The SaaSpocalypse is Cancelled, WB Back in Play, Zuck Grilled in LA Trial | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:01John Coogan?

  In case you were wondering how to shake hands with your with your friend or with your enemy, it works. It's the same. It's the same process. You grab the hand with great force.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  And underrated, you can establish dominance. You can handshake mog, clearly.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  Huge missed opportunity for Sam and Dario not to.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  To crush each other's hands to the point where the other one is bleeding and crying. That would have really set the tone.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  They have to rely on voice transcription.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. It would have been much better to just watch crushing in the hand. You know, you do those like strength training for a reason.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  Every once in a while, you don't want to get caught lacking. Anyway, there's big news today. We're canceling the SaaS apocalypse.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  R I P SaaS apocalypse. It occurred from January 2026 to February 2026, and it's over now. We're declaring it over. No, it's not. It's not entirely over. Who knows where where the market will go?

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  In many ways, it's just getting started.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  But I do think we're starting to see a bifurcation in the sloppable companies and the un-sloppable companies. There should be some divergence between companies that have figured out how to integrate with AI, how to retool their business model, or just show that their business model was strong all along. And we'll go through that.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, there's a category of SaaS that is SaaS, but they will be AI beneficiaries.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  Yep. Should we watch? Have you seen Pacific Rim?

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  We got to watch this pump up speech.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Because this gets me fired up. We're canceling the apocalypse. It's movie night again in class.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  So the storyline, aliens, giant alien Godzilla like creatures called Kaiju's have descended upon Earth.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  And only robots that are as big as the Godzillas can fight back. But you need two people. It's much like us. You need two pilots because the mental load of driving the robot, being in the drift, is too intense for a single person. It will drive you crazy. So two pilots, two Jaeger pilots must pilot the ship together and share the load. And and so they both punch, and then the robot punches. It's amazing. It's a great film. You'll love it.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  He's got to give a speech. You you're you're known for giving great speeches, just like this. This is this is a Jordi Hays original right here. Yes, movie day again. Welcome to the stream, Ryan.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  At the edge of our hope.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  At the edge of our hope.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Things aren't looking good at this point.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  At the end of our time.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  The end of our time. AI is upon us.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  We have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  We must believe in the stocks of the SaaS companies.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  There is not a man nor woman in here that shall stand alone.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  No, no public company shareholder will stand alone. We stand with you.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Today, we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  We're bringing the fight to the foundation labs.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  We're cancelling the apocalypse. We're cancelling the SaaS apocalypse.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  Woo!

• 2:59John Coogan?

  And then the greatest soundtrack ever. I love it.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  I only, I only really had to ever give one speech like that.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  Last year.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  But it hit.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  It hit.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  The team needed it in that.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  We did and we got through.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  Critical moment.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  We.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  Powered through.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  We powered through. So anyway, we've lost a lot of good soldiers, a lot of good market cap out there during the SaaS apocalypse. $2 trillion, something like that, maybe. It's been rough, but, and, and I mean, truthfully, like the narrative does make sense. Like, uh, agentic AI systems, co-pilots, foundation models, like these are disruptive innovations. Fundamentally, they're counter positioned against traditional seat-based SaaS pricing. We know this. Legacy companies will be caught in a jam because pivoting the entire business model is difficult. You can't just flip a switch and start charging customers in a completely different way. Your investors will freak out because your finances will be deeply unprofitable all of a sudden. Company cultures and organizational structures are aligned around particular in- incentives. And so you have to rewire everything for a different business model.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  And that's really hard. And that's why people are sounding the, this is a disruptive innovation. This is not a sustaining innovation like mobile or cloud. Uh, the SaaS apocalypse was always a little bit of an indiscriminate hammer. It felt like. I mean, there was one article in the journal that was like Anthropic launched a legal tool and that caused the sell off. And it's like, well, it could be that, or it also could be Claude Code, or it could be Open Claw, or Codex, or Spark, or like, there's a million different things going on in the AI world. That one just kind of took hold. But I think we will soon be finding out what companies are truly unslopable, as you put it, and actually benefit in the AI future. And there's a bunch of early signals, so let's run through them. First, Google's comeback. I mean, this was the first victim of the apocalypse.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  This one happened like a year or two ago. Why would anyone search Google ever if an LLM could get you a better answer in fewer clicks? Of course, Google quickly caught up to the frontier. They launched AI overviews. They flexed Deep Mind's research previews. They showed off the power of the TPU. Core business is surviving and thriving, due in part to Gemini helping understand intent so they can deliver ads on longer, more complex searches. So, Google's been doing fine. They're, they're sort of already building back from the SaaS apocalypse that they experienced. Then you have Meta. Will user minutes migrate over to LLMs? Will Sora destroy Instagram overnight? Will Slop clog the feeds? Maybe, but not before Meta's transformer-based GEM model absolutely destroys

• 5:24John Coogan?

  ad targeting and just makes everything so much better and re-accelerates revenue. And we've talked to a lot of folks about that. And so Meta's doing very well, even though they haven't like figured out their AI strategy, rolled out any of the new crazy frontier models from MSL. Like, the business is great.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  Certainly argue they have an AI strategy.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Use AI ML to make really good ads.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  And they've been doing it for a decade.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  But it's more on the product side, right?

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  So is it the Manus? Is it Net New product?

• 5:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  Is it Meta AI?

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Yep. It gets more interesting when you go to the smaller companies, not super small, but Spotify doesn't really need to invest in generative AI. I heard a good analogy that was like, should Spotify have like released a guitar so that people can make more music? Like, no, because people will pick whatever tools available and then they will release that music on Spotify. These artists, if they're using AI tools, or maybe they're just prompters, whatever you want to call them, they will bring AI music to the platform. It'll be filtered by algorithms. Slop will be in the trough, but only the most delicious slop will bubble to the top. Current data shows AI music currently underperforms dramatically on a percentage basis. Like, the number of AI songs is huge, but the number of, like, actual minutes watched is low.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Even if that flips, Spotify still benefits. Let's switch over to Shopify. You can definitely vibe code an e-commerce website now, but Shopify is not a major cost driver for most businesses that use it. You're talking maybe like $1,000 a month for some companies, and it's a lot of headache that they just don't have to even think about. And then there's a whole bunch of advantages that Shopify should benefit from in the AI era. It's very full-featured, so it's actually hard to replace. Setting up a new store is faster than waiting for a prompt to return, like, it's all pre-built. And then AI tools benefit from all the context and data that Shopify has across the entire platform. And then lastly, agentic commerce doesn't replace Shopify Checkout. It's just a front-end to the Checkout, much more mobile or social.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  Checkout, payment.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  Post-purchase.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  So if it's driving activity, that's actually a net benefit. And so, there's a whole bunch more examples. Lastly, you gotta consider Salesforce. Marc Benioff has been duking it out with Jim Cramer on CNBC over seat-based pricing in an AI era. And it's 100% true that there are some amazing AI-native CRM startups that are aggressively trying to eat off Benioff's plate. But Anthropic is hiring a Salesforce admin. They're growing so fast and so big that they need someone just to be full-time job, manage their internal Salesforce. And so, there's growth all over the SaaS ecosystem, and things don't seem to be decelerating or slowing down. It's definitely go time, though, and it's time to revisit sources of strength.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  It's wartime.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  It's time to become unslopable. It is wartime, and it's founder mode time.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so going back to the fax machine example, in 1999 was the first year that showed a significant drop in the sale of physical fax machines. They dropped by 10% in a single year.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  When was that?

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  In 1999.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  1999.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  That is not a okay growth just... Started slowing, it had been slowing up until that point, but it was slowing and then it like fell off a cliff.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Yep. Should we read through this Goodwill Hunting meme? This sums up the SaaS apocalypse. Of course, that's your contention, your first time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcasts, Dario and Dorekesh probably. Now you think it's the end of white collar work and seat based pricing is screwed. You're gonna, you're gonna be convinced of that till tomorrow when you get to something big is happening. Then you'll install Claude Bot on a Mac Mini vibe coded dashboard on top of a Postgres database and say, we're all just a couple Ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That's going to last until next week when you discover context graphs. And then you're going to be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. Well, as a matter of fact, I won't because ultimately the application layer is just, the

• 9:14John Coogan?

  application layer is just business logic on top of a cred database. You got that from Satya's appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS sticker. You watch some podcasts, then pawn it off as your own idea to impress some VCs and embarrass some anons who's long SaaS. See, see, the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple of years, you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact, there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you drop 30 grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come up with the same conclusions you could have got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  It's great. Roasted. Matthew McConaughey hit Variety this morning.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  And commenting on AI, Brandon just shared it. He said, it's coming, it's already here, don't deny it. It's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that no, this is wrong. It's not gonna last, there's too much money to be made and it's too productive.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  AI acceleration.

• 10:14Jordi Hays?

  So I say, own yourself, voice, likeness, et cetera, trademark it, whatever you gotta do, so when it comes, no one can steal you.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes sense. Matthew McConaughey voice, I mean, that's an iconic voice. I think there's definitely a huge deal to be done. And the AI voices, although we're in a boom right now, I remember being able to go on Waze and pick, I think Snoop Dogg had a deal, but there were a number of celebrities that had, you can imagine like an Arnold Schwarzenegger, get to the chopper, but then also like, take a left, and it's like fun. And they would just pre-record all of the different lines, like, keep going straight, bear left, take a hard left, and you record like 20 different lines, and then the program just picks the audio file for the correct moment, because there's only like 20 different things you could possibly say in a navigation app. But those types of things, there's a, there's clearly a framework for that.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  And all the agencies and all the unions understand this. So I feel like we're, we're in this weird, bizarro world where people think that, oh, like IP does, law doesn't exist, and we darn gonna be able to deal with this. It's like, no, like, there's, there's like decades of lawyers who like are foaming at the mouth, being like, I can't wait to sue ByteDance. This is gonna be awesome.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only thing is that it's gonna require real cooperation from platforms.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  The platforms are ready to cooperate.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  I disagree. I don't think, I don't think they're cooperating that hard. There's so much, there's so much content of a bunch of individuals on YouTube, on Meta, that is using their name and likeness and putting them in situations that they would never, ever, ever agree to. And you can argue that it's not good for their brand, but it's incredibly entertaining. And so the platforms leave the content up. By the time you do a takedown request, it's got 200,000 likes or...

• 12:05John Coogan?

  You don't need to do a takedown request. You just need to do, pay, pay me, pay me. That's what people want. They want to be paid. The, the message in that Matthew McConaughey post is not, is not like, it's, it's super critical that no one ever uses an image of me or, or my voice ever. It's that, look, if somebody's profiting off it, that's, that's my IP.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I, I read his comment more around making movies, saying, don't use AI to make this scene that would normally take four weeks in some exotic location and a thousand people. Obviously, AI is gonna be used for that. I think there's a separate issue of people generating Matthew McConaughey, doing and saying things that he would never agree to, that are sort of compromising, or again... Putting him in situations or having him say things that he wouldn't ever agree to, even if he was getting paid. Michael Burry is going off on What happened? Karp. Okay. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has his head in the cloud. Mm hmm. Saying he's a frequent flyer. Hmm.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  And they get into some of his business and personal travel expenses. During the year's ended December 31st, 2025 and 2024, the company incurred expenses related to the use of the executive aircraft of 17.2 million and 7.7 million respectively. It's quite the feat to spend 17 million in a year on business and personal travel, particularly when the jet's not even the rental. Jeffrey's analyst Brent Phil, he's got a bone to pick, runs the numbers. Assuming use of a mid-sized jet with an estimated operating cost of $7,000 per hour, this implies roughly 2,400 flight hours or about 28% of the year in the air. Even under a more conservative assumption of a high-end jet such as the G650 at an

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  estimated 15,000 per hour, the 17 million still equates to approximately 1,147 flight hours or 13% of the year. Notably, this 17.2 figure is more than double Karp's executive aircraft expense in 2024 and appears elevated relative to peers with Meta CEO spending 1.8 million and Palo Alto Network CEO spending 2.4 million. Terrible comps. Why? Like Karp is obviously constantly traveling all over the world. Yeah. He's an international businessman. Yeah. I know podcasters that do, that do like 250 hours a year. Oh, yeah. Like, like you're talking about going from like somebody who like travels like a good amount at like, let's say like 200 hours a year.

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  To me, uh, yeah, I might catch some flack for, for defending, uh, private, uh, Aviation. Aviation, but it just doesn't seem that crazy. The entire reason that Palantir is growing the way it is, is like they're doing deals in Japan. They're doing deals in, in the Middle East. They're doing, it's just like this guy is a global deal maker. And if you really wanted to do an analysis on this, you should look at all the international deals that they've done, maybe ignore the US and see if Karp is actually delivering. Jira Ticket says, do you think he has monetization on? Who's he talking about? Kame, Kameini. Kameni's been putting up insane numbers on X, quite the tense geopolitical situation.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  I hope that, I hope that we're not starting a new war in the Middle East. But if Kameni does have monetization on it, certainly is a, gonna be a real revenue line item on the, I have to imagine, does X sanction accounts?

• 15:28John Coogan?

  I think creator payouts are probably geographically limited to certain countries where the payment rails work. If a country sanctioned, like, I actually get my X creator payouts just straight up through Stripe. Yeah, it just comes through Stripe. In fact, I think I had to set up a Stripe account to receive it.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  I think I said Raimentlect was like the prototypical Neolab.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  So he's really, yeah.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  It's a funny camera angle. What's going on here? Okay, I like that. Different.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  Switching it up.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  It's over the shoulder. I'm interviewing you. I'm getting to the bottom of it. You answer me. You answer me. Well, okay, okay. We get it. Production team got some new PTZ cameras. We get it, guys.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  We have news on the Warner Brothers Netflix Paramount front. Netflix is open to raising their bid for Warner Brothers. There's a 35% chance that Netflix-

• 16:19John Coogan?

  Like a stone. They were at like 70%.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Netflix apparently has ample room to increase their offer.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  It's a $325 billion company, Netflix.

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  I think everyone believes that they're, they're good for it.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Netflix has ample cash and could bump up its offer for HBO Max owner Warner Brothers Discovery if competing bidder Paramount Skydance increases its own offer. The two media giants have been locked in a heated rivalry. Oh, you see what they did there? That's a new popular show, Heated Rivalry. It's about hockey. Over Warner Brothers and its storied catalog, which includes iconic franchises like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC Comics, and Superman. Though Warner Brothers is moving forward with a March 20th shareholder vote on Netflix's offer, it has given Paramount a week to come up with a more compelling bid. Netflix has bid $27.75 a share, or $82.7 billion, for Warner Brothers' studio and streaming businesses.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Well, Paramount has offered $30 a share or 108 billion for the whole company. The creator of Stranger Things is sitting on a lot of dry powder that gives it some flexibility to up the ante, holding about $9 billion in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet as of December 31st. Warner Brothers rejected Paramount's latest hostile takeover bid on Tuesday, but gave the rival studio until the end of Monday to submit a best and final offer. We're going into the final rounds now. Price will likely be the deciding factor. Warner Brothers' concerns around funding and regulatory risk are real, but at a high enough number, they become secondary.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  David Zaslove must just be over the, over the moon right now.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  A bidding war. He's been working.

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  The bidding war of his dreams.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  Every CEO that is flipping an asset dreams of, of a bidding war like this.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  It's great. Britman expects Netflix will counter with an improved, with any improved offer from Paramount, but the real twist is that these deals were never apples to apples, and it may ultimately come down to how much value the board and shareholders assign to the network business that Netflix would leave behind. So you need to do a sum of the parts. What's the value of just CNN, HGTV, the linear TV channels? Put that in because Netflix doesn't want that stuff. They just want the IP and HBO. Paramount said it would continue to push the tender offer. It has launched for the studio opposing the inferior Netflix merger and still plans to nominate directors for the upcoming Warner Brothers annual meeting. All eyes are now on whether the CBS parent improves its offer, which Netflix is allowed to match under the terms of the merger agreement.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't see how Netflix actually gets approved on this one.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  You think that, you think they're cooked?

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think if, I think if Trump is souring on it, it's over.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  I was so pilled on the whole YouTube is the real competitor here. Watch time matters more. Think about screen time. Roblox is a competitor to Netflix. TikTok's a competitor to Netflix. Fortnite's a competitor to Netflix, but I don't think a lot of people think like that. It's a very tech-focused view.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  You have to think about the, the entertainment industry, the core industry, people that make television shows and movies, things that, things that you have, things that you have watched, like movies.

• 19:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, things that I have watched.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  Meta has obtained a patent for an AI system that could simulate deceased users by analyzing their historical data, allowing the account to keep posting. Messaging and even making video calls in their behavioral style.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  You thought I would stop posting after you killed me. Nice try.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  I will continue.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  You just created a billion John.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  You just created a billion John Guggen posts, both satirical and 500 words.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a family member sent me this this morning.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Disturbed?

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Saying, is this real?

• 20:03John Coogan?

  I'm surprised you can patent this. This is just like a thing.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Is this, is this meta thinking out you got population collapse?

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  And obviously, it's pretty hard to monetize a bot, but if you're driving.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  In an AI doom scenario where all humans are dead, you want to still keep your services up. You gotta simulate all the dead people, maybe. I don't know. Is this, is this doom pill?

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  Dan says true posters keep posting after death. There was a 4chan post apparently from a few years ago where somebody was like, I'm an engineer at Meta. And they basically fully, I only saw a screenshot. It may, may or may not have been real, but it appeared to be from a few years ago. And they were saying like, I'm working on this feature. It seems bad. Interesting timing. Obviously, Mark has been in LA this week. He was getting, he got grilled for.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  Wait, that was in LA? I thought that was in DC. Oh.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, kind of rude, rude not to.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  Stop by the Ultra Dome before you get, before you get disposed.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  A little warm up on TVPN before you go in front of the big guy?

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah. So he spent six hours.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday, we call Mark Zuckerberg to the stand. Thus began Wednesday's nearly six hours of testimony from the Meta platform CEO in a trial of a lawsuit brought by a young woman against several.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  And this was about benchmark hacking in Lama 3? Is that what he was on trial for?

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  No?

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Not as bad as that, contending that social media.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Potential weakness in the ad model? Is that what it's about?

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  Overspending on the metaverse.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Concerns about distillation, I think.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Oh, distillation. Yeah, that's why he'd be on trial for that. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  Contending that social media causes depression.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  To guy Mark Lanier. Lanier, the plaintiff's attorney.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  We gotta ask.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  In the landmark case, who spoke with a faint Texas twang, showed the courtroom dozens of internal emails and chats from Met employees and executives over the years debating decisions like whether to ban the beauty filters teen used, teens use on Instagram to mimic the results of plastic surgery. So anyways, there's a bunch of the features like that are kind of the focus of the case.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  There's also, there's also a story on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today. Social media bans for youth gain momentum worldwide. And it does feel like a parenting skill issue a little bit. Like, you know, it is possible to keep kids away from social media if you are, you know, an active parent, but at the same time.

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. The only thing, the only thing I would say, we don't have, we don't have.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Maybe you should ban it.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  Children with phones yet.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's deliberate.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's deliberate, but at a certain point, like what?

• 22:33John Coogan?

  They would love phones.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  They just will not be having them.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  I mean, I know my plan. I will give my son a disassembled iPhone one. And when he can assemble it and, and, and piece it together and manufacture it himself here in America, then he can use it. And we already ran this on Tyler.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  20 years later.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  And then we, and then we did get Tyler a phone. This was a good benchmark. We got Tyler, didn't we get you a real phone because of that? We did, right?

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was the reward.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  Well, that was also because I, I installed the new iOS when he was still in. Like totally destroyed my old phone.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  We gotta do another prank on Tyler soon. They're so good.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, chat, if you have any, any good prank ideas, like.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was like, no, no, no, definitely not. eBay is buying Depop secondhand. Thanks, Andrew. That's a good one.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Andrew is the king of VC dad jokes.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  He loves it.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  He loves it.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Fantastic. So eBay is buying Depop from Etsy for $1.2 billion. And this is in the Wall Street Journal. The addition of Depop to its portfolio would boost its footprint while also expanding its presence in the fashion market. We are confident that as a part of eBay, Depop will be even more well positioned for long-term growth, benefiting from our scale, complimentary offerings and operational capabilities. eBay plans to cross-list Depop products. On its platform and expects the acquisition will expand its market share. Depop seller and buyer cohorts will gain access to eBay's financial services, shipping and cross-border trade solutions, as well as its authenticity guarantee. Young consumers are a key demographic for eBay as Gen Z and millennial shoppers are driving secondhand commerce.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Depop is also more popular as an app than a website, unlike eBay, which might bring in a new user base.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, eBay is still such a force, but it is certainly not cool. Depop is cool. eBay has struggled.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Jordy has spoken.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  Great business. Not, not cool. But.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Do you know, do you know why they call it eBay?

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Because it was founded in East Bay.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh, by some East Bay rationalists?

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It was sort of a last wrong project. It's right up there with the.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  Ara says, we have a definitive answer now. AI will affect the labor market, starting with freelancers. First paper to use business level data to track AI versus labor. A new paper from Ramp finds businesses are shifting spend from freelancers to AI. More than half of the businesses using freelancers in 2022 have stopped entirely. The companies that used to spend the most on freelancers shifted to AI the fastest. 97% savings for the businesses that spent the most on freelance. That is wild. Generally makes sense. I mean, the whole premise of freelance is like, you probably get paid a lot better on an hourly basis. Maybe you can capture more value on a, on a dollar basis by working,

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  you know, spreading your talents across multiple companies. But obviously the flexibility comes with little to no lock-in. And so businesses can much more easily shift spend around. So not, not super surprising. The vibes have really, have really shifted.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Terminally Online Engineer posted Dario's speech at the AI Impact Summit in India. Let's pull it up.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's watch this.

• 25:51Speaker 04

  Energy and ambition in this room and across India are incredible. I've been spending the last few days meeting with Indian builders and enterprises, and the energy to build together here is palpable, unlike anywhere else. This is the fourth AI summit we've held since the tradition was initiated at Bletchley Park back in 2023, which I still remember. And in those 2.5 years, the advances in the technology have been absolutely staggering. Along with those, the advances in the commercial applications and the societal and ethical questions around the technology have only grown more urgent.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  My fundamental view is that AI has been on an exponential for the last 10 years. And as part of a sort of Moore's Law for intelligence. And that we are now well advanced on that curve. And there are only a small number of years for AI models surpassing the cognitive capabilities of most humans for most things.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  The words that were said there sounded normal and fine and just normal Dario talking points. It's the reading from the phone that feels like you're a best man at a wedding who didn't really prepare. More good news. If you're over 65, congratulations, you own the economy. The Wall Street Journal was just blackpilling. The elderly are physically and financially healthier than ever. So why do their needs keep taking priority over younger generations? People over 70 are 12% of the population, but they got 32% of the dollars. They've been stacking paper for seven decades and it's paying off.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Demographics, rising profits and soaring asset values have together wrought a quiet transformation in the American economy. The greatest wealth transfer in history is about to happen.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  The silver tsunami.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Oh, is that what they call it? I've never heard of that.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's in the small business acquisition community. They talk about like a bunch of, most of the small businesses in America are owned by people that are near retirement age. They need, they're going to have to turn over, pass, pass the torch at some point.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. America is really, really getting older. In 1981, 11.4% of America was over 65, 65 or over. Today, that number is 18%.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  Do you think some of these people have been DMing Zuck and saying, hey, look, I'm getting older. I still want to be posting money spreads on Instagram.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  For sure that.

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, from, uh, from the afterlife.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  I'm not giving it away. I'm not passing it down. I want you to allocate it to. It is an interesting predicament that we are in. As the elderly share of population and wealth grows, their priorities and preferences shape the economy as well. They represent a growing share of consumer spending. Healthcare accounted for all of the net job growth in the last 12 months, reflecting the needs of an aging society. The problem is that while retiree wealth can finance a lot of consumption, workers have to produce what retirees consume. And relative to retirees, workers' numbers are dwindling. One solution would be for everyone to work longer. In 1983, Congress modified Social Security to gradually raise the full retirement age from 65 to 67.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  The, the share of people 65 or over participating in the labor force did creep higher until 2020. With the outbreak of COVID that year, labor force participation plunged for every group.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Eli says, hey, little Caesars, I think this is maybe too many emails to send someone for ordering a single pizza.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  See, John, look at this. Point proven. 1.6 million views, similar to Bland, 68,000.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  And I'm one of them.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  So what do they actually do? So they do, they give you the receipt and then they say, we're on it.

• 29:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  So after you got the receipt, you can't trust that they're on it.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  You gotta wait until they send you another email.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  We have received your order.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Almost ready. Your pizza is almost ready. You would assume they're making pizzas pretty quickly.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Go ahead and head over now because your pizza is almost ready.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  Order loaded into pizza portal with a trademark.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  Dear Eli, look for your name on the pizza portal in our lobby and use this code.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  On the trademarked pizza portal.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  TM.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  Pizza's ready. I bet you can't wait to enjoy your Little Caesar's pizza. We understand, and it's waiting for you now.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  Are you on your way? Dear Eli, your pizza's been waiting in the trademarked pizza portal for a few minutes now. Space in our pizza portals are limited. Cold pizza. I hope you, dear Eli, I hope you like cold pizza. Because it's been over 10 minutes since your pizza has been placed

• 30:32John Coogan?

  Placed in the pizza portal.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Trademarked pizza portal. Order picked up. Hey, can you imagine?

• 30:38John Coogan?

  Are you there?

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine the jump scare on the cold pizza? On the subject line? That's gotta have the highest open rate.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Wow. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we'll see you tomorrow.