Paramount Strikes Back, Ads In Gemini, Bieber’s Apple Beef | Diet TBPN

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

• 0:02Jordi Hays?

  Some big news this morning.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:03Jordi Hays?

  Paramount is launching a hostile bid worth $108 billion to acquire WB. Pika says, this is crazy. HBO should make a show about billionaire media tycoons trying to buy other media conglomerate and highlight all the behind the scenes drama.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  My take today was basically like, people who are saying that Netflix plus Warner Brothers is the worst possible outcome, I was talking to you about this on Friday. I think they're sort of overplaying that narrative because I could imagine Warner Brothers and Disney being more monopolistic, or Warner Brothers going to Google and YouTube and being like free on YouTube, being like way more anti-competitive. And so the Netflix Warner Brothers, like at the very least, it's like the third, the third worst case scenario. Like there just really is so much competition in media because media is cheap.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Anybody can be a media company.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Exactly. And there's so many free options. And then there's also video games.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  And I think you can argue with how good some video models are getting and, you know, audio and voice models, like it's, it's going to be even like, you're going to be able to make a cartoon as a single individual and make like many, many, you know, many, many episodes, seasons, right? There's going to be more, more competition than ever at the actual like in the content layer.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Even if some of the platforms consolidate.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, just a lot of people are putting on a, they're, they're straight up putting on a two hour podcast instead of a movie regularly, except when you're on the plane flying back from New York, then you got to watch The Fugitive with Harrison Ford. I made Jordy watch it. Give me your review.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic film. We don't know, we don't know how to make movies like that anymore. I would watch movies if all the movies were like that. You should put together.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Movie list.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Your movie list.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  I have one.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Like this in the next week or so, so people can watch them while we're, you know, between like, you know, Christmas and New Year's when we're off the air, but.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  Have you seen it, Tyler? Oh, wow. Okay. Treat yourself to the fugitive this holiday season.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  Chris Murphy, US Senator from Connecticut.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  I thought that was crypto Twitter. I thought it was Chris Murphy crypto Twitter.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't think so. Chris says the Netflix purchase of Warner Bros. would be a disaster. It's illegal, but there's some quietly rooting for it because a Paramount takeover that includes CNN would be worse. A short thread on why that's the dangerously wrong way to look at this. This deal is a classic antitrust violation. It will drive up prices. HBO Max is one of the few things that keeps pricing pressure on Netflix. Hundreds of movie theaters will go under. Writer, writers and production workers in the content business will have terms and wages dictated to them. But some will say, well, if the Paramount and Ellison Trump cabal gets control of Warner Brothers and the deal includes CNN, then Trump would effectively control the bulk of the mainstream media from CBS all the way to CNN. That's worse than Netflix owning Warner Bros.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes, it is, but A, a Paramount Warner Brothers deal would be illegal, too. Trump shouldn't force us to be for illegal but less corrupt things. B, why do we think Netflix won't agree to the strings Trump puts on this deal? This is about making money, not protecting free speech. Five, tyrants want us to accept blurry moral lines. They want us to accept one level of corruption or illegality just because there is an alternative level that's much, much worse. But that's how democracy disappears, by rules disappearing and constant relativity creeping in.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  David Ellison was on CNBC this morning and he was talking and they were asking him about CNN. You own CBS, 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning. And clearly, a lot of people are like, are you going to put your thumb on the scale politically? Is there like a political angle to the way you will steward these media assets? And I don't think people are that worried about the political bias injected into Foghorn Leghorn or Wile E. Coyote or whatever, or even like the Seinfeld catalog. It's not like they're going to reboot it and it'll be like a right wing Seinfeld. Like, I don't, I just don't think that's gonna happen. But people do worry about news coverage like CNN, CBS. But the weird thing is that in the Netflix scenario, CNN is left there in the, in the, in the ghost ship. There's, it's a ghost ship.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  It's a ghost ship.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  We know this very well from, from the way tech likes to acquire companies.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So is there a scenario where Paramount loses? Warner Brothers but then still buys the cable business?

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Yes, I think so. I think so. And they get Shark Week and they get, they get a bunch of fun stuff. HGTV, 90 Day Fiance.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  David Ellison with Shark Week. I mean, putting the Ellison family behind Shark Week.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  People think the Ellison's are-

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  That might be good for sharks.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's the thing. So we talked with Rich about how like more competition than ever at the content layer. It's very cheap to create and distribute content, effectively free.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  That said, there's feels like in some ways more of a monopoly than ever on truth, if that makes sense.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  Legacy media properties have a monopoly on truth.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  If we say something and we have the aesthetics of television, we say this is true. It doesn't hold the same weight as CNBC or CNN or anything like that because they have, they're actually running, generally running-

• 5:00John Coogan?

  It's just the brand.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's brand.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  It's just the brand.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  It's brand. So when the New York Times says something and a Substack disagrees with it and says, no, this is what actually happened. Who are people going to believe? They're going to believe New York Times 10 times out of 10. Ideally, you would want a lot more kind of like distribution between the networks and these brands that have a monopoly on the truth.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, but at the same time, the fact that, that David Ellison is not cheering. Like you see Warner Brothers and if you're, in the, in the conspiratorial, the tinfoil hat, like David Ellison is trying to control the news narrative that is sort of bubbling up there, the flip side is, is he should be cheering. Cause he's like, wow, they bought everything I don't want. I didn't want Batman. But in fact, he does want Batman. He does. He wants Foghorn Leghorn.

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  He wants it all.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  He needs Foghorn Leghorn.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  He wants it all.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  He needs Wile E. Coyote. He needs Porky Pig. The list of as- You don't know Porky Pig?

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  How do you not know Porky Pig?

• 5:58Jordi Hays?

  Is that a YC startup?

• 6:00John Coogan?

  It should be.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  I think there was a YC company in this batch called Piggy Robotics.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, we saw. No, the YC companies need to keep-

• 6:07John Coogan?

  New rule. New rule.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  Every Pig themed startup-

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Nick, when you're booking, when you're booking YC startups, if it's swine themed, they're on the show.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  Red alert. Pig has rebranded.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  No.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  The YC company called Pig.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Wow, spitting in our face.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  They're now called Butter.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Butter.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  It's still like animal themed, it's an animal product? It's an animal product.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Analyzing it based on its macros.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Is it goat butter?

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  Very heavy on.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  Cow butter?

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  Fat, low protein.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  Low carb, low protein, high fat.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  We have some news from our flight back from New York. We flew JetBlue again a couple of months ago. We flew JetBlue with the whole team and we got into a little bit of a situation with JetBlue.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  They almost had to land the aircraft.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  They almost had to land the aircraft because we were, Jordy and I were sitting in business class. We were served steaks. We tried to pass those steaks back to our friends and colleagues who were sitting in economy. And they told us not, they said, stop, you can't. I think someone put their hand on your chest. And said, sit down, sir.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  So it was even worse.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Sit down.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  They didn't put their hand on me, the flight attendant, but they grabbed the dessert.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  Oh, they grabbed the dessert that you were trying to pass back.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  Pass to the team.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  And, you know, we like to believe in.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  Do I not own this dessert?

• 7:21John Coogan?

  We like property rights around here. We like the ability to move freely. And I think possession's nine tenths of the law. You give me the ice cream, you give me the steak. I control it, I can do what I want. But on our latest flight, we figured out the ultimate hack for how to pass food back from business class to economy on a JetBlue flight.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  And we proved that this works twice.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  And we're sharing, and we're sharing it with you today.

• 7:46Jordi Hays?

  We're sharing this alpha.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Deep alpha, deep alpha. And so we'll, we'll hopefully pull up some of the photos, which, so this is, so in, in first class, they give you headphones with a case. And so what I was able to do was I was able to take the food.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  So my food.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  And put it into the case.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  So we, we all had dinner before the flight.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  That's ice cream in the, in the phone case.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  We had dinner before we left. So I show up and I'm not hungry, but Ben's a growing, growing boy.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  Growing boy.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I'm like, we gotta get, we gotta get my, my dinner back to Ben. And so we put, uh, we, we take the headphone case, we zip it up.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  I take it back, I pass.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  You insisted on the bread roll going in there.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Of course I had to, I wasn't gonna have, he needed the bread.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Did you eat the bread?

• 8:28Speaker 02

  I ate all of it.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Okay, wait, was the bread over buttered? Or did it have the appropriate amount of butter?

• 8:33Speaker 02

  It had a lot of butter.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  It had a lot of butter, right?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  I thought you were loading me out.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  Jordy insisted on giving you the full pad of butter and I thought maybe half a pad.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I just wanted you to have optionality.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Okay, well, yeah, I guess you had optionality, you could have taken it out.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  No, but the guy, there was a guy across the aisle from you, he was giving me the dirtiest.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  No way!

• 8:49Speaker 02

  I thought he was, I thought he was gonna say like, if you don't bring me back food too.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Oh, he wanted, he was gonna tattletale, that is a risk.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  No, but the real, the real risk when you're running a strategy like this and you need to be highly coordinated is that the flight attendant in, in the business class section says, where's your cutlery?

• 9:08John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Where's that plate?

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Because, because it's in the back. Your knife and fork are gonna be missing. So, the real, yeah, you can see Jordy going back to drop it off. I took that photo.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  We were running, running plays.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  So, so there's another tip here, that, that, that you don't wanna jump the gun. So, the, the, the food service, the dinner service, it takes place over a couple minutes, all the plates get, just, uh, get, uh, passed out and people eat pretty quickly. So typically, the flight attendant, by the time they finish delivering the last plate, they will go and start picking up the plate from the beginning because it only takes a couple people, a couple minutes to eat the food on the plane. But, what you, you wanna wait them out, you wanna, you need a couple rounds of them coming by and, and you, and you have the full meal there and they're like, are you done with that? And you say, no, no, I'm still working, I'm still working. So you gotta say, I'm still working, a couple times and then they will go back and sit down. That's your opportunity, because that's when they're at their weakest.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  You almost got caught, at one point.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  I got caught?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  She came, the flight attendant, lovely, lovely woman, she came over and said, do you want any tea?

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  And you had.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Missing, missing cutlery.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  There was food in the headset case.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  The headset case, yeah. I had to close the headset case because you don't wanna get caught with the.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Annelli Chapa submitted a last minute bid to buy Warner Brothers, $45,000.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  In 45K in cash, in cash. It's like, it actually is relevant because the other, the other offers are heavily debt laden. And so if you care about that, if you want an all cash offer, this might be your best get.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  It's a pretty good option.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  This is the best option if you're, if you only want.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Andy, Andy, who's been on an absolute roll lately says, you're laughing at him, but how much did you put up to buy Warner Brothers?

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Can we pull up Andy, Andy launched, uh, did a, had a launch video like yesterday?

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Andy, of course, is the founder of 2cents dot money. Hi, this is Ozma. We make films. 2cents founder, Andy Duro, raised 3 million for his startup and paid us 2.5 million. This was the only direction he gave us. I need this to look like the most expensive launch video ever made. It has to look like a huge. Why is he in Albania, Albania? The day before our shoot, Andy was still on his investors boat chasing a series A. Is this rage bait? I feel like this is giving me like, I'm going to be enraged. Uh, we were under contract to spend the entire production. Here's what we made.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  I want a Scarface montage in a mansion.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Show off our in-house coding models. Coding models. And they should be coding in Rust, not just tiny apps, but full-scale system architecture.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  The cinematography here is wild.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Like this one. And I want the bathtub scene from The Big Short, but add more models. And like, have one of them explaining the value prop of 2cents.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  So basically, you know how everyone on social media pretends to be rich? The problem is, it's all fake.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Then we should have the models reenact that scene from The Wolf of Wall Street. You know, the one where Leo's boat gets seized by the FBI?

• 12:18Speaker 05

  Yo, some lobster for the ride home, you fucking miserable prick. No, you can't afford them!

• 12:22John Coogan?

  What was the bid? He said he, he spent two and a half million on this? Is that what, is that what you're saying?

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  All right, this is not PG enough, but it is funny. It's funny to basically run through every single launch video bit that there is.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  And narrate and just be narrating. Yeah, just do that one.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Just do that and then do that one and then do that one. Yeah.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Buco is saying the more he reads about the Netflix deal, the more it seems like, one, this is bad for everyone that isn't Netflix. Two, this would be very good for Netflix. And three, it should be blocked if our system still works. So he is a block the deal guy. Ernest says it's extremely pro consumer. New price is going to be lower than the current standalone Netflix plus max price with superior UX for subscribers. And Buco says, I don't think you can say it's extremely pro consumer with any sort of confidence.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is one.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Give them tremendous pricing power.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  A few people have said, oh, yeah, like it's going to be cheaper. And it's like, okay, is it going to be cheap? It's going to be cheaper like right away. Is it going to be cheaper?

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, no way.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  In 10 years? No way.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and I mean, if there's nothing, there's nothing more long-term pill that a public company like they love thinking in decades and like, no, I mean,

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  They're like.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Like a company like Netflix truly can be like, yes, like.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  The price is going to be like $99 a month by 2035.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  It might be a steal. It might be a steal at 99 if you're getting Seinfeld and Foghorn Leghorn.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  December 2010, Time Warner views, this is a New York Times article, Time Warner views Netflix as a fading star. For the past year, executives at big media companies have watched Netflix with growing resentment for its success in delivering movies and television shows via the internet for its stock price nearly quadrupling. For its chief executive being named businessperson of the year by Fortune magazine. I imagine at that time they were thinking, well, it's cool that they can deliver movies, but they'll never be able to make, they'll never be able to make content. And of course, now recently Netflix to buy Warner Bros.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  It is such a, such a big deal. Like 83 billion, it's almost, it almost feels like small compared to like all the AI valuations and stuff in the, in the, in the hyperscaler valuations. But Netflix is only a $400 billion business by comparison. So like this is 20% of their market cap essentially. It's a, it's a serious merger and would be, and would be huge, huge integration. I do wonder about that question of like, how many movies they would be making per year? Would they, would they try and still make 30 big movies or something like that? If you don't make those big movies, you don't, you don't develop the new IP. Like, if you look at what Avatar is, Avatar has been, you know, this like incredible undertaking from a fan, like just so much money poured into the production there.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  But it's probably the best chance of getting something that's actually like an enduring legacy. Where it's like, yeah, people are still talking about the Avatar multiverse or cinematic universe in five decades, 10 decades, you know, in a long, long time. It's very, very hard to, to be, to be sticky if you're not taking big swings and doing things that are like actually really, really bold.

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  Sammy Gold says, Lena Con, you can have this one, this one time.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't really understand why people are so against this.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  The idea of Netflix owning Succession, The Soprano and The Wire.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  Well, the TV stuff doesn't seem that bad because that was never in theaters. I, I, I guess I do understand people who are saying like, like, like they're going to own Lord of the Rings. Seeing Lord of the Rings in theaters was a special thing. And that special thing might not happen anymore because it's incompatible with the modern business model. And so if you're, if you're a Lord of the Rings fan and you really like the movies and you did not like the show, well then it's like, get ready for more shows and less movies, probably.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Anybody who's upset because of the impact on traditional cinema and movie theaters? I want to see everything, I want to see proof of how many movies they've gone to in the last.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  The revealed preference is crazy.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the last year, right.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Apple is changing of the guard. It, it feels like a ton of executives are leaving, ton of executives are turning over. And everyone's kind of speculating that potentially this is the beginning of the next major executive leadership team coming in, that there'll be some sort of, you know, before and after. Maybe we're exiting the Tim Cook era. I think you just got to double, triple, maybe 10x Tim Cook's pay and you're good. I remain, I remain positive on Tim Cook's leadership. I think he got the big things right. And I think he missed the hot things, but missing the hot trend that's actually not that existential to the business.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  That you could argue they haven't missed yet.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could argue they haven't missed it. And you could argue that AI was not existential to them, at least in the short term. But this Justin Bieber post is insane because you read me this and I, and I didn't hear you say, this is from Justin Bieber's account. And I was like, oh, that's funny. There's someone who's mad at Apple, but it's way funnier coming from Justin Bieber.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Put Justin Bieber as a product manager at Apple and I genuinely believe the products across the board would improve. Justin says, if I hit this dictation button after sending a text and it beeps and stops my music one more time, I'm going to find everyone at Apple and put them in a rear naked chokehold. Even if I turn off dictation, I somehow hit the voice note thing. The send button should not have multiple functions in the same spot. I couldn't agree more. This is so, I mean, it's just absolutely insane because, because the issue is, yeah, one, one, this happens a lot. This happens to me. And then it's always nerve wracking because if you have somebody pulled up on text and you happen, let's say I'm like,

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  hey, this, hey, this person is wanting to change the, the time of this meeting to this other point. And I'm actually, I'm like, what do you think? What should we do? And then it's just like, happens to be like recording and then you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't want to.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Apparently we have to issue a correction. Taylor's over there putting us in the truth zone. Apple doesn't have product managers?

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. There's so many, there's this new software. Every time I open an app made by Apple, there's a new, there's a new bug. Apple executives have floated the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technologies divisions as one combined group under Shrogi in order to retain him. So this is of course, Apple's chip chief, John, Johnny Shrogi. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Chip chief.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the chip chief. Uh, informed CEO Tim Cook, he is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains, at least for now. The designer of the Apple watch just released a new watch himself. And it is mechanical and costs only $60,000.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  There's a video, by the way. Play this. This is a crazy video. Look at this. The dial is spinning and yeah, wow, it really looks like UFO inspired. It's $60,000, jumping straight into the Holy Trinity tier, I suppose.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  I think it looks very cool. I've never thought I want a watch that looks like it's in the same universe as the Apple Watch.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, I can really respect.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  I really, I think this looks very cool and I think there's a consumer out there where they were like, finally, somebody made a watch for me. I love this. We gotta pull this.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Video up of Bill Ackman.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  In Japan.

• 19:48Speaker 06

  Bill Ackman. Yes. Bill Ackman.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  Is that Bill Ackman? Bill Ackman? Japanese TV, see?

• 19:59John Coogan?

  The graphics package is electric.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we can pause it. Did that woman just pull a Japanese, "May I meet you?" on him?

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, 100%. All quiet on the frontal lobe.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  That's very funny. Prediction markets will replace buying stuff. I want someone to bring kiwis to my house. I make a prediction market about whether someone will deliver four kiwis to my doorstep and load $15 into no. A guy with an e-bike sees it and picks up some kiwis before dropping them off on my doorstep. He bets yes, drops them off, the market resolves to yes, and he gets $15. Rest in peace, Amazon, DoorDash, Uber Eats, et cetera.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Sailor comes in and says, "Prediction markets will replace relationships. I have a crush on your girlfriend. I make a prediction market about whether she will leave you for me and load $15 to no. She sees this and drives over to my place. Before texting me, she's here, she bets yes, she comes inside, the market resolves to yes, and she gets $15. Rest in peace, Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Fry, bars, restaurants, et cetera."

• 21:05John Coogan?

  It's so insane. Such a good copy pasta. And I can only imagine the quote tweets on this post just being like an endless, an endless stream of iterations of this exact template. I've been asked, "What do I think of Calci and Polymarket? These are still very early days. My vision, which I started to articulate in the 90s." Is of a world very different from both the world then and the world of today. A world where markets are accepted as offering more accurate estimates on far more useful topics. So I'm mostly interested in the potential of stuff today to enable and cause that future vision. The politics, policy questions on polymarket and Kalshi trending now seem plausibly like topics

• 21:50John Coogan?

  where some people might find their estimates useful in making personal or collective choices. But I don't have great confidence in that or know who these people are. So I think that, like, we saw a glimmer of this in the sense that if you were running a business that stood to benefit from the Trump administration or hurt because of the Trump administration, maybe tariffs or something like, if you were manufacturing t-shirts in China and you were like, okay, if Trump wins, there'll probably be more tariffs, probably another trade war. What's the probability that Trump wins? What's the probability that I have to do a red, the fire drill, a code red to move my manufacturing to Singapore or something?

• 22:34John Coogan?

  You could make a business decision based on that. I agree with him, like, I don't really know how many people were doing that seriously. And also, the prediction markets were like 55%, you know? It wasn't like 90%. It wasn't like that clear. Yeah. It wasn't like, oh, everyone just knows what's gonna happen. It was like, oh, yeah, like, you know, slight edge this way. But yeah, I mean, if you're trying to plan for like a forthcoming Trump administration, it's not like you could go to prediction markets four months earlier and get like a definitive correct answer. Like, that's just not the way, that's just not the way it played out. But if these systems continue to grow in size and to attract users and competitors, they could lower many of the costs of creating and managing such markets,

• 23:16John Coogan?

  allowing a lot more experimentation with markets like those I find more promising. Read my long-term vision. Of course, if these systems induce a backlash that gets them outlawed or drastically shrunk, that may plausibly block or at least long delay my vision. I don't personally mind people having fun knowingly betting on sports, on actions that celebrities can influence, or on topics where insiders have big info advantages, like mentioned markets. But I see many people complaining about those things, and I fear a new prudish temperance movement may shut them down. And as a side effect, shut down the more promising markets that I've envisioned. I, I, I think it's a really big, it's a really big question on the prediction markets.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  It's not like there's, there's the, there's a positive and a normative side of these things. So in economics, there's positive questions, normative, normative is like what should happen?

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  And positive is what will happen. They're debating prediction markets on moral grounds, on what should happen. They, they, they have a thesis on, I believe that, that this is great and, and this is good. And it should, it should proliferate. Or, or I think it's bad and, and it should be shut down immediately. There aren't that many people that are actually thinking clearly right now about like, what will happen? But how big will these markets be? How prevalent will they be? You know, sports betting has gotten a lot easier, but you know, it hasn't taken over everyone. Like I know a lot of people that don't sports bet. I don't personally sports bet.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also, it's also possible to get to the future that he's envisioned since the nineties. You need to have sports markets. I think, I think so many people are just absolutely sick of the marketing from, uh, and, and just the feuding between Cal, Cal She and Polly Market. Like if we were on X and like FanDuel and DraftKings were just constantly going at each other all day long. Everyone would just be like, please leave.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Speaking of presents under the Christmas tree, the Google team is cooking up a present for me in 2026. They're going to put ads in Gemini. Let's go.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  Finally, finally.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  We've been asking for it.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  I hear the sleigh bells ringing.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  We've been asking for it, ads in L L Ms. We talked to the founder of perplexity about it. We asked Arvid, why are you going to put ads? We want ads in perplexity. And he said, maybe, and the tech folks wrote a whole article about it and they got really mad.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  I'll let Google jump first.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  I'll let Google jump first. We've talked to Sarah Fryer, we've talked to the OpenAI team about how badly we want ads in chat GPT. How badly we want ads in L L Ms. They said, maybe we're going to do it, maybe we're not. They've been sitting on their hands, but now.

• 26:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how you can, I, I love listening to your voice.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  It's good, it's good. We need it back, we need it back up track.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  This feels like very Google to just be like, yeah, we're, we're the ad business. We're going to do ads, we're going to do them first. We're probably going to do them. Better than than anybody else, at least initially.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  A lot of people are are are wondering like, hey, there's a there's a world where Gemini doesn't have ads and is free for two years and it just completely puts the screws to every other, you know, L M provider.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  I always look back to what would the Instagram business look like if they were forced to monetize it independently? Like, it's an amazing platform that's perfectly suited for to monetize with ads.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  And yet, you can imagine Meta ramped ad spend on the platform 10, 20 times faster than maybe an independent operator would have because they just had been, they had all the customer relationships, they had all the, they had a strong sense of who the person was already because they were probably on Facebook as well, so.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  I I don't think I don't think ads cause failure to adopt a new product. I would be, I I don't know, we'd have to look through the the the product graveyard, but I feel like of of things that die, they rarely die because.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people are people are acting like ads and L M's are going to be like the biggest deal and are going to be the biggest issue. And I just don't think it's going to be, I think they're going to.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  In many ways, they could make the product better or more like sticky in the sense that you're like looking at stuff, doing shopping in there.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I want every L M to have a lot of ads so that I can swap between all of the best models without feeling like I need to sign up. There's this company Halftime, which won the Grok Hackathon that happened over the weekend.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Yes, Halftime dynamically weaves A I generated ads into the scenes that you're watching, so breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  It just makes you second guess every output you get from the model.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  We have to pull up the video that's at the bottom of the timeline. They just reinvented the Star Wars Cerveza Cristal ads. Have you seen these?

• 28:02Speaker 03

  You fought in the Clone Wars?

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 28:03Speaker 07

  Yes, I was once a Jedi knight, the same as your father.

• 28:11Speaker 07

  I wish I'd known him. He was the best star pilot in the galaxy. And a cunning warrior. I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself.

• 28:23Speaker 07

  And he was a good friend.

• 28:26Speaker 07

  Which reminds me. I have something here for you.

• 28:32Speaker 07

  Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  It's the best. It's like pure art. AI could never. It's so good.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for hanging out with us today.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Thank you, everyone.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  We love you all dearly.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Have an amazing evening. We will see you tomorrow.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.