let's go to Nick Carter. He says locked in and pulled another all dayer today.

• 2:15:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  Let's go, Nick.

• 2:16:01Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. The only time I've ever taken naps during the workday, like I was like, probably like devastated. Like I've had to be in like a really bad spot.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:12Jordi Hays?

  To be so strung out.

• 2:16:13John Coogan?

  I take like one nap a quarter on like a Sunday. And it's wonderful, but I'm not a daily napper. It's kind of crazy.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, naps are, I get it if you're like Paul Graham and you're working on your painting career and you're trying to get like a, you know, burst of energy for the afternoon. But I don't know any.

• 2:16:34John Coogan?

  Also, it's kind of impossible to take naps when you're on enough stimulants to kill a horse.

• 2:16:38Jordi Hays?

  That's a big, that's a big part of it. I think anybody's that is like, oh, I should take a nap. It's like try.

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  Try 600 milligrams of caffeine and some nicotine, 4 milligram nicotine pouches all day long.

• 2:16:48Jordi Hays?

  There you go. You won't be.

• 2:16:49John Coogan?

  You won't be inclined to nap. You'll be pulling all dayers every single day.

• 2:16:52Jordi Hays?

  All dayers, daily.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  But I love Nick. Quintessential, you can just do things guy. Did the boxing match, did the investigative journalism, huge, huge capital allocator. Love Nick.

• 2:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:17:03John Coogan?

  Does a bunch of cool stuff.

• 2:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Student of capitalism.

• 2:17:06John Coogan?

  Let's go to my colleague, Bridgette Harris over at Founder's Fund. She's, she's quoting Peter Thiel, says, "The Wall Street banks are long the trade deficit because the bigger the deficit, the more money they make." And she says, "Obviously, bigger trade deficit equals larger volume of cross-border payments. Stable coins could be hugely helpful here in helping smaller banks compete with cross-border flows. Large banks have no incentives besides defensive to switch because of this dynamic. Lower fees equals less profit." Among others, has to be a smaller player slash new entrant with nothing to lose plus favorable legislation because the incumbents won't cannibalize themselves under unless pressure comes from the outside. And love you, Bridget, but you made a terrible mistake. You included

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  a link to Spotify, which is banned on X, and that's why you only got 99 views. So turn this into a clickbait thread, repost it, I'll retweet it, and we'll go to the moon, we'll cover it again. I think you got a thousand likes easy on this. If you just make it a little bit more incendiary, you need to call someone out, they're the reason America's stagnating. This is the problem. You got to be much more aggressive. But honestly, a very thoughtful post and something that really digs into all of the features of stable coins and all of the different factors going on there. I was not aware of all this, but it makes a lot of sense.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, it's, it's gonna be interesting with stable coins. So far, it seems like the fees, you know, Stripes obviously made their move into stable coins. We'll see like what the, you know, I've seen like some stable coin products that just still have like similar fees to like traditional payment processing, but it'll be a pretty cool experiment to run to just be like, all right, if you can move money basically for free in the sort of trustless way, how much does that accelerate the velocity of money? And I would imagine it'll be pretty significant.

• 2:18:50John Coogan?

  Yep. I mean, it still seems like we're pretty early in all of the crypto stuff, like even Bitcoin, it's unclear, like, is it putting pressure on certain parts of the US government? Like, it's become a political issue, and there's pro Bitcoin or anti Bitcoin communities, but we're not, we haven't really worked through because we're not on the gold standard. Like, if Bitcoin displaces gold, how does that really trickle through the rest of the American economy? Like, not sure.

• 2:19:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, now there's rumors of the strategic Bitcoin reserve.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  That would be big. Yeah, very interesting. But Bridget has a fantastic post on Pirate Wires, deep diving the, the Stripe acquisition of, it was a Bridge?

• 2:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  It's confusing because it's Bridget and Bridge, but the, the stablecoin platform that got acquired. And so you should definitely go read that if you want to learn more about stablecoins.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Let's go to the founder of Perplexity. He was demoing a new perplexity product for shopping, which I love. You can just take a picture of something and then perplexity will go and find the product that you're searching for. And in this case, he asked, what watches does Jeff Bezos wear? And he perplexity helped him realize that Bezos is often wearing the Omega Speedmaster Professional Moon Watch and another watch. And he says, should I buy this? And I think the answer is absolutely, you should buy it. We need more technologists and founders who are watch guys. We've seen this happen with Zuck. He's rocking a fantastic FPJorn. We know some capital

• 2:20:26John Coogan?

  allocators who are rocking Pateks and Nautilus and Aquanauts at this point, but it's still under discussed and there's still major alpha in getting into the watch game.

• 2:20:35Jordi Hays?

  It needs to be more a part of the conversation.

• 2:20:37John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So I highly recommend this. You need to differentiate. You're in brutal competition with every other big tech company, bro. You need to stand out. Get a nice piece.

• 2:20:47Jordi Hays?

  Statement. Get a hitter.

• 2:20:48John Coogan?

  Get a hitter. And then every time you go and shake someone's hand, when you go shake Jensen's hand for those for those GPUs that you need, he's going to be like, ooh.

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Whoo, whoo. Even people that aren't watch guys, they're still going to notice and respect it.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:21:03Jordi Hays?

  It's a way to make an impression.

• 2:21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I say, pull the trigger. Let's go to Yarden Shafir. He says, I'm outside the club. A drunk girl is yelling her opinions on Rust. I have hit peak San Francisco. Wow, 7K likes. Let's go.

• 2:21:18Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Tech is mainstream.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  People like Rust. I've never, I've never written a line of Rust. I know it's a very popular language, really popular with crypto, I think. I'd really appreciate it if people can stop being transphobic in my comments. Go do that someplace else if you must. Yeah, of course, this turned into a culture war issue. It's more, it's more of an issue than hot.

• 2:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Anything, anything past, anything past 1000 likes, it turns into.

• 2:21:41John Coogan?

  You're in the dark territory.

• 2:21:43Jordi Hays?

  Culture war zone.

• 2:21:44John Coogan?

  Dark acts.

• 2:21:45Jordi Hays?

  Try to keep your likes under 1000 if you don't want politics and social issues.

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  You want, you want low TAM bangers, just the people that know.

• 2:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Consistent, consistent.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  Or else it's going to get to you crazy. But yeah, I mean, this is, it's interesting because sometimes like the drunk girl outside of a club, I remember in Miami, seeing a drunk girl talk to a bouncer about. Bitcoin and it was right at the peak when Bitcoin was at 20K and then it immediately sold off afterwards. So there is a little bit of like when your barber is giving you stock or your taxi driver is giving you stock tips, like maybe that's a signal.

• 2:22:19Jordi Hays?

  But this is a signal that SF is is is back.

• 2:22:22John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:22:22Jordi Hays?

  The fact that somebody went out in San Francisco presumably past 10pm is a really bullish sign.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder if that's real or if that it was just like a like an imagined scenario.

• 2:22:34Jordi Hays?

  You can just make up things.

• 2:22:35John Coogan?

  You can just make up things. Let's go to Beth Jaisos, he says bio acc is the next Overton frontier, few.

• 2:22:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so you know, we've been, you know, you've been a strong proponent for literally years for genetically engineering bears to domesticate them and also make them, you know, allies for us and.

• 2:22:54John Coogan?

  And also biohacking and stimulants and all sorts of stuff in in that world. But yeah, it's interesting to see where this goes. What's interesting is like the Overton frontier, is he just saying like that is where the political issues are being fought right now, like over IVF, over what Nora Siddiqui is doing at Orchid, over like genetically engineering babies, like that type of stuff? Because Overton, I usually think of the Overton window as like the what is acceptable to say politically, so it seems like what he is saying here is maybe that that there are things that are going on in the bio accelerationist community that you can't talk about or you would be canceled if you talked about. And this is like the rumor that there are genetically engineered children in China right now, but not in America. Have you heard this?

• 2:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  And so, so it's interesting that it's like, maybe we're going to have to have a national conversation about the morality of bio in the same way that we have had it around AI.

• 2:23:50Jordi Hays?

  There there, yeah, there needs to be a conversation. There's there's certainly, I could get on the hat for this.

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  Put on the tinfoil hat.

• 2:23:56Jordi Hays?

  But there's many people like, you know, one of the, one of the, you know, sort of pushback against this, there's many people that believe that Lyme disease was created in a lab.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Because it basically spread out of this small area around. Like Long Island.

• 2:24:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:11Jordi Hays?

  There was a, there was a island off of um.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  Manhattan?

• 2:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Like Montauk area.

• 2:24:17John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:24:17Jordi Hays?

  And dogs would wash up on like in Montauk.

• 2:24:21John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:24:21Jordi Hays?

  Never like a dog combined with a pig.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Like very weird.

• 2:24:25John Coogan?

  This is the most crazy.

• 2:24:26Jordi Hays?

  Very, very weird uh stuff, but uh Lyme disease also spread out from uh sort of like that was the geographic center. And the ticks that initially had it would sort of spread out from, from there.

• 2:24:39John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm terrified of ticks and Lyme disease whenever I'm on the east coast. I always avoid going for hikes and stuff. I'm like.

• 2:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Huge west coast alpha, like having less ticks.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  There's something scary about having like something so small have such a huge impact on you.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  No, it just almost destroys your life. Yeah.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  And snakes. I'm not a fan.

• 2:24:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Anyway, hopefully we'll hear some more stuff about bio- biological accelerationism. I think that we, we need a good blog post from somebody. I mean, a little bit of that's happening with Neuralink and probably Nudge and a few other programs.

• 2:25:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  So putting all that together into kind of like, we need like a Packy deep dive or something. Be cool.

• 2:25:15Jordi Hays?

  Some things just need a Packy deep dive.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  They do. Uh Jeff Lewis says, I believe that in the future will be governed predominantly by algorithms. Phase one, algorithms accumulate power, two thousand to twenty twenty. Phase two, governments attempt to wrest power from or align themselves with algorithms. Twenty twenty to present. Phase three, algorithms become the government.

• 2:25:37Jordi Hays?

  So Jeff has a special talent.

• 2:25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:39Jordi Hays?

  For looking at uh, you know, there's that phrase like, how do you, how to predict the future is to like, sort of like, look at the, the present, right? And in many ways, like he positioned this tweet in a sort of like incendiary way of being like two thousand to two thousand and twenty, right? Algorithms gaining power.

• 2:25:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Um but uh, but yeah, I, you know, I, I, I buy this. I feel like we're, we're uh already seeing the.

• 2:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Governments align themselves with different algorithms, right? You saw that this election cycle, but I would just say, I wanna, I wanna live in a world where the temp check algorithm runs, runs the country, right? Vibes based governance and Jeff, we've told you this already, but bring back temp check.

• 2:26:24John Coogan?

  We need it.

• 2:26:25Jordi Hays?

  Some of the best VC content market, I know you're not a VC.

• 2:26:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Best VC content marketing in the game.

• 2:26:30John Coogan?

  It was fantastic.

• 2:26:31Jordi Hays?

  Classics and some low tan bangers in there, so.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is kind of the Brian Johnson question right now. He's been, he's been asking a lot of people.

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  He says that don't die is an algorithm and like that's what he's really creating.

• 2:26:44John Coogan?

  And also he's been asking a lot of people like if, if, if you could guarantee that an AI would give you like a better life outcome, would you submit to the AI, to the AI dictator? And it's a very interesting philosophical question that I think we'll be digging into more over the next few years. So definitely the right question to be asking.

• 2:27:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:27:03John Coogan?

  Go to Matt Turk, he says, okay, but what, but we dramatically improved our podcast game and it's a response to TechCrunch. In 2023, VCs returned the lowest level of capital to their investors since 2011. And so the 2023 was not a good year for venture capitalists. But there were a lot of great podcasts that came out of this era.

• 2:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I would say that in many ways, maybe the, the carry checks were lower, but big funds were still being raised.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  Yep, fees were high.

• 2:27:32Jordi Hays?

  The fees, you know, stayed stable.

• 2:27:34John Coogan?

  And so why not put those fees into a shore SM7B or some cinema cameras or a lovely set?

• 2:27:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  But yeah, we do need more venture capitalist podcasts. I've noticed this when I've looked at like, if you're a VC or a company and you wanna go do, do a press junket, it's actually pretty hard to go do 10 solid interviews that have.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  You know, a reasonable following. Like if you're a celebrity and you're promoting a movie, you can go do Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert, like you can do, you know, NBC and CBS and, you know, The View and all of these different things to promote your show and they all have large followings. And on, in terms of like VC world, there's really not that much. There's like a few shows that are pretty big. A lot of them don't have guests. It's not like you can just call up all in and go on. 20 VC does this.

• 2:28:26Jordi Hays?

  There's the TechCrunch one, but it's not like you're gonna go and get these sort of like super influential hosts.

• 2:28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it is really important for, for founders to be able to like work their way up and start with a smaller show and then parlay that into the bigger show and then wind up on the big show. But it's really, really hard.

• 2:28:44Jordi Hays?

  The same way that tech founder Donald J. Trump finally was able to claw his way up onto Rogan.

• 2:28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there needs to be a similar path, but it's hard because Dorkesh is so focused on AI and Lex occasionally, he may have the cursor founders on, but he hasn't, I don't think he's even had Palmer Lucky on. There's like, like there's, there's not really that many just general tech shows like Logan Bartlett, a great show, but it's like now narrowed down to just like public company SaaS CEOs, which is cool.

• 2:29:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And that's why we started this podcast. We felt like the technology industry needed a podcast.

• 2:29:18John Coogan?

  It did, it did. So, yeah. Let's go to the real estate god. The real estate god says, craziest thing in America is that the average person could two to five X their salary simply by taking a sales role, but they're too scared of people telling them no 20 times a day. Interesting. Yeah, that's true.

• 2:29:36Jordi Hays?

  It's, uh, it's funny. Sales is one of those things like, you know, in a lot of things, if you're getting told no 20 times a day, like you should just like stop doing what you're doing because the market is telling you like,

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  You're doing something wrong.

• 2:29:48Jordi Hays?

  You're doing something bad. Like it sucks. But sales is like one of those things like the, the, the no tolerance needs to be, uh, extreme mostly because like sometimes like even customers that want your product like don't want to deal with you right now, or they just have 10 other things that are more important. So you're never going to break through. Someone else shared something recently that was like, Oh, in the future, I forget who posted this, but in the future, you're gonna be getting 2,000 email, like, perfect cold emails a day from all the outbound sales agents and Salesforce is gonna be like taking you out to like a steak dinner and they're like, so, we're gonna renew your contract, we're gonna increase it like by like 50%, like, here's, you know, just sign right here and you're like, alright, like, I guess, I guess this is what we're doing.

• 2:30:33John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Let's go to Jen. She says, overheard three tech bros discussing how much money it would take for them to replace their girlfriend. Thing is, none of them even currently have a girlfriend.

• 2:30:46Jordi Hays?

  Boom, roasted.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  Roasted.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  Technology brothers, tech bros, get girlfriends, dude, figure it out. And, yeah, don't let people overhear you talking about embarrassing things. Although, could be imagined, could be a fake overheard.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you never know, you never know.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  It's a proven, that goes in the how to post bangers, how to create generational wealth on X.

• 2:31:10Jordi Hays?

  You know, Red Bull Futurist exemplifies what a technology brother is. He's over here talking about wanting to have 10 children, right? So, he, he can't, there's nothing, like, no AI girlfriend, you know, friend.com is not gonna replace, you know, having a loving wife and partner and mother of your children.

• 2:31:33John Coogan?

  Until there's some crazy bio-accelerationism and some artificial womb.

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're domesticating bears. Artificial wombs.

• 2:31:41John Coogan?

  Let's go to Jenny Fielding. She says, a pre-seed company that raises a modest round should not be burning more than 50K per month. This is a hill that I'm willing to die on.

• 2:31:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, don't die Jenny, there's money to be made. But, this goes back to your $17,000 pre-seed back in the day.

• 2:31:59John Coogan?

  If we were burning 50K, that would be one week. We'd be out of money in one week.

• 2:32:04Jordi Hays?

  One week, no. Yeah, I think, this is the challenge with venture, right? Money that is a raise gets spent and it's ridiculously hard. I, you know, one of my portfolio companies...

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  Just raised around basically off of a lot of momentum.

• 2:32:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32:22Jordi Hays?

  And there's already this like, oh, we could hire this person.

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:26Jordi Hays?

  Like this person's amazing and look what they're gonna do. And then suddenly this company will have added like a million dollars a year burn that

• 2:32:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:32Jordi Hays?

  really need, or maybe they could have pushed it back, you know, down the road. So yeah, this is where like Y C is like dogma is just absolutely correct.

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:32:43Jordi Hays?

  Which is just like keep burn incredibly low and it's so hard. You know, as somebody who started a company in 2021 and

• 2:32:51John Coogan?

  Oh, I never even realized that. Y C P G wrote this post and I believe it was called Don't Die.

• 2:32:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:57John Coogan?

  And now Brian Johnson's using that in the, in like the literal sense.

• 2:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:00John Coogan?

  But the original P G thing was just, don't die, don't run out of money. And as long as you do that and you stay an entrepreneur, eventually you'll figure it out.

• 2:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have, I have, there's a company that, that I backed in

• 2:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:10Jordi Hays?

  in 2021 and the, only three people invested in the company. Y C, or I invested in one other guy invested in then Y C did their, their round and they've pivoted like 10 times.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  But all of their updates are like, we pivoted again. And it's like monthly burn, like runway. And it's just been going, it's been like 8K a month burn plus like server costs. And their runway has just been like dwindling down.

• 2:33:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:37Jordi Hays?

  Like very slowly, but they've taken too many shots.

• 2:33:39John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:33:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm eventually expecting to get an update from them.

• 2:33:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:42Jordi Hays?

  It's like, we have 10 million of ARR.

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:45Jordi Hays?

  Like we pulled it off.

• 2:33:45John Coogan?

  I love that, but

• 2:33:46Jordi Hays?

  But they would have had way less shots on goal.

• 2:33:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, seriously, like it, it is difficult to create an axiom around burn rate. Because if you're doing something that's R and D intensive, or you're gonna spend a lot of money on lawyers, or you're acquiring a domain, or if there's something weird going on, like it's going to be very bespoke. Some companies are completely justified in burning 100K a month out of the gate. And some companies shouldn't be burning more than 10K out of the gate. It just really depends on what you're doing and who your team is and where you are. But in general, I agree, you should be conscious of your burn. So great post.

• 2:34:21Jordi Hays?

  We certainly are at this podcast.

• 2:34:23John Coogan?

  Participating. And let's end with one more promoted post and then we'll go to Lulu.

• 2:34:29Jordi Hays?

  This promoted post is from DuPont Registry.

• 2:34:32John Coogan?

  Oh fantastic.

• 2:34:33Jordi Hays?

  DuPont has a 2024 911 GT3 RS. This is not the first time we've had DuPont as a promoted post and not the first time we've had a GT3 RS on here. This one is a paint to sample pastel orange that comes fitted with custom 1016 Industries Carbon Fiber Kit. This car looks fantastic. We eventually will be doing a transcontinental race as Technology Brothers, probably with a ramp branded car.

• 2:35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, GT3 RS, probably Gumball 3000.

• 2:35:07Jordi Hays?

  Gumball 3000.

• 2:35:08John Coogan?

  Maybe the Dakar as well.

• 2:35:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so there's a few big races coming up in our pipeline and we're certainly going to be, I'll be driving a Porsche, you might be driving something American, but that will be, we'll each die on that hill.

• 2:35:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:35:21Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, fantastic example. Thank you to DuPont for it.

• 2:35:26John Coogan?

  And how much is it?

• 2:35:28Jordi Hays?

  Coming, it's listed at 490,000.

• 2:35:31John Coogan?

  Wow, an absolute steal.

• 2:35:33Jordi Hays?

  An absolute steal.

• 2:35:34John Coogan?

  I mean, at that price, you can't afford not to buy it.

• 2:35:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're, they're basically giving this away.

• 2:35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:39Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would make sure to, you know, get your PPI.

• 2:35:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:43Jordi Hays?

  Because, I don't know, pastel orange, PTS. This could easily get into the 500s, but thank you to DuPont.

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:53Jordi Hays?

  And excited.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  If you're, I mean, an entrepreneur or then you can pick it up, but if you're, you know, a capital allocator with some small 400 million dollar fund, like that's a no brainer.

• 2:36:04Jordi Hays?

  No brainer, no brainer.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  Let's go to Lulu. She says, taste aside, from a purely strategic perspective, this brand marketing is disastrous for Jaguar. For context, Jaguar sales have been plummeting down 70% in the US in five years. Did you hear that they took a year off of making cars?

• 2:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:21John Coogan?

  They just are not making cars for a full year because they're just completely resetting. Up to 2018 Jaguars were actually growing quickly, doubling sales in a few years. And she breaks down all the disaster that came from this post that was called Copy Nothing. And it was a very abstract ad, looked like a, like a... I don't know, like a music video almost with a lot of interesting characters. It got a ton of attention and I think Lulu's post got more than her than the Jaguar post.

• 2:36:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:55John Coogan?

  Likes. Lulu got 16K on this and she kind of breaks down the problem that Jaguar used to be the iconic image of an old school British gentleman. Think Sir Roger Moore. It was James Bond, Level, Carr, and then they kind of messed around and wound up with kind of shifting from being in the luxury and classics, classic sophistication market with competing with Bentley and Aston Martin, and then they shifted down to premium, competing with BMW and Mercedes in a more crowded market, but Jaguar SUV sales are cannibalized by their own sister company, Range Rover. And now they're not upscale enough to compete in the luxury market and not cutting edge enough to compete in the premium market.

• 2:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  So they need to reset. They need to focus on the cars.

• 2:37:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they have this vicious cycle where you have lower sales, which means you can invest less in R and D and, and you're not even producing parts at the same scale, which means that the parts end up being more expensive for you. And like, it's this crazy vicious cycle. And then it almost feels like this campaign is not like a nail in the coffin, but how do you, how do you completely turn off an entire new generation of automotive enthusiasts where I've never once considered buying a Jaguar, except every now and then you'll see like a Jaguar is like leasing and they're like, we will pay you a thousand dollars a month to lease this car. Like they're like so like bottom, like the lead, like they can, they can't give these cars away.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:21Jordi Hays?

  They stopped making cars for a year because their sales were like basically zero.

• 2:38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:26Jordi Hays?

  Like car, people don't realize like sales volumes on cars are like, are not even that high. Like the, like-

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Aren't the Waymos Jaguars?

• 2:38:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Waymos are Jaguars. Maybe Waymo should just buy Jaguar.

• 2:38:39John Coogan?

  At least they can make cars.

• 2:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cause at least they can make cars.

• 2:38:41John Coogan?

  That seems like the end of the road here.

• 2:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that seems like the end state. That's, that's the only time you really see a Jaguar, but I saw something that like-

• 2:38:49John Coogan?

  They wanted to revamp the brand. They shouldn't have done this crazy video. They should have hired someone like- Who Hyundai hired, who was the former developer of the M label at BMW. And he created the N group at the performance group of Hyundai. And they're creating like insane cars like the the Ioniq 5N. Have you seen this? With like the fake noise and like all the car guys love it, even though it's electronic. Even though it's electric vehicle, it sounds like a V6 and it like shifts like a V6 has this fake DCT in there. And then, and then they're also doing this crazy Envision car that looks like a

• 2:39:24Jordi Hays?

  Super nostalgic one.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Super nostalgic. And so there, there are a bunch of ways that they could have gone into the vault and brought something back that stood out and made a, made a statement as a car. But they just chose not to. Maybe this will be the start of something new, but it was a very weird brand direction.

• 2:39:42Jordi Hays?

  No, it did. Somebody, somebody was commenting and I think this was accurate. Like it's almost like they were expecting like a Kamala win and they had invested like tens of millions into this campaign and they were just like, all right, we already made it. Like we bet the house on this. And then everybody's like, no, like you realize that like Trump won, right?

• 2:40:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, but we don't talk about politics on this podcast. Um, so we will, uh, leave it at that. Jaguar, uh, could be a good acquisition target for us at some point. Um, the, you know, history of the brand aligns with a lot of our ethos. Um, so somebody will bring it back. Sometimes it just takes an extra decade.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  Yep. Thanks for watching, subscribe or else you'll be relegated to a life of flying on NetJets.

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Ouch.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  Have a good one.