00:44:02 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:44:02] S0: He's got you on next He's next for sure. [00:44:06] S1: For sure. And I think I will be staying away from his supplement stack. Hopefully hoping hoping to make [00:44:11] S0: it Yeah. Longer. Really sad though. [00:44:15] S1: Yeah. Very sad. What a what a career and what a fantastic The Hulk the Hulk Hogan theme song, I am a real American. Such a good song. Such a great rallying [00:44:24] S0: name of his beer, Real American Beer. [00:44:27] S1: Yeah. Fight for the rights of every man. Such a good song. Light, crisp, crushable. So, is a there is a reflective piece in the New Yorker about Hulk Hogan's Gawker lawsuit that we can go through. But first, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the modern Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product road maps. Go to linear app homepage. And, you know, if Hogan's selling beer, you gotta get you on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. [00:45:07] S0: Friend of mine is was business partners with with No way. Hogan on that. That's crazy. Yeah. [00:45:15] S1: So we have Zak Kukoff joining at noon to break down the AI day yesterday in Washington DC. The besties met up with the [00:45:24] S0: They crushed it.
00:45:24 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:45:24] S0: They crushed it. [00:45:24] S1: Hill and Valley crew. Honestly crushed it. We have a bunch of great posts that we can run through. First, let's go through a little bit of the Hulk Hogan loss Gawker lawsuit. This is from 2016, well before we actually saw the the results from all this. But, on Monday afternoon, a Florida jury added $25,000,000 in punitive damages to the $115,000,000 it had awarded Hulk Hogan on Friday in his invasion of privacy case against Gawker media. Hogan sued Gawker for posting portions of a sex tape it received from an anonymous sender. It's a shocking amount, not least because it's $40,000,000 more than Hogan, whose real name is Tade de la la, had demanded. Verdicts of this size can pose an existential risk to media to a media company. That's what happened to Gawker. Gawker has reported that it earned $44,000,000 in revenue in 2014. In in January, Gawker's owner Nick Denton announced that he had sold a portion of his company to investors in order to fund this case. Gawker will certainly appeal the verdict as it should after it pays a bond of up to $50,000,000 arguing that the jury was unreasonable in finding that Hogan's right to privacy outweighed Gawker's right to publish the material, which it believes was of public interest which is a very yeah. It's [00:46:38] S0: it's Strange defense. [00:46:40] S1: It is. It is. It is hard to to argue. He is a public figure but this is a very personal thing. [00:46:46] S0: I mean, if they had just posted that it existed and they had seen it.
00:46:46 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:46:46] S0: I mean, if they had just posted that it existed and they had seen it. [00:46:50] S1: That's true. And that's kind of what's happening with the Wall Street Journal. They're not posting everything all the time with regards to the to the to the Trump Epstein stuff but they're they're referencing that it exists that they verified it and that seems to be a safer path for media companies to to kind of report that they've confirmed that something exists without actually putting everything out necessarily. So the publication of the videotape of consensual sex between adults is not the most appealing place to plant a first amendment flag, but it is worth considering the possible effects on publishers if a judgment of this magnitude is allowed to stand. And so the the fallout from Gawker was certainly celebrated in tech because they also had, ValleyWag, which was, very annoying to a lot of people in tech because it was basically like TMZ for tech. I don't know if you were aware of ValleyWag back [00:47:39] S0: before Before my time.
00:47:39 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:47:39] S0: before Before my time. [00:47:40] S1: Before your time. But it it did have like a chilling effect. I remember being at South by Southwest and a friend of mine who's a venture backed founder at the time was was really into doing handstand push ups and was doing handstand push ups at a at like a party that was being thrown that were people just kind of hanging out and he was just doing some handstand push ups As one does. As one does. And and there was a value add reporter there and wrote about it as a characterization of like how bro y the situation was, but didn't include his name. And he was like, I dodged a bullet. Because like, could have been forever outed his I mean, in many ways [00:48:15] S0: does many ways, he could have built his aura I agree. If he if he was named. [00:48:20] S1: In the modern era, it would have been incredibly bullish. Mhmm. But at that time, it did feel like something that could destroy you. It was it was a very tense time. Very, very tense time. [00:48:28] S0: Roy Lee, would not have, done well during that era. Yeah. Maybe he would have maybe he would have changed the meta though. Because he's making he's making shirtless posts on the timeline. Yeah. Bringing them into the modern era.
00:48:28 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:48:28] S0: Roy Lee, would not have, done well during that era. Yeah. Maybe he would have maybe he would have changed the meta though. Because he's making he's making shirtless posts on the timeline. Yeah. Bringing them into the modern era. [00:48:42] S1: Yeah. It is it is it is an interesting interesting thing. Like, Valleywag would probably be writing about Cluely a lot and framing it in a different way. There's already probably folks out there who are framing Cluely as particularly bad on the other side of the aisle or in the in the anti tech category. But it just doesn't seem to have the same effect. It certainly doesn't stop venture funding or customers or any of that. It doesn't it seems to be that we're in a different era where people people in tech were were clearly, it was controversial in tech. People were definitely divided. [00:49:14] S0: I think it would be good if there was some law that required if if media company wanted to write about someone's physique, they should have to post physique. [00:49:23] S1: Oh, their own physique. Yes. [00:49:25] S0: So that should just be in the footnotes. [00:49:27] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:49:27] S0: Yeah. It's important context. [00:49:30] S1: Anyway, in other in other news, Fin, the number one customer the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake off, number one in ranking on g two. Go check out fin.ai.
00:49:30 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[00:49:30] S1: Anyway, in other in other news, Fin, the number one customer the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake off, number one in ranking on g two. Go check out fin.ai. [00:49:43] S0: And OWN is apparently helping launch a media company. Yeah. And so, you wanna go work for OWN or this new company, which I believe is called Cool Tech News, go check it out. They're looking for a producer. [00:50:00] S1: The founder of Nikola, the electric vehicle company that went bankrupt and landed its CEO founder in prison for a brief time. He was in jail for life, then he got pardoned. Just did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson, and Nate Anderson from Hindenburg Hindenburg Research had a lengthy rebuttal to this that I thought was pretty interesting. So Nate says, I am Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research. Reference [00:50:33] S0: Okay. And just for context Yes. If people haven't seen this yet, Tucker is basically positioning the takedown of Nikola as a woke witch hunt. Is that is that is that an accurate summary?