Stripe's Billion Dollar Crypto Deal, AI for Police, Elon's Diablo Addiction

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Have I told you about Coogan's Law?

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  You have? I've told you about this? It's

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you see it everywhere.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  Ones you, ones you know of it.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  You can't help but notice it.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  I mean, there's a number of these laws that people, you know, repeat in tech. Metcalfe's Law, or, you know, what's that one? Anything that can go wrong will.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  You know, those, or Moore's Law. The rate of computing is doubling.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  They're not true scientific laws in the sense that they came out of scientific papers, but they're axioms that define the way. What's that one?

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  Anything spacked by social capital will drop 90%.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  So Coogan's Law is, the value of a coined phrase is proportional to the square of the amount of algorithmically consumed content. Basically, my prediction here is that coining phrases, like laws, is going to increase in value as feeds and just the overall consumption of content becomes more algorithmically driven and more compressed. So as we move to tweets and TikToks and short form, you need to be coining phrases at like an increasing rate. And if you look at who's really popular in tech, they've almost all coined phrases, you know, like, it's time to build. American dynamism. Software is eating the world. There's so many of these.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Bology has the network state. Lulu has going direct. I don't even know, I talked to Lulu and she said that going direct was not her phrase, but she like took it to a whole nother level. Lindy Man, same thing. He didn't come up with that concept, but he like

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  He's the Lindy Man.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, but he like dominates it.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  And so finding a really key pithy phrase that you can build your whole brand around, super key and going to be increasingly valuable. If you look back to like the great books, like, you know, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, like, those guys didn't need to compress their ideas down into pithy phrases. No one talks about, you know, like Shakespeare's Law. You know, you just read all of Shakespeare. Because you, that was the only thing that was, they weren't competing with tweets. But now you're competing with tweets. And so you need to Really, you know, compress everything down.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  And so Coogan's Law is a reference to that.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Right. There's a guy, Zach, I think I'm gonna butcher his last name, Poggrub. Who, his whole, his word is obsession. And so he's just constantly, every, you know, 50% of anything he ever talks about ties back to obsession somehow.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  And part of his cult of obsession is pick a word or a phrase that you just become one with. And then you just repeat it over and over and over and over. And it works because I don't even know the guy. I have some mutual friends. But I'm bringing it up right now in the context of all these other phrases that are, you know, have become popularized in different ways. And it's just because every, again, almost every single time he's saying anything, it comes back to obsession. Right? Which is just his like rallying cry, so.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  I have a group of buddies who are like in the content world and they all have these, they call them razors. You know, like Occam's razor. This guy George Mack has Max Content Razor, which is only create content that you would consume yourself. Which is good, but it's also kind of silly that he even needs to coin a phrase, right? But it works really well because it sticks in your mind. And it's this whole like just compressing a big idea down. Paul Graham, Founder Mode. Like, there's a lot that was said about that, but it sticks in your mind. It's like, okay. Well, whatever that is, whatever makes successful founders, we're calling that Founder Mode now. And there's a phrase for that.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  And that was, clearly there was a gap in the vernacular, in text vernacular. Where we needed a word for like, what is the Steve Jobs, Elon, Brian Chesky mentality? And Founder Mode just slotted in there. So it's kind of.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  Founder Mode for us is listening to our own podcasts. Because you've already had the conversation.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  Ideally on vinyl, which will be coming soon. So if you're not subscribed, subscribe and then you'll be the first to know when the vinyl drops.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  It's good.

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a different experience. The tonality, the analog nature of it, it almost, it's the closest thing for us to feel like we're back in the room where the recording happened. Right? Sitting at this wooden, wooden desk. Feeling the energy from the, the crystal ball.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  What did our, what did our one fan describe it as? A rustic feel?

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  A rustic analog.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Cause you hear the, you hear the paper shuffling.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're rustic audio.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's organic, it's all natural. It's a, it's a return to tradition.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  It's good. Should we go into the top story of today?

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to, hard to follow Coogan's Law, but.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  Well, well, next time we need Jordy's Law.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  So we're gonna come up with that and then we're gonna be coining a lot more phrases and you're gonna hear them. We're gonna try them on here and you'll hear them here first.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that's a whole new segment of the show is, is new laws.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Just coining phrases.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  We're tracking phrases and laws. We could have, we could have a chart that was just like, you know, going long and short on these different phrases.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  I mean, in, in some ways it's extremely silly to just think that like, oh, okay, you, you have some idea, you've written it out. Maybe you've actually put a lot of thought into something and realized something interesting is going on.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Somebody came out and wrote a piece on taste in terms of startups and it's like, okay, does that really need to be said?

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but in some ways it does. Yeah, in some ways it does. And, and yeah, I, I think a lot of people, a lot of people do forget about like the importance of like compressing it down and something that can be viral.

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's like, it's, it's a meat. They're always memes, right? It's time to build.

• 6:01John Coogan?

  Yep. Solana's really good at that. Moon should be a state.

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  Moon should be a state.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  That phrase is, is so much bigger than that. It's talking about.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  Solana's Law would be how many times people call you a billionaire in a derogatory way is equal to uh, how political, you know, what, what, what would the law be is.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  So there's something there, right? It's like if people are, if people are getting angry at you and calling you a billionaire.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  You probably are just a capitalist.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. It really is clear that like, he's, he's particularly good at just these, these pithy phrases. Cause every, uh, when he writes a piece, the titles are always really good.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Like, uh, I mean, he had one that was like moral inversion, just this idea that like.

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  In another life, he was a journalist. If he wasn't a billionaire, he would have been a journalist.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And then, uh. But now he's doing it with the daily, the, I don't know if you're subscribed to that, but it sends three takes, three morning takes. And each one of them has like some sort of clever, you know, pun or, you know, headline. And I'm like, how do you come up with these? Cause it's really hard, but I guess you can build the muscle, you can be really good.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  There could be some real alpha in us just ripping all the takes from him. Just going back through the daily and repeating them as original thoughts and just in focusing more on the algo. And just trying to grow faster and bigger. And then he'll be trying to plan his takes out to be like, okay, well I can't do the daily anymore. I've got to drop it the, the morning that after they record.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, as long as that's, as long as that's more profitable, then I'm, I'm down.

• 7:46Jordi Hays?

  I, um, there's a topic that we have to cover. I'll, I'll actually wait. It's, we can put it in the reaction section. But I just got an email, uh, that was from this guy Eric Newcomer, who's a journalist. And he says, the, the subject of the email is new, is reflections on newcomer four years in.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  And the preview line is newcomer is on track to generate more than one million in profit on more than two million in revenue this year.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Pretty good.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  Um, which is fantastic.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, it just shows that, that, uh, he's living every journalist's dream, which is to be rich. But, but, uh, instead of being, you know, just rich and successful, they choose to, uh, attack and try to tear down the sort of like crabs in a bucket phenomenon.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Crabs in a bucket for sure.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  Crabs in a bucket, journalists in a bucket.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Well, he's a Harvard guy. He's, he's buddies with, uh, Max Child. You know, this guy who runs this, uh, AI startup. He's, he, he's a little more in tech than most people think.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  And, and he knows who, he knows who butter, who butters his bread. Cause he's got the events business, a lot of sponsors at Cerebral Valley.

• 8:57Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Bringing in the big bucks. He's not going to be writing hit pieces for very much longer.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I think, I, yeah, yeah, eventually, eventually you just gotta tone it back.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Hit pieces aren't going to get you to Sue, to, uh, Lake Como.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  No one, no one ever wrote-

• 9:11Jordi Hays?

  You need to be a peer. You need to be a peer.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  And you don't become a peer by writing hit pieces.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  You become a peer by generating, you know, huge, uh-

• 9:19John Coogan?

  No one's, no one's inviting Taylor Lorenz to Saint-Tropez, right?

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  Like, she's not going to Saint-Muritz.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  She's climbing in through the, through the HVAC system, you know?

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  She's like, she's in the, she's in, uh, Hotel Ducap, Ducat or whatever, uh, in the HVAC system because it's, it's 82 degrees in there.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, uh, we need to get into the story.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, the top story, we, we gotta talk about Stripe acquiring Bridge for over $1 billion. Are you big in crypto?

• 9:57John Coogan?

  I'm like generally a believer.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't-

• 9:59John Coogan?

  I like Bitcoin, but I'm not really deep in any of the Web3 stuff.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  And we like bubbles and speculation.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  I do, I do. But I was thinking about like, why do we need to talk about this? And I think the real reason is just that, you know, whenever one of these billion dollar acquisitions happens, like, there's a new class of wealthy individuals who are on the scene. And like, these founders, they're going to be the ones you're bidding, bidding against at Christie's. They're going to be the ones, like, if you're fighting for a new allocation in the Ferrari F80, like, you're going to be going up against this guy, so you gotta know who he is. So we should do a little, a little overview of, of Zach Abrams and, and Bridge, just to kind of set the, set the story. Because it's a pretty, it's a pretty fascinating journey to get to this billion dollar outcome. So Zach grew up in North Carolina, attends Duke, and he, he's only done one podcast.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  I, I, I searched all over the place, I could only find one, like, 20 minute podcast that he did, but it was really great. And he talks about when he was at Duke, his dream-

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  That might be Abrams Law.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  The number of podcasts you do is inversely correlated with enterprise value.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The dude is clearly actually working and building stuff, not just stroking his own ego. But, uh, he, he said that while he was at Duke, his, his life's goal and his dream was to become an operating partner in private equity.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  I love it. And he, and he achieved it immediately. He goes to this private equity firm and he focuses on like opening and closing factories for this auto parts business that they bought.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  A real PE guy, he's closing stuff.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So he's like 24 and he's like shutting down manufacturing plans, opening up new manufacturing plans. And it's like a beast of a time because it's post recession. I think it's like 2009 and it's the auto parts business. Like no one's buying new cars and stuff. It's just like really rough. But then 2010, he realizes that like, okay, I want something different. There's a startup scene out in Silicon Valley, moves out there. He starts a fintech company called Evenly and he sells to Square pretty quickly after a year and a half. And so this is, he gets into Square pre-IPO, pre Cash App, pre a lot of the crypto stuff and kind of sees that start growing. So he's a product manager at Square, works there for a few years, goes to Coinbase where he leads the consumer business.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  And what's funny is that I, I didn't fully fact check this, but he's, his co-founder at Bridge is Sean Yu, who I believe was also his co-founder at Evenly and also worked with him at Coinbase and also worked with him at Brex.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this is one of those, this is like, this is, this, this story is fantastic because it completely justifies VC's pattern matching.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  It's like, okay, finance background. So has like extreme work ethic, understands how business works. Starts a company, sells to Square, probably wasn't like an amazing outcome, but you know, stays on with his co-founder, learns the game, is at a hyperscaler.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  Goes, goes and works at Coinbase, another hyperscaler, goes and is at Brex early, another hyperscaler with his, with his original co-founder the whole time. And then starts a new company and raises at 40 pre, which probably felt like really expensive for a lot of people, but they're like, hey, he was, sold his last company to Square, he's with his original co-founder. And so. The pattern matching is extreme all the way through.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  Not technically hyperscalers, by the way. That term is reserved for the big tech companies that are building like massive.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Right, right, right. Sorry, sorry.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Scale ups, scale ups.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Scale ups.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  And, and in the financial world.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  He never like went off and did something random.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So when he, and, and, and, you know, he's now, he's not like, he wasn't, he wasn't FOMOing into fintech.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  He started in fintech in 2010.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  So he's like a decade and a half into his career when he's really building Bridge.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  So I think here's the reason that this story is important is this is the only major liquidity event that I can think of in crypto that wasn't token oriented.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Like, can you think of another? And, no, they definitely didn't have a token.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because they didn't need it.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  It's all just infrastructure.

• 13:56Jordi Hays?

  And, but I cannot think of another major, outside of Coinbase IPO, can you think of another crypto company that was a eight, you know, sorry, 10-figure acquisition? It's just, you can't think of one. They're all.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  A similar business would be like Chainalysis, right? But I don't know if they've sold or.

• 14:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so like, again.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  That's a company that doesn't have a token. They just do the research and I think they're doing very well.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  But again, to your point, not a liquidity.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  This is like the Instagram moment.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and the funny thing is this will inspire an entire massive wave of new crypto infrastructure investing. It's good timing. I have a, a company that's similar to Bridge for Latin America. That does stablecoin infrastructure. They're called Menteo. They're going to be raising this quarter if you're, if you're listening.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  This is, uh, yeah, Dylan Field posted this about, uh, uh, he's the CEO of Figma. And he said, in 2006, I asked Joey Krug, Joey, what are going to be the biggest use cases for crypto? He quickly and succinctly answered speculation, stablecoins and prediction markets. Meme coins, Stripe's acquisition of Bridge and Polymarket. The world is starting to catch up to Joey. And that's like exactly what's happening right now.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  You have Pump dot fun, tons of meme coins, also just speculation on Bitcoin and ETH as like underlying assets. But then now we're seeing a lot of infrastructure in stablecoins, which makes a lot of sense. It is really hard to refute if you're a crypto skeptic. And, uh, and then Polymarket, which is obviously like taking over the world right now.

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it's it's interesting. So I met Zach in 2022. It was must have been post his initial fundraise, which I think was at 40.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  I think he did two, two rounds, like a series A.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  And I think they raised 53 total, probably 10 on 40 in that first thing. And then I think they probably did like 40 mil on 100 or 200 or something.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  I met him in the context of we were doing a lot of work with stable coins at Party Round.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we supported stablecoin investing on chain, um, which was funny at the time because the reason that that what he was doing was important is because we even had deeply crypto native companies that were using our product that didn't want to raise using the stablecoin functionality. Because it was too much of a hassle. Once you had the stablecoins to convert them and all that stuff. So he was solving an important problem. I I had already backed a company called Layer 2. That um, is doing sort of similar stuff to to Bridge, um, more focused on like sort of like banking applications, but um, they were, I thought Layer 2 was a good bet at the time. They were powering all of Angel List's stablecoin

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  infrastructure. Uh, Bridge took it in another direction. And when I jumped on with Zach, I wasn't, um, Zach's obviously super smart. Uh, I should have probably tried to invest at the time, but he wasn't raising. And he basically just mined me for information for like the entire 30 minutes. Like he was just like not really wanting to share anything because I think he wasn't, didn't know exactly what he was doing yet. So he just used the entire meeting to just like, you know, just mine uh, information of how we were thinking about stablecoins and we had a bunch of crypto sort of companies as customers. So anyways, should have, should have uh, bet big on Zach uh, at that time, but um, didn't really, I don't know. I don't kick myself that much because it wasn't like a fundraising specific meeting. Um.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  It's interesting though.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  But um, but yeah, I think it's, I think it's fantastic for crypto at a time when speculation and prediction markets, like you're saying, are getting all the attention to say like, hey, here's a, here's a major liquidity event by the most storied, relatively recent Silicon Valley company being Stripe.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  Putting it on the map and like legitimizing it, um, which is just good because I have a lot of. I'm personally heavily invested in early-stage crypto and ultimately, I think that it was always very clear that stable, like, nothing has product-market fit in crypto like stablecoins. Like, if you actually look at, like, I think the most, it's, um, USDT is, has more revenue on a per-employee basis by like 10x than BlackRock.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  Which is, sounds insane, but I think they have like a hundred-person team and they're doing billions of dollars.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  So I think that, uh, it's very like legitimizing and it's just very positive. The only, the only thing that was unfortunate about the way the whole announcement went down is that Sequoia didn't really get the credit that they were wanting. And so Sean had to really come out.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, the information really snubbed him.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Snubbed him, felt very personal. He had to come out and say, "Hey, we led the Series A."

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't Ribbit or Han or, you know, Sean was like, "I don't even know who those funds are."

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, so hopefully, they issued a correction.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Thank God.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, journalism is saved, but it was a dark day for journalism.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was rough. It was rough. Um, I've actually used stablecoins. Uh, I paid a, a video editor in Argentina.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  And because the currency was fluctuating like crazy. And it was really, really hard and the fees to get dollars there were crazy.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, as Americans, we want USDC, USDT adoption. It's good for the dollar. It just allows us dollar dominance. I had a, I was on a, I was on a, I was on a surf trip with four Argentinians when I was 18, traveling from Ecuador to Panama. And I was on like a six-month trip at the time.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  And my Argentinian friends had to cut their trip short by like eight weeks because their currency just got demolished mid-trip and they were sitting, obviously in Argentinian pesos and so they're, imagine getting your budget like slashed like by 60%, you know, so they just literally had to go home. And so, yeah, just think it, I, you know, I pray for the continued dominance of the US dollar as long as we both shall live, for the sake of our children and their children.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  But stablecoins are good, you know, stablecoins are, are a big catalyst for the dollar.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  It's kind of fascinating. I mean, I, it doesn't seem like anyone's announced like Bridge's revenue or how big they were, but.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  No, it, they did. It was like 15 million dollar run rate. So it was like 100 times.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Huge multiple, but it seems like they have a massive regulatory moat or have done a lot of hard work on the regulatory side.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  That's what I actually don't, as, you know, idea guys, non-technical folk, I don't know what they built that was so valuable that Stripe couldn't build it themselves and felt like they had to, what you don't know is like how much of this, this is almost like Stripe hedging, like Stripe's been, had a lot of stablecoin initiatives internally. They've been trying to build.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Partnership with Paxos, right?

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've been trying, they've been working on this space for a really long time. So I'm, I'm excited for it to come out more of like, what did they build that was so critical that they had to pay 100 times revenue or whatever they paid?

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Well, this Anon Signal wrote on Conviction Finance, "Zach has managed to do the near impossible, obtaining solid licenses with the two major jurisdictions, the United States and Europe, where they are both permitted to transmit large sums of money and exchange currencies on behalf of users, essentially a ramp, one for the Eurozone is located in Poland, the other a US. Delaware C corp is located in Berkeley. USC corp has money transmitter licenses approved in 22 states and they got more. And they're close to 48 states now, if not, they already have them. And so it feels like Bridge went out and did all this like heavy lifting on the regulatory side to actually get approved. And then they also have very high transfer limits. I guess there are tiers to the money transfer, like, like, you know, approval levels.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  And so they did all this hard work and I wonder if that's, if that's difficult for Stripe because they're such a big company. Maybe they're like, you know, it becomes more of a political issue. The politicians want to extract more of a pound of flesh or something. Cause you would assume that like, okay, a bigger company would actually have an easier time getting transmitted.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's, it's sort of interesting. Stripe knows how important stable coins are to their business long term. Did they only spend like $50 million trying to make this happen? Did they spend a hundred million dollars internally? Did they spend $500 million internally and like fail?

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  Right? I just don't know why they didn't have the lobbying power. They have the technical prowess and the like war chest to have made this happen. And so maybe Zach is, um.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Who knows? Maybe, uh, maybe Zach, you know, plays like, oh, I'm a nice guy. I don't do podcasts, you know, I just, I'm just interested in money. But then behind the scenes, he just was, was just an absolute animal, right?

• 23:17John Coogan?

  It seems like it.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  Just doing deals with the mafia, Poland. He did what, he did what it had to take.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  In Europe now.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  He was in, yeah, he was in Poland on founder mode, meeting with the mafia to get this done.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. One, one thing I was listening to that podcast with him and he, he pointed out this very interesting thing that I couldn't quite get to the bottom of was, is that there's some sort of like legacy ruling in the American banking system where dollars in a bank account need to be. demarcated between checking and savings. And I, and I'm not exactly sure why. I think it might actually just be to, for the measurement of the money supply. Um, I couldn't really get to the bottom of it, but um, he said that like, one of the things that the stablecoin infrastructure unlocks is the ability to have a yield-bearing account that then you can also transact with. So basically just merging a checking and savings account. And now like a crypto skeptic would say like, well, that's like a stupid technical feature. Like, why can't you just make a

• 24:16John Coogan?

  a combined checking and savings account or a, a yield-bearing checking account? But it's like, well, there's so much cruft in the legal system around the American financial system. But it's like, maybe, yeah, you do just need to like, have some sort of greenfield fresh start and that's enough. I don't know.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So at Capital, we had, uh, we had a high-yield checking account. So it's not that. It is a good, I mean, I, I think the

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  there's so much, um, platform and infrastructure risk and all this stuff, right? Like, one of the reasons that they maybe had to buy Bridge, I'm just speculating, is that Stripe's existing bank partners had no interest in taking on that level of risk, right? We, at Capital, we were rolling out a stablecoin custody product when we were informed by our bank partner that we, we were going to have to jettison a lot of our digital asset-oriented customers. And so our entire product strategy like fell apart because we couldn't do the thing that our customers wanted. And in fact, had to be like, oh, you guys should like leave, basically. So there's so much, um, that, that

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  is, I feel like the whole Bridge story is such a good example of risk-taking, right? There's so much that Bridge was trying to do that when they started was unclear if it was even going to be possible. And so oftentimes,

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Opportunities like that attract unsophisticated founders that don't know what they're getting themselves into. And then founders that are sophisticated and already successful and comfortable with the risk, right?

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Because a lot of people would have said like, oh, what you're trying to do is you're going to get destroyed by Stripe. Or you're going to get destroyed by Block and Square. Or, or, oh, what you're trying to do, like, no bank's going to allow that, or you're never going to get money transmit or licenses. Or whatever the things that there, there would have been a lot of ways to, to, if you were writing an investment memo on the business, be like, what could go wrong here? And Zach, I'm sure was totally aware of all of those risks and still comfortable with it. And it shows that, it shows that there's so much alpha and just being okay with the fact that you're taking on a regular, you're taking on a lot of regulatory risk, you're taking on a lot of platform risk.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  And you need to just, that's part of what creates these sort of exponential opportunities.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Do you think there'll ever be a stablecoin de-pegging? In the sense that like normally when a, when a stablecoin de-peg's, it's like a disaster because it means that like, it's been discovered that,

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  that they don't actually hold the assets. But I wonder if in the future, stablecoins become so popular that they be, they essentially become global.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Super valuable. And then the, the US, the, the Fed is like printing too many dollars and the dollars become inflationary. And,

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  and just like the dollar went off the gold standard. Imagine if like the, imagine if USDC or USDT become so big that they say, you know what? We're, we're no longer backed by the dollar because we are more stable than the dollar.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Right now, they're using the dollar to break stability.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's been a big. So that's been a huge critique of, of, um. So Coinbase has always taken the approach.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  That, um, that everything, like they, they've taken a very transparent approach.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Tether, I don't think has ever come close to the same level of transparency.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's always been like questions about Tether.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  And there's a, there's a huge amount of, you know, saying.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Tether USDT can say, oh yeah, we're a stablecoin. But what if, but it's a private company and what if they've just been, they could have been giving themselves for every dolla, you know, dollar that they take in and, and sort of minting a new stablecoin. What if thirty percent of the time they were like, we're just gonna take, you know, I, I don't know, right? Like, you just don't really know what's going on and that's why they're, they're.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  USDT de-pegged during the whole FTX saga. There was like a lot of people.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  It was a very, very minor de-pegging compared to Luna, which was like off by thirty percent one day and everyone was like, okay, this is the end.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so I think that, uh, there will undoubtedly be a time in the future where a major stablecoin like blows up.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Right? Because part of, part of crypto, by saying, hey, decentralized finance, which is another way of saying unregulated finance or like digital, you know, crypto-based finance. The whole thing has just been speedrunning why we have all these financial regulations in the first place, right? So if you allow anybody, if you allow a global team of Anons to start creating financial products, yeah, you're gonna, similar things are gonna happen to the Wild West of America when like ten dudes were like, yeah, let's create a bank.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  You know, and this is like the cattle bank and, you know, whatever. And they just are, they're just freestyling, you know, finance.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the bull case here is that, is that it's like, yes, they are speedrunning, like, let's regulate financial products for the first time. But just by virtue of the fact that they are not immediately slotted into the existing regulatory scheme.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  You're able to take a second crack at creating more effective regulations that make more sense and allow for speed and transparency or whatever. And you're just, it's just like, you know, it, it's the same thing as the people that wanna like go and build a new country just because there's like so much legal cruft because every year in America, we're adding like ten times the amount of laws that we're deleting, right?

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  So the amount of laws is just growing, growing, growing. That slows down innovation. That slows down the, the financial sector. And so it's like, yeah, it is the Wild West. It is really bad while it's completely unregulated, but there's a really bullish case for. Whatever regulation comes, it's just going to be a little bit more fresh and a little bit more from first principles. And hopefully, a little more permissive and just informed by the, the, the wins and losses of the last, you know, few decades in the traditional finance system.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely. The other thing that's interesting about the whole thing is that Stripe was willing to pay 20% of what people believe Circle's eventual IPO will be. So people are projecting Circle will IPO at, at something like a $5 billion valuation. Circle, what, let's look at what their market cap is right now.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  You mean for the stablecoin market cap? Because that's just the value of all the stablecoins?

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they generate-

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Really, really high and then they get a percentage on that as their market cap?

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  You can, you can buy USDC for 99 cents right now.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  Hmm. De-pegged.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  It's the end.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Pegging.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  It's game over.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  What is the, so the market cap is $34 billion right now?

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. And that's for all the stablecoins?

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the reason that that's substantial is it means that Circle is, has taken on $34 billion and is earning interest yield on that, which right now is somewhere around 5%.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  And they're giving a lot of that back as incentives, but it's still a very, very profitable business. So anyways, something that Zach and the Bridge team did resulted in it being their $15 million company being worth a billion dollars. And we'll find it out over time, I imagine.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's certainly-

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  Crypto needed a win.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:14Jordi Hays?

  That wasn't speculation. It's not enough to be, it's not, even though-

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  Pump dot fund, who knows what the enterprise value of a business like that is, right? Because it feels like very like it's on the most shaky regulatory ground possible. But they're doing hun- I think like hundred million a year in fees, right? So that's a massive win from a revenue generation standpoint. But what is that company worth? So I think crypto needed a win and it certainly got one.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  I mean, it's it feels like this year, there's been three major wins across all three of those. Speculation wise Bitcoin is near all time highs, like in terms of the digital gold thesis, like it's very, very solid. And so this whole, you know, fear that was being sowed by the crypto skeptics was correct around some of the bubbly NFTs. But clearly it was wrong about Bitcoin because it's had much more staying power than those folks predicted, right? They like everyone was predicting that Bitcoin, once it sold off from sixty five at the height. Or I think it was like seventy for a little bit during the peak down to like it was in the thirties and maybe even high twenties at one point.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Well, it's back up and if it keeps, if it keeps going up and down, like, yeah, it's it's volatile, but it's here to stay in one way or another. And then you have polymarket like absolutely dominating like the news cycle and providing some sort of insight and and, you know, some, some value that's like

• 33:46Jordi Hays?

  Degenerate polling.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's the there's the D gen gambler aspect to it, but there's also just like the like the normie value of like, of like, people want to look at a percentage of who's going to win the presidential election. That has value, people will pay for that people and that that seems like something that's more fundamental and more easy to value than like, what is an art piece worth? Right?

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Like if you're a business or a hedge fund or something and you think that the the there's going to be some economic impact to a Trump election versus a versus a Harris. When like having that data is valuable.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if this is available to see on chain, but what percentage of polymarket's bets are on the election versus anything else? Like it must be like ninety eight percent.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  I don't know if it's ninety eight percent, but it's it's certainly high. There's like a billion dollars of liquidity in the in the election right now. I asked Shane like, what does he think the next, the next biggest market will be after the election? And I think they have some pretty exciting things planned. They, I don't believe they use Bridge, but they do use stablecoins on the background, in the backend. But they're a very crypto native company, so they're able to implement that. And Zach's been in, or Shane's been in crypto for years in the Ethereum community. But for so many other companies, using stablecoins is a huge hassle. You don't want to roll your own infrastructure there.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Like with my first business, we took, we accepted Bitcoin payments through Coinbase in 2013. And it was a mess. It was a disaster. I think, I mean, we lost like $10 million because we sold it too early. We should have held it. And then also, it was just like a nightmare from, from an accounting perspective, because you basically are operating in foreign currencies and you have to reconcile those. So your balance sheet's like fluctuating left and right. And so you wind up accepting them. And then for anyone who has a product with any sort of return policy, you wind up acting as a hedge, right? Because like, let's say that you're selling-

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  I'll take that Bitcoin back.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  Exactly. Let's say you're selling like microphones for $500. You buy 10 microphones for Bitcoin. You have $5,000 in mics. If the price goes down, you just sell those microphones and get your cash back at dollars. But if the price goes up, you return the microphones and you get, and you get the Bitcoin back. And so you wind up in this weird scenario where like, if the price is going up, you tell the customers, well, okay, we will refund you in the currency that you gave us. Or if it's going down. So you're always like playing this weird game of like, what do I give back to the customer? Because you act as a hedge. So it's just really, really difficult. But obviously, if you can just plug stablecoins in, it makes a ton of sense. And that's what's happening. That's actually the biggest win.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  What if it comes out that Stripe paid a billion because Zach had taken his entire-

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  Fifty million dollar round from Sequoia and just gone super long on Bitcoin and then he's sitting on like so the company actually got bought for a hundred million dollars but then there's a billion dollars and it's like Sequoia is like you know what we made this bet once with SBF it didn't work but you fucking did it.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  You know, I was waiting, you know the famous story about the FedEx founder?

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  So the FedEx founder, he's down to his last dollar, the company's about to go out of business, famously he goes to Vegas, puts all the company's assets on black, comes up black, he doubles his money, he's able to make payroll, the business keeps growing. Now, the conspiracy theory is that it wasn't, he didn't go to the casino, he went to like a loan shark in Vegas or like the mafia.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  I know, the real, Ben, where's my tinfoil hat?

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Is that, is the water in the shot for him? Can you just keep it on the other side or something?

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  It'd be on brand for me to have water in the shot.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, the whole time.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  No, so I think the real conspiracy theory is that he was narco traffic, you know, doing like trafficking drugs and getting a lot of cash and he needed a story in terms to say, like all he would have to do to make a hundred grand in cash is do like one run for the cartel and then all of a sudden he's got.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  Oh, because he's in FedEx, yeah, that makes sense.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  Cause he's in the trucking business.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Exactly, so he could be like, okay, I'm just gonna do one.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  So if you wanna, if you wanna create a.

• 38:16John Coogan?

  Hypothetically.

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  Legendary, hypothetically legendary story of how you bet your company on the, in Vegas and you suddenly came up with all this cash.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  That's a pretty good way to.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  That's, that's super fascinating. Yeah, you'd have all the infrastructure to do.

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  But it's, but anyways, so take my tinfoil hat off, but I, I, I think that.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was always thinking that during the last crypto boom, when everything was just ripping, there was, we were gonna hear the story of a company that raised some money, didn't find product market fit, but put their whole treasury in some altcoin and wound up with like just a huge treasury. And then maybe they would, maybe they would keep building, use that and then actually make a, make a win. And it'd be like, wait a minute, that company came out of like stealth, they raised a $1 million seed round, but they have a thousand employees or something and they're just launching this product, like what happened? It's like, oh, well, yeah, because they turned that million into a hundred million.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  Essentially gambling, uh, and it would be like a FedEx tile story. But, uh, everyone I talked to in crypto was like, yeah, there's been people that do that, but then they just ride off in the sunset. They just leave and they don't, and they just stop building, they just drop out, which sucks. Um, but yeah, with this, uh, with, with Bridge, the, the one really interesting example that I, that I did see of like, uh, a company using this and it was a perfect example of, of, of this was, uh, Scale. So they have a bunch of contractors internationally, they wanna pay them quickly in dollars because there's no fluctuation. And so they use, I think they use a product that's built on top of Bridge.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  I love how we say there's no fluctuation of the dollar.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  I mean, essentially.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  Been devalued.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but like relative to a lot of these other places, like, like people would be so happy to, to get paid in dollars on the day that they work. And that's something that stablecoins can, can bring. So it, it's interesting to watch crypto like rack up these like very real wins, whether it's like Bitcoin becoming essentially Lin D.

• 40:10Jordi Hays?

  Haters will say it's Photoshop.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, haters will focus on the board apes. And it's like, yeah, that was one thing that didn't work out.

• 40:17Jordi Hays?

  It was, so it was Yuga, it was Yuga Labs that was our customer that.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Really?

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, didn't use our, when they, when they raised with us, they didn't use the stablecoin functionality.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Well, should we move on to Brother of the Week?

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was a tough one.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  But first, I need to tell you about NetJets. If you're looking for the ultimate in flexibility and convenience when it comes to private travel, NetJets offers an unparalleled experience. With access to the world's largest fleet of private jets, NetJets allows you to enjoy the benefits of private aviation without the hassle of ownership. NetJets operates the largest, most diverse private aircraft fleet in the world and offers a full range of personalized private aviation solutions to meet and exceed the high standards of the world's most discerning travelers. Tell a personal story about flying on a private jet. Do you have a lot of experience in the private jet world?

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  Not as much as I'd like, John. I think that private aviation is the last true luxury.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  It is.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  Something that David Senra said.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  One of his mentors told him.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 41:28John Coogan?

  One of his mentors told him.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  One of David's mentors.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  The life goal is to get a private jet.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  That's the only thing that matters.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  It's the only thing that matters.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  That's the only thing that matters. Here's the thing. You can sleep in a private jet.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  You can't fly a house, right? So what does that tell you?

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Optimize for the jet. Don't optimize for the house.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised that's not more of a thing. You think about it, RVs are big.

• 41:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:52Jordi Hays?

  And, and why are people not just saying, you know, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna buy this jet or I'm gonna, I'm gonna leverage NetJets primarily as a, you know, sort of like this sort of RV in the skies, right?

• 42:05John Coogan?

  There is this interesting thing where people always complain like, oh, we don't have flying cars yet. We don't have flying cars yet.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  We do, buddy.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  We do. It's just not evenly distributed yet. We have, we have private jets, which you can take anywhere like it's a flying car, and then we also have helicopters.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  And if you put those two together.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised that.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  Kind of flying anywhere.

• 42:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm surprised that it hasn't become more popular to develop.

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  You know, something, you know, maybe this is a partnership with NetJets, right? But developing, you know, a city in Arizona that's way off the beaten path, that has consistent air, you know, private air travel between LA or somewhere that's, that's a comparable distance to New York. Anyways, there's, you know, we're thrilled to partner with NetJets as consumers and as a show. And, you know, we, we look forward to many, you know, more trips with them in the future.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. So thanks to them. Uh, should we move on to the brother of the week? We got to give it to Daniel Francis, getting doxed. Uh, you might know him as Daniel Johnson.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  DJ.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Or Growing Daniel?

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  Growing Daniel.

• 43:14John Coogan?

  Daniel. One of the greatest posters. He, uh, he announced his startup Able this week. And it is an, an AI startup for police and he's based in San Francisco. And he, uh, he launched it in an interesting way. I mean, he has over a hundred thousand followers. Basically everything he posts goes viral. Like he's fantastic at shitposting.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  It hits.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  But he chose to launch this in kind of the most normie way possible, just like a TechCrunch article.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  TechCrunch article.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  But his aura was so powerful that, oh, did he, did he do an interview with Gary or something?

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  Gary, I think was just a big investor.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So like, like, you know, he could have, he could have gone on a podcast. He could have done a launch video. He knows people. He could have done all sorts of stuff, but he went with just the TechCrunch article, which is kind of hilarious and counterintuitive.

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  I think he might still be having a little bit of an identity crisis. He's like, I'm the number one shitposter on tech Twitter.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  And I'm building AI for cops.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is a little hard because like, yeah, maybe you know, his account is shitposting. Like there's a couple of shitposters that I follow. Like there's this one guy, Chris Backy. Do you know him?

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  He worked at, he ran Lasky. He sold it to Twitter and he worked at X and then he left. And when he left, he was like, big news. Like I'm leaving the company. Like, thanks everyone. And he's always shitposting. So my reply was just like, oh, this is like your best joke. Yeah, this is hilarious. Like you can't believe you even like, you even got rid of your official badge. Like, you know, this is like searing. Comedy, great satire on like what what cringe people do when they leave companies. Yeah. And so you could see this like backfiring if he's like, hey, I'm launching this like police AI startup. Everyone would just be like, oh, like this is the best shit post ever. He's like, no, guys, it actually is real. I'm actually like a real person.

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny to think about him in some Milwaukee police station, you know, doing a customer like meeting or conversation or a sales thing and they're like, so, you know, we have a few minutes before the chief arrives. What? Tell me about yourself. You know, what? Do you have any family in law enforcement? And he goes, well, I'm somewhat of a sheriff myself.

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  On tech Twitter, actually, a little town called Technology Twitter. I don't know if you've ever been there, but.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  I actually met Elon Musk.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, uh, uh, this is not.

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing. People aren't going to want to say that there's there's always any time somebody posts a lot and is building a company. All the VCs that suck at posting try to signal them, you know, and sort of like shit on them and be like, oh, this is not a serious. Founder or whatever, why he's posting it, but but whether you like it or not, if somebody can figure out how to post really well. They can figure out how to build a company and get attention and communicate in the right ways to raise money, to hire great people, to get customers. So for some reason or another, the skill set of posting translates well to doing.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Well, it's it's the compression of ideas, right? Yeah. So like posting a banger tweet is just taking some sort of like concept that's bouncing around in the ether and boiling it down into something that's funny or fits into a meme format.

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  That gets attention.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And it relays a complex concept in a very short amount of time. And and that is just a valuable skill as long as you don't get addicted to it and you're not just making posting your entire life. Or like getting sucked into it and having some weird ego, but I don't think he has that.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  Daniel, it's an edge because his ex income allows him to take a lower salary from Able.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, he probably makes a decent amount, right?

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  He's probably making like 10 grand a month or something, a couple of hundred a month from that. Oh yeah, Cyan is in here.

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Oh, we got Long Journey. That's great. Ju- Justin's over there.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  That's awesome. NYC. I- I- I love it. Do you- did you see the- his- his-

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  It's- it's- it- I will say, it is the most hilarious business that he could build.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  Why?

• 47:13Jordi Hays?

  Straight up. As a po- as a poster, to go build AI for cops. I'm totally for it.

• 47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  I want the police to have more funding.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  I think that they have gone through a decade of being ostracized and put down and told that they were bad people.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  When these are people that get paid way less money than they should probably to do a job that is very challenging. And you, you know, half the country seemingly hates you, whether they're people that are breaking laws or people that are just uh, police haters. So, um, I think it's a- I think it's totally a smart move because he can go make building AI for cops cool.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  And attract other smart posters. Um, but it's- it's funny from the lens that I would say that, you know, somebody like Ayush who's building Warp is like a, you know, talented poster. There was a lot more overlap in terms of the customer-

• 48:10John Coogan?

  The buyer.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  The buyer-

• 48:11John Coogan?

  The buyer's already on tech Twitter.

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, I just don't think, you know, maybe two cops follow growing Daniel out of his a hundred thousand.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, the only value is maybe hiring engineers.

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  Which is deeply valuable.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  But-

• 48:23John Coogan?

  And investors.

• 48:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  Like, uh, uh, uh, every major VC who's on tech, there's a way of it.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the real- yeah, the real- the real edge is ability to raise capital and hire talented people that otherwise wouldn't be going and applying for a job at- at a AI for cops.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Jordi Hays?

  Startup.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you remember his stunt at Twitter?

• 48:44Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  It was iconic.

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  I was actually- I got dinner with Raul-

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  The night before that happened.

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  And we were just like hanging out and then I went into, uh, like a meeting at Founder's Fund the next day. And we all open up our phones and we're seeing like he- the guy that I had dinner with the night before and- and Daniel just out front of, uh, out front of Twitter HQ like talking to Deirdre Bosa at CNBC about how they got laid off and like causing this like viral like fake news cycle. And, uh, it was just iconic.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  That was amazing and it's no

• 49:21John Coogan?

  That was really like the moment-

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  It's no fluke that both those guys have gone on to build interesting companies, right?

• 49:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, they have, yeah.

• 49:26Jordi Hays?

  Cause they're interesting people.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah. And I think, I think both of them like have the ability to not get lost in the sauce on Twitter.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  You could raise a whole the, you could raise a whole fund dedicated to funding posters.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:41Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's just the poster index.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  And I think it would outperform.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  Perhaps.

• 49:48Jordi Hays?

  There's only one way to find out.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Only one way to find out, gotta fund the posters.

• 49:53Jordi Hays?

  Fund the posters.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  It's an interesting, it's an interesting category to be in. Like, I'm pretty sure the company that makes the body cams has, is doing pretty well. I think it's, uh, I think it's the same company that owns the tasers. I forget what company that is, but, uh, but they're, they're like a multi-billion dollar public company.

• 50:10Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  Um, it's just, it's just hard because like selling into police departments is, uh, it's not, it's not like DOD where there's one buyer.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  The real, the real play is building Twitch meets police body cams meets polymarket.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Meets polymarket, so you can bet on it.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  Bet on arrests and

• 50:27John Coogan?

  What's gonna happen?

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  Chases and, and, um, yeah, just betting on the full-

• 50:32John Coogan?

  Will they pull over? Will they make a run for it?

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Okay, I see a Hellcat engine. He's, he's breaking for it.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, the other company that's done really well here is, uh, are you familiar with Flock Safety?

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, they are crushing it and, uh, and-

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  Is that a founders fund company?

• 50:47John Coogan?

  And they-

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  Another big acquisition.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, they did.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  Aerodrome.

• 50:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and everyone thought it was really, really hard to build like the, the ender role for like the local government because it's just so fragmented and you have to go like jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Um, but some people have cracked it and so, you know, if he can figure that out, it's gonna be good. It's gonna be good. I'm excited. So congratulations to Daniel, the brother of the week.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  Brother of the week.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  Should we do some, uh, tweet reactions? I like this one. So Elon Musk has been playing Diablo relentlessly. I mean, the guy is one of the top thirty.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Diablo players in the world right now, something like that. And so Alex Lieberman, uh, over at Morning Brew says, how does this man have time to play video games? I would absolutely love to see a screenshot of Elon Musk's calendar would be a fascinating window into elite time management prioritization and delegation. And so, yeah, I mean, he's running SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring Company, all pretty serious efforts.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Then also campaigning constantly and doing tons of interviews. He's also running Twitter X constantly and then apparently becoming one of the greatest Diablo players ever in the world.

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then, and then, uh,

• 52:15Jordi Hays?

  aren't there people that are saying that he's not actually playing and maybe he has a whole team of people that are playing? So they're warming up the account for him.

• 52:23John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah. So one of, one of the other great Diablo players did kind of a breakdown and said that, so Diablo basically has new season content every quarter where there's like a new final boss and new levels and stuff. So even if you're maxing out your account, when the new season drops, like you have several hundred hours of content in front of you just to get to the right level to beat the final boss. And so in order to be where he is, which is beating, cause he, in this tweet, he says like, uh, five minute T 150 clear, which is like the hardest thing you can possibly do right now. Hope there's some mid-season content because he basically like finished the expansion pack like in like a month and a half. And it's supposed to take you like three months or maybe longer.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  And so, uh, so one, one of the Diablo like, you know, fans says like, in order to do this, like you literally have to be playing like 40 hours a week or something like that, maybe more. And so now there's like this, this theory that maybe Elon has a team of interns or something like playing on his account, doing a lot of like the grinding and leveling and then he can just log on for the best, which is, which is like amazing delegation if that's true.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's giving, it's giving, it's giving. It's giving ammo to, I mean, the guy spends a lot of time on jets, right?

• 53:40John Coogan?

  Sure, Starlink now.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure Starlink, testing Starlink, making sure it's working. What better way to test the product than to play, you know, Diablo? I think that this is potentially giving some ammunition to the folks out there that say Elon's not a real, he didn't build SpaceX, he didn't do this or that, he hires teams. That's like the, that's the number one gotcha that people like try to get Elon for is like,

• 54:06John Coogan?

  That's the midic take.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  That, yeah, it's like, you didn't do that.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  Other, you hired people that did that, which is like, okay.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  You should, you should do, you should hire people and build Neuralink too.

• 54:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  I think everybody would benefit if you could do that. But yeah, this is giving some real, you know, ammo to those people who are gonna do a takedown piece, which I'm sure journalists will find a way to paint this in a Elon's deceptive video game practices apply to much more than just, you know, online games. Elon's treating the entire world like an online game.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  He thinks leveling up is all that matters when, you know.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it's human, humanizing. It's good. Like, the idea of, you know, this very powerful and wealthy person like not having fun or like letting off steam at any point is like very blackpilling to me.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that he is over having kids and now it's just like, I'm gonna be a kid?

• 55:09John Coogan?

  He was joking about it recently, right? He was saying he was gonna have Taylor Swift's baby.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  That would be, that would be.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Or he was like offering to have a baby with her.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  That part of the simulation, I cannot wait for.

• 55:22John Coogan?

  I think he's down and I think he's hit such economies of scale with the, with the children that like, I would be surprised if it ever stops. I have this theory that like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of like old dudes who.

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 55:35John Coogan?

  There's a lot of like old billionaires who are like constantly getting divorced and remarried. And I think at a certain point, it's like, they just like having weddings because weddings are just like big parties and like an excuse to, to, to throw. Cause you, cause you look at, you look at, I forget, it was like maybe the founder of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, like, he had like three weddings in the course of like nine years or something. He's getting remarried every couple of years. And it's like, okay, why doesn't he just like date or like not get married? But at a certain point, it's like, he probably has some legal team that can like structure the perfect like prenup. And then he just gets to throw a wedding and his girlfriend likes that. And so he's just like, yeah, okay, run it back. We'll do another one. It's not, not a big deal.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  And then when they break up, it's like, yeah, they get divorced, but to him, it's just like breaking up with someone. It's like very like low stakes, I think.

• 56:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  But it's like an excuse.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  That would be, that would be.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  I don't see it that way, but.

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if Elon, Elon should, should open source his entire, you know, family building playbook, including, even if he's not getting married to these women, I'm sure they're signing documentation that basically says, if we have a child.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  You get taken care of, yeah.

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, these are the terms.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  Well, he gets.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  He sends a term sheet.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  Well, he got destroyed by Pavel Durov recently because Pavel has like 50 kids because he was not only.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  He got mogged?

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Oh, he got totally mogged because Pavel, it came out that he has like 50 kids because he's been like donating sperm at sperm banks and stuff and just doing like all this crazy stuff.

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's.

• 57:02John Coogan?

  It feels a little unnatural. It's not a.

• 57:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's not a, that's not a cool way to have 50 kids.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  No.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  For Pavel? Yeah, that makes sense. Over a hundred.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  That's just to me reckless and weird, just like, you know.

• 57:18John Coogan?

  He is a dripped out technology brother, though, so.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  No, I support, I support, I guess I support, I just think that why not just have 50 children with 50 women if you're gonna.

• 57:29John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 57:29Jordi Hays?

  I guess he does. He just doesn't.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't fuck.

• 57:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to this one. So, Will, who I think was at OpenAI for a while, I follow this guy. He says, I don't understand the recent trend of college dropouts, specifically raising some insane 10, 20, 100 million dollars at 100, 250, 500 million dollar valuations, pre-product or pre-revenue, often for idiotic shit. Are people unable to see how they're fucking themselves? It's not just free money, my brother. And he kind of went on to say like, yeah, that he knows a lot of people that were young and they raised too much money and now they're buried under a pref stack and it's kind of a warning to the next generation.

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  This is the dark side of pattern matching.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  Where pattern matching Zach, who had been in fintech for over a decade.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  Building at Square, his own company, then Square, then Coinbase, then, then Brex.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  To go then build another fintech company, but pattern matching, oh, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out to build the social media app.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  And then go on to make a plethora of devastating, you know, mistakes and mishaps with people and the, you know, the government and all these different things. And then when I saw this tweet, the number one, the, the company I was thinking about is a company called MACH, which is making, um, I,

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, uh, MACH Industries?

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  MACH Industries, which is like an MIT,

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:10Jordi Hays?

  dropout and, you know, they're building, uh, I think they're building hypersonics.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  It was like hydrogen weapons.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  Hydrogen powered.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Big cannons. He was gonna shoot down weather balloons and drones and just defense tech broadly.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  So the issue is, is,

• 59:26John Coogan?

  But yeah, got a lot of money very quickly.

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  Speedrunning, um, in, in some of these industries that where the stakes are a lot higher, like defense tech.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:36Jordi Hays?

  You're seeing some of those issues with MACH where one of their employees like was hospitalized with like devastating inju- injuries because something blew up and,

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  there's a real, I, I, I, I don't think, uh, I'm all for giving smart, young people lots of money to, to do ambitious things, but it's almost like they're find the balance of it, right? So, but so bet on, bet on the kid, bet on the dropout, but go get them somebody from Lockheed Martin.

• 1:00:09John Coogan?

  Well, that's the under.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  To be their chaperone.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  That, that's the under discussed thing about Facebook. They had some like VP of engineering who was like 45, who was there very early. I forget what this guy's name is, but he was like, allegedly like very important in like stabilizing the company early on when it was a bunch of crazy kids running around and, and he had like just the right level of respect to be like, okay, when he speaks up, we should listen, but he's not trying to like, be like, oh, we gotta bring in NetSuite. It's like, he wasn't like, he wasn't slowing anything down, but he was providing like just enough, like, you know, basic rules. Cause at one point like Facebook was all just like one file on, uh, on a web server. And like, when you wanted to make a code change, you would just be like, hey, everybody, I'm pushing the code. Like, nobody make any changes. I'm gonna update the file.

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  Or whatever, like the files on the web server. It's like, it was getting crazy. And he like brought in like cool stuff that like cool process that everyone was like, okay, yeah, this process actually makes us better.

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense, yeah.

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  Which is cool. Um, it's, uh, it's interesting because. I think there's, there's two things that are kind of on a collision course with these like crazy high valuations and high early checks. And it's one that the funds are bigger than ever. And even though we went through the Zerp era and, and VC fundraising went down, there's still so many more billion dollar funds out there than there were 10 years ago. So there's just more money to deploy and you gotta deploy it to get the fees. So there's all these incentives aligned with like, we gotta deploy big money. So let's push out the IPO window, do more growth stuff. Let's put more money into earlier stage companies, like write bigger checks. That's fine.

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  And, and then simultaneously, the two hot industries are immensely capital intensive. AI, so I'm gonna come in and say, yeah, I'm gonna do a training run. I need to hire, I need to hire a bunch of engineers that are gonna want a million dollars a year. And I'm gonna also need to buy a bunch of Nvidia GPUs and do a bunch of CapEx and build out a training center. And even if I'm not capital intensive, even if I'm capital light, a training run might still cost $10 million for my first thing. So like, there's just higher computing costs and we're not in the zero marginal cost era of AI. And then defense is the same thing. Yeah, I'm gonna need to buy a bunch of CNC machines, a bunch of, like a bunch of aluminum. Like all this stuff has cost. It's not just this, oh yeah, you're YC, you get 100K and you're gonna go spin up a web server.

• 1:02:28John Coogan?

  And your cost is gonna be perfectly matched with your revenue. Like when your website blows up and starts getting a ton of traffic, well, yeah, you're gonna have paying customers then. So all of a sudden, we have, the two hottest categories are highly capital intensive, at least in theory. And then you have funds that are perfectly set up to fund those capital intensive businesses. So it's just like, anyone with an idea, let's get a big check in there. But the problem is that if you, i- i- if you wind up pivoting to something that isn't as capital intensive or doesn't find like the immediate product market fit, you wind up buried under this huge capital stack. And I think that's what, I think that's the pain people are feeling right now.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  But yeah, they'll probably get a call from Jeremy Giffon soon.

• 1:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jeremy, Mock Industries is, Jeremy's like.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  No, I think that the challenge is, so this happens with, with, let's say,

• 1:03:30Jordi Hays?

  the, I think the, the, the rule is, maybe it's Depew's law, which is the faster you get a lot of money, like, the dumber you will be with it, right? And so if you win the lottery, you're gonna just spend that money horrendously. And that's almost always what happens because you didn't have to learn how money works. You didn't have to learn how hard it is to make it. And so you're just doing like crazy, crazy stuff. And this happens even with angel investing. People like, oh, I'm gonna do angel investing and their worst five investments. Sometimes you get these people that are like, oh yeah, my first two angel investments are unicorns. And that's because of the networks they were in. But more often it's somebody search angel investing and makes like their, the worst five investments

• 1:04:15Jordi Hays?

  that they'll make in the first five deals that they do.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Jordi Hays?

  And so I think the challenge here is when money comes really fast and easy, like you're an MIT dropout that raises $50 million in the first year, you're just gonna make a bunch of really bad decisions. It's everything from you're gonna spend $400,000 on a brand identity because your VC connected you to a, to a, to the top.

• 1:04:42John Coogan?

  Branding firm that seems good, right?

• 1:04:43Jordi Hays?

  To the top agency and you're not thinking about the real cost of that. You're gonna make a hire that's not a good culture fit because they just care about cash comp and you're gonna just overpay for them. And then now you're dealing with this person that.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Not holding the bar on hiring.

• 1:04:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're not.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  I just need to hit my hiring quota.

• 1:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, or you optimize, you're, you're telling, you, you know, these people get excited about being like, oh yeah, we're, we're a 20% team. And it's like, well, you don't even know what you're building yet.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  You don't even need to be like fully starving, but just like. A year or two of like being somewhat cash constrained is going to set the culture up for years where you're going to go back and like the CEO is just going to be when some VP comes to them and is like, I want to spend $500,000 on a branding package. They're going to be like, what? Like I did our first brand myself. Like,

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Like, why do we need to jump there? Let's just do a half step. And then, and then all of those are going to add up to like saving money and being a little bit more judicious. And a little bit less like frivolous and then you won't have a culture of frivolousness, which I think is like the real danger with like the.

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Overall, when people are, I don't think, I don't think it's bad for the world that this stuff happens, to be honest. And in fact, in fact, the entire model is predicated on if you back 20 MIT dropouts and one of them builds a generational firm.

• 1:06:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Then it worked.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  That's the entire model of venture capital. So Will, I, I think it's a funny tweet and, and like I respect that point of view, but he's not really realizing what the real game of venture is, which is if one of these companies becomes 10% as big as SpaceX, then the entire investment strategy worked.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  That's true, but he's not talking to venture capitalists here. He's talking to entrepreneurs.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  His brothers.

• 1:06:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's talking to the brothers. And so what, what he's saying is not that like, yes, all of these deals could add up to plenty of funds doing well. And even the bad funds, they're going to return capital. They're going to be one X funds, maybe two X funds. They'll be okay. It's not like the cash will really get totally incinerated. The, the problem is, is that I think he's trying to just raise a flag to college dropout, young people that it's like, yes, you can go and do the, the fake work of twisting your idea into something that fits a VC narrative and say, oh, well, like we could be asset light, but we can raise more money if we say we're going to train our own model. Or we could, we could do this, but if we say that we need to buy this huge manufacturing

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  plant and put up a big American flag, we'll be able to raise more money. So let's go with that path, even if it's not the right path for our business. Even that's, even if that's not what the capital structure of our industry demands. And so you wind up building for the VCs instead of for the market, for the customer and for yourself. And so I think that's kind of the, the meta take here to some degree.

• 1:07:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  But yeah. Gotta kiss a lot of frogs. Game. Should we do this one? I love this one.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  Evan Armstrong writes, obviously, I am excited for my child, but also really wish I had like two more months to write. Just today, pre, one, pre product, pre product robotics company raising a two billion valuation. Two, Bridge getting bought at ninety X revenue. Three rumors about new models coming. Can't help but want to publish on this.

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  I know. This is a man who prioritizes work over everything else.

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Skip paternity leave, brother.

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. It is the most important thing that keeps the, keeps the society, keeps capitalism grinding. The relentless march of techno capital is nothing without those who are willing to put their family to the side.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  I took off thirty six hours when my son was born. Not necessarily proud of that. But I, he was born Saturday, like, you know, in the early, early hours of the morning. Twelve hour.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Monday. You're on call with the East Coast.

• 1:08:45Jordi Hays?

  I legitimately had a twelve, twelve hour meeting ba- of back to backs on Monday. But we had to, like, that, that was the only way. Had to do that. I didn't do that with the second one. But, uh, but yeah, I mean, I think that, uh, that's just a sign that Evan loves his work.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:09:05Jordi Hays?

  He is, there's a lot of big stuff, stuff. We wouldn't have this podcast if there wasn't stuff to talk about.

• 1:09:10John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, underrated about this tweet. Work-life balance always goes viral. So I don't know if this got dunked on, but like, if you're, if you're rage baiting, like, this is the best possible rage bait if you're just trying to grow your account, like, because people will fight about this forever.

• 1:09:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cuz he could have tweeted, well, I'm a big fan of organic intelligence.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Being my new child. I'm really a fan of artificial intelligence.

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:37Jordi Hays?

  And the child that I'm having today, I could have had the same child four hundred years ago, but AI and large language models didn't exist four hundred years ago.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Exactly. So if you just dial this up, if he just rewrites this, it's like, I haven't seen my child in months, but I've been writing. Boom.

• 1:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're actually, so Every is chugging along. I've subscribed to their stuff forever.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Jordi Hays?

  I think that they are too nice of guys to be in the media business. They now, they, they spun out a word processing product, which, which seems cool. Uh, but they're not like Eric Newcomer who's putting up seven figures of Beavida.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  Because, you know, maybe they are now. I don't, I don't know. I have no idea. Um, but I think that Evan is too nice to rage bait, you know, like he, he only went 50% of the way there.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, what is the actual, it's every?

• 1:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's a media company. I think they're focused on, on AI.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I've never seen them get, uh, absolutely raked over the coals by tech or the communists and you gotta have an enemy. If you don't have an enemy, you don't have an ally.

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  The only reason people rally together.

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  The enemy of my, yeah.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  No, seriously. You have to have an enemy. If you don't have an enemy, there's no reason for someone to be your ally.

• 1:10:56Jordi Hays?

  We should, who, we need to pick an enemy.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  The working class, obviously.

• 1:11:01Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. We, we all know that the working class gets too much credit. And it's long, uh, and it's, and, and respect for the, for the financial professional. Yeah. Blue collar.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. They're, they're, they're clearly the enemy. Um.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And we haven't done our jobs until people are used, calling us billionaires in a sort of negative.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Exactly. Pejorative.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Pejorative.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, unironically, the, the, the enemy that I always focus on in the tech stuff is, is China essentially and, and the foreign governments.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  That's an easy enemy. And that's so authentic to, to my lived experience because I, I studied abroad in Shanghai.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  I studied while I was there at basically the Harvard of China. I worked at a tech, tech accelerator, like while I was there. And within 48 hours of setting foot in that country, I knew that I wanted to do everything. I wanted to spend my life making sure that we contained China.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  And that, and that they didn't export the, their sort of way of life to the world. Um, so I don't have any issues with the people of China.

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  But their way of life.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, and and and I feel like that's it it I always try and remind people in tech when there's these little feuds like, oh, Miami versus San Francisco, like, which is cooler? Or like, the Gundo versus SF, like, AI versus hard tech, or even like, the intro fights between like, the VC firms, like, Andreessen, Sequoia, Founders Fund, like, they're all beefing or whatever. And I'm like, okay, like, there might be good reasons for these beefs, but like, let's refocus on like, the real battle here, which is like, America versus

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  They're all gonna enjoy a conversation at Milken.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Everyone, everyone's on the same team here. And and I try and I try and refocus, especially like, when the Gundo bros start going hard on SF, I'm like, you think, do you think China is having these fights over, over Wuhan versus Shanghai? No. They say, what is Wuhan good at?

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  China, China, China.

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  Biotechnology, bioweapons development. What, what, what is, what is Shenzhen good at? Copying American, uh, consumer electronics. Like, they're both excellent in their own ways, in the same way that the Gundo is great at hard tech and San Francisco is great at AI. They're not fighting.

• 1:13:23Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't have said it better myself.

• 1:13:25John Coogan?

  They're working together as one team. We need to be one team over here in America.

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who's the LP, who, we need to find the LP in Sequoia, Andreessen, and Founders Fund, this is probably Saudi.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  Oh, there's tons, not even Saudi.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna be like, put, who's the, who's the one person that can put all the GPs on one group chat and be like, squash this, squash this right now, in front of me.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  You know who it is? I, I think it's Zuck's family office. You know that?

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  I forget what they're, what they're called, but I'm pretty sure they're LP and everything.

• 1:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  But there's a bunch of others, endowments and whatnot.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Dad, the GPs are fighting again.

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I do think that, I, I, I love the idea of like, you know, uh, being a founder became high status. So it was like, oh, I gotta, I gotta graduate from college and get on the track and, you know, start a company.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  No, drop out. I gotta get into a good school.

• 1:14:19John Coogan?

  Then it was like, drop out and, oh, like, I'm just gonna go straight to angel investing or like, start a VC firm. And it's like, okay, like, kinda odd. And then we talked about that one guy who was like, uh, he's starting like, uh, fund management software. It's like, one layer of abstraction. Pretty soon, it's just gonna be like, I'm just gonna go be an LP.

• 1:14:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna go straight to be an LP.

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  Straight to be an LP.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the investing is something that I feel like I grew up in the so immersed in the Silicon Valley ethos of you can just do things, you can do anything. That

• 1:14:50Jordi Hays?

  the the number one way in which I've felt that experience really matters is in angel investing. Because I just started angel investing and I didn't know, you know, there was no, I didn't go to Jason Calacan at school.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask if you had done that.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Like I didn't, didn't do that. I just started investing in cool ideas with smart people and it's overall been very, you know, fruitful that strategy, but there's been a number of, it's like, okay, I

• 1:15:20Jordi Hays?

  talked with Zach.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Within six months of him incorporating Bridge, didn't invest. I met Shane from Polymarket, like we would DM back in like 2021 and I didn't go back up the Brink's truck. And, uh, and now having had those experiences, I'm like, next time when I meet people like that now, I just figure out a way to give them money as fast as possible.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:46Jordi Hays?

  And experience matters, like my returns from this era of my investing life will be better than the prior era because of that learning.

• 1:15:55John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, are you gonna invest in any fentanyl vaccines? You said this article?

• 1:16:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. This is the, I, I, I think I texted this to the group being, being.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  I think this is in Bloomberg, says a fentanyl vaccine is a long shot that just might work. Wha- what did you find interesting about this?

• 1:16:13Jordi Hays?

  So I just think it's funny because

• 1:16:17Jordi Hays?

  it's the private markets doing what they do best, which is finding solutions to problems that the government is not capable of solving. I just think that the government. Is probably a lot more able to tackle the fentanyl issue than uh than than.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  Well, they have a monopoly on violence and they should import enforce that at the ports, right?

• 1:16:39Jordi Hays?

  Right, right. And and.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  But at the same time, yeah, I mean, if you if you sell this through medical clinics, potentially people come in when they're not.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  It's just a funny, it's just a hilarious, yeah, they're at rock bottom.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  And they say like, look, I'm done.

• 1:16:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm literally going to buy some sketchy cocaine right now. Please, can I get this vaccine? Will it will it kick in in the next two hours?

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Jordi Hays?

  You know, cuz I just, I don't, I don't know, but I but I I think it's um, I really don't know who the customer is for this. I mean, I can imagine, but it seems like sort of a very.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, like, people that think, like, I'm very happy to report that I don't ever expect to encounter fentanyl. In my life.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so this vaccine, I'm.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  You know what I need? I need an ayahuasca vaccine, so then I can go into the jungle with all the tech billionaires. And be like, yeah, let's go on this ayahuasca retreat, totally like, and they're all getting one shotted, and I'm just sitting there.

• 1:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Like a demigod.

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  Getting stronger.

• 1:17:56Jordi Hays?

  You're having to fake, you're having to fake.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  I'm like, oh, yeah, it's so crazy, like, the world's open, like, I had this brilliant idea, like, it's a nicotine company, you should invest.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  And you're like, wow, that's what, that's what the demon told you? It's like, yeah, it told me, it told me that nicotine pouches are gonna be a big, big category.

• 1:18:14Jordi Hays?

  Twenty on twenty on two hundred.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, I just think getting like, if you're gonna do that vaccine, just start doing. Start back, start creating vaccines for everything. I mean, the vaccines are a great business model, so.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I want a vaccine for.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  Low testosterone.

• 1:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's one. Another one would be like inbox zero, you know, it's like a vaccine that.

• 1:18:39John Coogan?

  What if there's a microplastics vaccine? Take that, just, your body just deflects the plastics.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, force field.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Force field. Anyway, I don't know how we're gonna cover this, but the cover of The Economist this week is fantastic. It's the SpaceX rocket taking off, the, the starship, but instead of the, the core tube, it's just the dollar. And it says, "America's economy is the envy of the world," and it's a deep dive on the resilience of the American economy. Often hated on, but extremely resilient. And Robert Sterling posts this like mega thread of all the things that he loves about America, and it's just amazing. I'll read some of this. "Culture that celebrates risk-taking, ingrained hatred of bureaucracy, robust capital markets, Starbucks Nitro Cold Brew, cheap and abundant oil, you can just do stuff.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  Investment bankers that work till 2 a.m., low barriers to entry for entrepreneurship, manifest destiny, private equity, Delaware C corporations, M&A markets, meritocracy, low capital gains tax, McDonald's, New York City, University Greek Life system, Walmart, GPU clusters, Sand Hill Road, Michael Jordan, 50 states competing for business, the Homestead Act, the old-school DARPA, no union reps on corporate boards." Like, the entire state of Texas, like you just riffed for so long and just sent this massive list of cool things and...

• 1:20:00Jordi Hays?

  How are you not bullish? How are you not bullish after reading that?

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  You really, you really have to be, but I love that it's, it's two, it's two lenses on the same idea. Like, you know that The Economist wasn't writing like this, right? The Economist is gonna have this very thoughtful article that explains basically the same conclusion.

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  In a much more complicated way.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  In a much more complicated way, much more nuanced.

• 1:20:25Jordi Hays?

  And I like how it, almost every single thing listed off was like, like intense American consumerism and then, and then, and then...

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  Finance.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Finance.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Ability to get filthy rich even if you're born poor, state school engineering programs, pickup trucks, yeah. It's just amazing. It really, it really is such a wonderful country. I always liked that, that, that teal line where they're like, "Oh, are you gonna leave?" He's like, "To where?" Yeah. It's the least bad option. Like, you might complain about America, but it is the best. We're just number one in everything.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I never...

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  I, I think we grew up in the, in the period where young people thought that America was bad.

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  We, I don't know what, I don't know what was the cause of it, but it's almost like things were so good here that people were trying to find reasons to not like it for some reason. But in, I've been to,

• 1:21:32Jordi Hays?

  I've been to forty plus countries, many of which I've spent, you know, a week plus in.

• 1:21:41Jordi Hays?

  And the, the closest thing I got to wanting to live there was, I, I would buy a vacation home in Switzerland. Just because I, Switzerland is outside of the United, like, I would say Switzerland is my favorite country, that's not the United States. Right? I just love being there. I could see spending a lot of time there. But I never once in my life was thinking I want to spend three quarters of the year.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  Every time I traveled, I would always just come back to like, oh, like I went to Thailand and I was like, oh, this is Russia's Mexico. Like, I went to Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. It's just LA. Like, there's a beach and then there's mountains. It's beautiful. It's amazing. People drive around on freeways. It's very similar to LA. Like, you go to all these different countries and it's like, there's, like, America is so unique in that we have, we have Manhattan. So that's like your Tokyo, your high finance, like, really dense city. You have LA SF, unrivaled Miami. But then you also have Hawaii, like, a chain of islands. So it's like, all of a sudden, like,

• 1:22:44Jordi Hays?

  Underrated, underrated.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  Fiji's, Fiji's great, but it's a lot farther and it's not ten X better than Hawaii.

• 1:22:50Jordi Hays?

  What's the next Hawaii?

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Alaska. Like, okay, I never need to go to Russia.

• 1:22:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  And, and America really just did a good job of capturing, like, every single biome. So there are, there are tropical areas, there are desert areas, there are mountainous areas, forest areas, tundra, like, we have it all. Whereas, very few countries have every single biome covered. Russia doesn't have tropical areas. They gotta go to Thailand.

• 1:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The, the thing that you need to do if you're American, and I think a lot of our listeners right now are American. Is as you go about your day to day life, or you go on a work trip, or you go on a vacation within the United States, view it from the eyes of some Italian kid who grew up in a small village and is visiting like Los Angeles, right? Like, we're sitting here recording with a straight shot view of skyscrapers of that are home to some of America's greatest companies, right? If you're from a small fishing village and you get to look out and see KPMG, I mean, that is, that's like a core memory, right?

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  If you're, and so it's our duty to view our world through their eyes. And when I drive back and I'm passing, you know, the other Jonathan Club, the

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  Beach Club.

• 1:24:12Jordi Hays?

  The Beach Club and seeing, you know, this Ferris wheel like on a pier, or I'm driving on PCH, or I'm, I see that I'm on the 405 and I see the Hollywood sign. You know, really Chateau Marmont.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, these iconic places, it's important to try to, don't just have your eyes glaze over and look back at TikTok, you know?

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  Enjoy it.

• 1:24:37Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy it.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Enjoy it. Yeah. America's undefeated. It's not going anywhere. No matter what happens. Sorry.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Sorry. This, this one was good.

• 1:24:49John Coogan?

  I have this riff with, you know how Josh Steinman tweets, "Good morning, we're gonna win" every day? And I was thinking about like, what is a mantra that, you know, you could tweet every single day? And mine was just listing out every single country that's not America and calling them un-American.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Canada is un-American. France is un-American. Greece is un-American.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Un-American is a good

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  It's literally true.

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  That's a potentially a phrase that we could, that we could coin.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  That we could own.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  It is literally true. Canada is un-American.

• 1:25:22Jordi Hays?

  Almost everything that I don't like is un-American.

• 1:25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  Should we talk about Tim Ferriss?

• 1:25:28Jordi Hays?

  Tim Ferriss is un-American.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  Oh, Tim Ferriss is the most American.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm just saying, I like Tim, but this specific video-

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  So he put up a clip from his podcast where he did a 30-day dopamine detox. No caffeine, alcohol, sex, or sweetness. He didn't, which sounds like, it sounds like I'm not going to hug my wife or something. But he was saying that he would not consume any sugar, anything that was sweetened.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the funny thing with this is, I could do, I could do, yeah, one, I could do all those things. But whatever dopamine release that I negated from skipping coffee, or nicotine, or any of these other, or a nice piece of chocolate cake in the evening, would immediately be undone by picking up my daughter and giving her a hug. You know, like the same, whatever, feeling.

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Like, to, you know, steel man him, like, that is the point of the dopamine detox is that you will, you'll proportionally get more dopamine from picking up your daughter, right?

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:26:28John Coogan?

  You're, you're, you're not like, okay, this is like, you know, like 110% of TikTok. It's like, TikTok isn't even in the equations. So it's just like the purest of the pure.

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for you, it would just be waking up in the morning and being like, I have three sons.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. I do wonder if he stopped posting during this detox.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  Because that's the real dopamine for a content creator.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50John Coogan?

  Did he stop capital allocating? Did he stop investing? Because the rush of making a good seed deal-

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  I think Tim stopped angel investing.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  Like, it was too much-

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Too much dopamine?

• 1:27:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the angel investing is deeply addictive.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  It makes no sense to do financially.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. I just, I always wonder with these dopamine detoxes, if, if like, when you cut something out, like, usually you find yourself finding a crutch. Like, I noticed, like, if I, if I stopped using one, like, I, I stopped using a lot of the endless feeds, but then I find myself just opening up like the Wall Street Journal more, and that's probably better. But I'm still, like, using that for whatever.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Still a rat on the treadmill, going to hit the-

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  So I wonder what his, what his, like, cheat meal was during this dopamine detox. Like, what was he doing to get dopamine?

• 1:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, the only-

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Probably posting.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  The only video that I would watch, it's funny, I don't think either of us watched the video.

• 1:27:45John Coogan?

  I, I did, it was him talking to Kevin Rose, the guy who tried to dig.

• 1:27:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so-

• 1:27:52Jordi Hays?

  I would watch, I would watch a 30 day long video of Tim doing a dopamine detox.

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  That's the real dopamine detox is just to watch Tim's extremely boring life in monk mode.

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:28:06Jordi Hays?

  It takes 30 days and you can sleep when he sleeps.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  When he sleeps.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  But you have to let, you have to be woken up by his alarm.

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  That's pretty sick.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  That's probably the.

• 1:28:16Jordi Hays?

  That's a whole, that's a whole category of content where you just live someone else's life.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  I feel like that's something like Jaco premium subscribers would like pay for some sort of live stream like come live my life with me. Like tap, tap into this live stream and you're just gonna like come along for this whole thing like when I wake up, you wake up. When I go to the gym, you go to the gym. It's kind of, people pay for that in person.

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Virtually, it's pretty scalable.

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  You can scale it, scale it. Yeah. That's definitely a high.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  There's definitely like a, like a, a lot of his on, his like offsite events, obviously very bounded by like the number of people that can attend. But if you just put out the 30 day video, like anyone can do it.

• 1:28:53Jordi Hays?

  Falling, falling asleep, listening to Jaco effectively tell you a bedtime story. Today was a great day. Tomorrow is gonna be a better one. And then, and then he just like is sort of rambling and you sort of fall asleep and then he says, morning sweetheart. It's 4 a.m.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  It's 4 a.m.

• 1:29:14Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to be up right now. You don't want to be up right now.

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  I gotta start posting the Jaco wakeups with the Patek at 4 a.m. Cause he has like the really athletic like Navy SEAL watch.

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  G-Shock.

• 1:29:25John Coogan?

  And G-Shock, yeah. And it's just the Patek at 4 a.m. Be like, time to go to work. It's the best. I love Jaco. It's incredible.

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  I love Jaco. Jaco, as soon as he's a billionaire, he can call in and be on the show.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  For sure. He's gonna be close. He has, he has multiple products that are like the top on Amazon. His, his business is insane. He has so many different monetizations methods. Did, did Senna ever send you that like breakdown? Oh, that's great. It's like, yeah, it's looking like in a single, in a single long Jaco episode. Like all of the ad reads and all of the monetization that's going on, they were like. Ten or fifteen different products and calls to action. So it's like an Athletic Greens competitor, an LMNT competitor, a protein powder, but then it's also like a subscription to the premium service. Uh, and then

• 1:30:13Jordi Hays?

  I bought his book.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, the books. And then it's like, and then it's like, there's a hundred dollar tier for like a course that you buy and you watch. There's like a thousand dollar tier for like going to a big conference. There's a ten thousand dollar tier for going to like the VIP conference.

• 1:30:26Jordi Hays?

  Getting kicked in the nuts by Jaco.

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  Fifty thousand. So, so like, no matter what you're willing to spend, he does really, really good at like price laddering and price discrimination. Cause that's one of the hardest things with, with podcasting and why it works with ads is that you, you have some billionaires in your audience. With us, it's like mostly billionaires, but, um, but then you also have some people that are like, they're not billionaires yet. And so they don't have the ability to, to drop, you know, a hundred thousand dollars on, you know, a private, a private event with the technology brothers. But how do you get money out of both of those audience cohorts? Well, you gotta have a, an affordable product.

• 1:31:02Jordi Hays?

  NetJets is a really good example, right? Where you might not be able to afford a private jet. And we certainly have friends who are billionaires who own their own jets.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  They, they'll still use NetJets, right? It's not a one or the other.

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  Yep. But it's also a reason why you might hear some ads on this show for things that, that have lower ticket prices. Because we wanna Yeah, we wanna monetize every single listener here. That's, that's the goal of the show, to be the most profitable podcast in history. And that means that no matter who you are, no matter how much, what, what your W2 says, no matter what your Roth IRA says, uh, we wanna get the most money out of you. Should we move on to Corey Levy?

• 1:31:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I tried to, I tried to, I tried to keep it together.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  So Corey Levy, I, I mean, it, it's funny because this got dunked on, but I mean, I love everyone involved in this and is this? Is this Ben from Vasto here? I don't know. It looks like some of my friends. I don't know. But Ramp held an event with KOSLA, with Keith, called The Art of Hiring. And it featured Brian Chesky, Mike Shebitt, and Keith, talking about how to hire and Founder Mode. And Corey Levy, who runs Z-Fellow's, prolific early-stage angel investor, essentially. I don't know, incubator accelerator, I don't know what term he likes, but

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  he wrote kind of a breakdown, some notes from the Art of Hiring event earlier today. And he starts with Keith, and so he adds Keith. And the first line that gets cut off when you see the tweet is just, "Don't hire anyone over the age of 30." And then there's like, there's like 25 other things that are all like, super reasonable, but he led with the most controversial thing. And so there's a community note now that says, "Age discrimination in hiring is illegal in the US. Anyone who follows the advice from the first point is potentially committing a crime." Which I just love. But obviously, he wasn't saying that literally, like, he's saying...

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, I could see Keith saying that literally. But he's also, he understands the art of rage bait, right?

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:33:08Jordi Hays?

  And using, saying controversial things to generate attention, which does other things.

• 1:33:13John Coogan?

  He's compressing the idea of like, you need young energy in your organization. You need people that are hungry, who aren't resting, investing, who aren't already millionaires, who want to make their equity work. And so you need people that show up and are hungry. And so, how do you compress that down into something that will stick in someone's mind? "Oh, well, don't hire anyone over the age of 30." Now, it's probably a lot more nuanced than that, and I think Keith, if you talked to him for an hour, he would get into that. And there's a million reasons why. And if you look at his companies and all the other companies, I'm sure there's people over the age of 30 at these companies. But it's a great way to get that to stick in someone's mind.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  So... It's funny because there's a um. Here, just turn the mic towards you. I was, I was talking with a founder that used to work for Keith and raise money from Keith and on the way over here today. And running a business for the first time, it's absolutely crushing. He's about to raise like a very hot series A. Cool. And he has taken every, almost all of Keith's advice. I don't know about this advice, but he certainly has learned so much from Keith. Yeah. And the only thing that he didn't follow is the Miami thing. Really? He originally started the company in Miami. Yeah.

• 1:34:28Jordi Hays?

  And at one point, it was probably the scariest day of his life telling Keith that he was gonna go back to SF. But almost everything else he's followed to a T. And it's just worked so. I think I know this company, yeah. It's worked so well. It's worked so well. Uh, this is Dara at Delphi. I'm an investor as well. Yeah, so it's worked so well for Dara, like. Yeah. Ignored the hype. Yep. Building in a very like hot space, which is like consumer AI. Has ignored the hype, stayed focused, focused on customers, like all these things that, that um, that, that Keith has parroted and reiterates and things like that. And it's just worked extremely well. Yeah. Like it, it, it, um, and so the funny thing with um,

• 1:35:13Jordi Hays?

  uh, I will say that Dara ha- hired one of my old

• 1:35:19Jordi Hays?

  uh, engineers who is over thirty, who does have children, uh, but that guy's a fucking grinder. Uh, so, so, um, yeah, I mean, I think overall, I do think about this sometimes where as a twenty-eight-year-old that has the lifestyle of some, something that's more found from somebody in their mid-thirties, at least in tech or mid-forties. Uh, depending on how late to children. You're like mid-fifties. Yeah, mid-fifties. Um, I do, that is almost like a recurring nightmare of, of like, if I was competing against myself without children. Sure. What, how much more would I be getting done and things like that?

• 1:35:59Jordi Hays?

  I do think that the counter side to that is when people are in their thirties, they're.

• 1:36:09Jordi Hays?

  They can't afford to lose in the same way, right? So it's like, there is this whole other side of it and they have the benefit of. And so when you, when you look at this tweet saying, don't hire anyone over the age of 30, combined with young college dropouts raising 30 to 50 million dollars pre-product.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:28Jordi Hays?

  The combination of those two things is terrible, right? And you brought this up with Facebook earlier, being like, Facebook having a really veteran engineer who brought structure and experience and all these different things. So anyways, I would say that overall Keith's advice, I'm, I'm like very bullish on any founder that takes like 90% of Keith's advice to heart.

• 1:36:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:51Jordi Hays?

  And follows it. I think it's a really good framework, but, um, but again, the, uh, don't, don't take anything too literally.

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 1:37:00Jordi Hays?

  Even Miami is.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Giving, I mean, the whole founder mode thing.

• 1:37:03Jordi Hays?

  Miami is like a state of mind in many ways.

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  And also, I mean, Miami is still like, I think we've talked about this before, but I mean, it still is just like a phenomenal place to go meet a lot of extremely wealthy people.

• 1:37:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, like it, it, I think everyone agrees that it is behind on, on hiring engineering talent, but in terms of just like lots of.

• 1:37:23Jordi Hays?

  Capital markets.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Rich and powerful people having money there. Like if you're, if you're a, if you're a founder and you're doing a fundraising trip, like stopping in Miami and meeting a bunch of people is like very doable and very beneficial.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35John Coogan?

  It's also just like an awesome place to live or an awesome place to visit when you're a founder and you've been grinding in some like, you know, tenderloin complex in, in San Francisco and you get to like, you don't just have to go down to San Hill Road, which is like even more boring. You get to go to Miami and hang out at all these people's houses.

• 1:37:50Jordi Hays?

  I know that I will absolutely own property in Miami at some point in my life. I'm not in a huge rush to do it, but I really enjoy it there and we're going next week.

• 1:38:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. But yeah, I I'm excited for this video to drop. I'm sure that they're gonna record it and put it out. I think it'll be good. I I think I think they're all really great.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, we're giving we're giving him the benefit of the doubt and Keith is like literally telling all these young kids. I swear to God, do not like I I cannot be more I cannot be more explicit about this. If somebody is thirty years old and one day disqualified.

• 1:38:27Jordi Hays?

  Write it into your HR doc, like write it into your hiring policies. Put it on your wall.

• 1:38:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, I don't even know where this is from, but you dropped this in the in the group chat and I just wanted to read it because I thought it was a funny quote from maybe like a Substack or something. This guy says, I look for the type of guy in London who gets up at seven o'clock on Sunday morning when his kids are still in bed and logs on to a poker site. So that he can pick off the US drunks coming home on a Sunday, Saturday night. I hired a guy like that. He usually clears five or 10 grand every Sunday morning before breakfast, taking out the drunks playing poker because they're not very good at it. But their confidence has gone up a lot. Someone who understands an edge. I love that.

• 1:39:06Jordi Hays?

  I don't even think we have to add commentary. It's just it's just cheers to that. Yeah.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  It's great. Yeah, find an edge.

• 1:39:13Jordi Hays?

  The hard thing, the hard thing with people like that is they they usually end up making so much money, they're really hard to hire.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. If you're making 10 grand a week, that's 500K a year. Like, what a job are you offering them? I mean, I guess this is probably for like a hedge fund position or something. Um, or somebody who understands that like, yeah, this is maybe not, uh, not gonna stick around forever, maybe. I don't know. Should we close with the the new king of podcasting, Harry Stebbings?

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Harry.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  Four hundred million dollar.

• 1:39:45Jordi Hays?

  I I I I will say, I think that that that picture could come back to bite.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  So the story is, uh, podcaster Harry Stebbings raises one of Europe's biggest venture funds. The British firm, firm 20VC pulls in 400 million dollars to invest in early-stage tech startups. And he claims it's to make Europe great again. Is he a Trump guy? Or is he just like riffing on that?

• 1:40:10Jordi Hays?

  I bet he's a Trump guy. He appreciates great entrepreneurs. Right? Trump is

• 1:40:17John Coogan?

  I feel like he's pretty like, uh, like non, like apolitical to like, because like if you, if you go super

• 1:40:23Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing, there's nothing less cool than being not living in the US but being obsessed with US politics. It's like get a life, you know? Like get a life. Yeah. So, yeah, no, I think it's amazing for podcasting. It's amazing for Harry. He's now, we kind of have him, if we're, if we want to build the most profitable podcast in the world.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:45Jordi Hays?

  He's pulling down 80 million of management fees.

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Jordi Hays?

  On that fund.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  He's in our

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  Big shoes to fill.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  Big shoes to fill. Target on his back, right?

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  Target on his back.

• 1:40:56Jordi Hays?

  It's not that, but, but we're a positive sum, right?

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:40:59Jordi Hays?

  We'll do a $500 million fund.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, congrats to Harry.

• 1:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to Harry.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  It is interesting. I feel like, do, do you think his audience is primarily entrepreneurs or VCs? Because he, he really focuses, he does get some entrepreneurs on the show, but it's mostly VCs that go on the show. So he probably has an incredible network. So he can get into, he can get small checks into deals, but like, what happens when, you know, yeah, he's interviewing like the Sequoia guys, but then they're not going to let him like steal a hot round from them. So how does that work in terms of deal flow?

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The reason that I'm bullish overall on, I'm not bullish on the European focus.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  Sure. Oh yeah. I mean, I guess that

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  If he's gonna invest the full 400 million in Europe, that's concerning.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. It seemed like the real alpha here was just, he is probably one of the greatest bridges between European LPs and US investments because he's he's a name brand in America. And if you are wealthy in Europe, you can't necessarily just call up an American VC firm and LP and do it.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  So.

• 1:42:18Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  I've seen this happen a couple of times where people have raised really big funds because it's like, oh, they they happen to be super connectors in like Brazil. And so they can go around and just pull all the Brazilian capital together and then they come in and they invest it in America. But they're providing that service to the Brazilian high net worth individuals and institutions.

• 1:42:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the. The reason to be bullish on Harry is that what David Senra has done for founders.

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  Harry has done for contemporary VCs. So in the same way that David will be talking about founder and then tie in. Oh, here's how these other three founders also thought similarly and applied this way of thinking to their business. He's doing the same thing with VCs. You know, where where he will be talking with one VC and be like, well, that's similar to how. You know, Peter thought about the initial investment in SpaceX or whatever.

• 1:43:14John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:43:15Jordi Hays?

  So I think that being a student, he's now a student and a player, right? And he's drawing on, I think it's a very real thing that he could text. Probably 50 of the best GPs and get a response within. You know, a day of like, hey. And they can be like, well, here are the traps in aerospace.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Here's why this won't work.

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh, this is actually really interesting. Let's look at it together.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, like, that's real alpha.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  Yep, that's great. Well, cheers to Harry and we'll see you next time.

• 1:43:50Jordi Hays?

  Stop.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching. Or listening.