XBOX Layoffs, Tesla's New Model Y, $12.8M Lottery Dispute | 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 Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ 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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Happy July 4th, everyone. I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend. How was your 4th? You already?

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  It was incredible.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  Cinema.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  Tyler, how was your 4th?

• 0:09Speaker 02

  It was electric.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Can you tell us about that white party that you went to? You can't talk about that? What about the wedding you went to? Was that a fun one? That was in New York, right?

• 0:18Speaker 02

  New York, yeah.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Manhattan?

• 0:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, Madison Square Garden.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  But you can't, you can't break it down for us?

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, they told us not to.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, got it. Well, I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad everyone had fun. My 4th of July was great. It was a little, was it humid?

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Did you even get sunburned?

• 0:33John Coogan?

  No.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  You don't even look sunburned.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Not sunburned. Can't say that for the rest of the team.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  He's larping.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Half the team over here.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  He's larping around saying, oh, I had the best 4th of July. Not even sunburned.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  No.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  Make it make sense.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, shade, shade. You stay in the shade at the right times.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  UV index?

• 0:48John Coogan?

  You're not, you're not sunburned. Why are you?

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm brutally sunburned.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Oh, on the back?

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  On my back.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, that makes sense. Uh, UV index. Was it humid in Malibu?

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  A little bit.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  It was a little humid in Pasadena and it made it feel very East Coast. Like it felt like an East Coast 4th of July to me. I did East Coast.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it did a little bit.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  I did East Coast 4th of July a couple of years ago and it was sort of refreshing. I don't know. It was nice. But, you know.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Drone shows were in this year?

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yes, fireworks are out, given the Palisades fire, the Altadena fire. So a lot of townships are playing it safe with drone shows instead of fireworks, which is, I don't know. I feel like it's cool. I like a drone show. I've only seen one when we were in France. It was cool. I don't have a problem with it, but I'm anticipating a backlash. I'm anticipating that people will be like, we gotta go back to the organic, authentic fireworks, right?

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  But...

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're like, I like when the air quality is terrible.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Okay, it's an air quality risk for you. You notice that?

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  I didn't notice it this year.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  Did you see fireworks or drones?

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  I, I honestly didn't see a single.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  I was asleep.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  I didn't see a single firework.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  I was up at 6 a.m. so I went to bed at like 9.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  I did not see a single firework on the 4th of July, which is crazy. I heard some around. But I remember when I lived in LA, the air quality would genuinely be terrible for at least a few days.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Because it just sits in there and if there's no wind.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  When I lived in Echo Park, it was like fireworks everywhere. It's the craziest neighborhood because people in the neighborhood buy the production level fireworks. You know how normally you get like a sparkler or you get something that like shoots off a little? No, they buy the same thing that you see at like Dodger Stadium, like the cannon that goes off and goes boom, that. But they, they don't coordinate them. So it's not like there's music that's playing and then it's synced up and there's a finale. It's just whenever someone feels like lighting one off, it goes full fireworks scale. There's some really cool like helicopter video shots of Los Angeles during, I think, 4th of July where they go really, really crazy, but yeah.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  I feel like that's the kind of thing Dalian would do is like, I'm gonna go fly my plane at 9:00 PM on the 4th of July.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  And just get into...

• 3:04John Coogan?

  I have some crazy video of the fireworks show at Dodger Stadium. Before, there were regulations around drones. I had one of the first drones and I flew it like through the fireworks and in spectacular footage. I'll have to play it on the show one day. Wildly illegal by modern drone standards, but at the time, no one knew how to regulate those things. So you could just fly them anywhere, which was really, really crazy, but a lot of fun. Anyway, big changes at Microsoft, big changes at Xbox. Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs by the end of next year. And here's where it gets interesting. It's not because of artificial intelligence, AI. The new CEO of Xbox has been very clear that they're not stuffing AI everywhere. They're going back to their roots, but they are focused on efficiency.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  And so the newly appointed Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has announced this morning that Xbox will lay off 3,200 staffers by the end of 2027, with 1,600 layoffs taking place today. She posted her full email to Xbox employees on X and it's very candid about the operational failures and trajectory of the company.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  Very notable that the first major layoff from a major company just admits that the business is not healthy.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  And doesn't blame it on AI.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  We haven't, we haven't, we have not seen a layoff of this scale.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  That wasn't at least partially credited to like the productivity increases that we're seeing from AI.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  And this feels like the most honest layoff and they're sort of forced into doing it because of the gaming community is like so anti-AI, right?

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  It would get even worse.

• 4:41John Coogan?

  There's a few things that are going on. So yeah, we need to break this debate into strategic. Should they be doing layoffs? What does this mean for the Xbox business? And then the communications around it as well, because the communications, we can dig into what she actually said. In her email, she says, "The business is not healthy and lists a bunch of surprisingly bad trends and aspects of the operation." One, Xbox is operating at margins three to 10 times lower than its competitors. It released its latest console to a smaller install base while the cost structure of the console itself was higher. Of course, memory prices are going up now and so the cost of these consoles is going to be even higher in the future. And in some of the parts, in some parts of the company, work has to pass through as many as 14 layers of management.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Wow, that's a lot. In a typical year, Xbox lost 64 cents for every dollar it invested. In addition to the layoffs, Asha said that Xbox will spin out game studios that it acquired over the years. Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, and Arcane are all getting yeeted in one way or another from the company.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  Satya has been running Xbox into the ground for the love of the game.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  You mean running it unprofitably for the love of the game?

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Because I do, I do agree that they face really fierce competition.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  PS5 has a ton of amazing exclusives and then Nintendo has, Nintendo, the N64 used to compete directly with the PlayStation. It was like, do you get an N64 or a PlayStation? And then once Xbox came in, PlayStation and Xbox, they fought for every exclusive. And by and large, you could play Call of Duty on either. You could play most of the games Madden was on both of them. And so you would sort of decide, oh, I got some friends on Xbox. I'm on the Xbox crew or I'm in the PlayStation world. But then Nintendo went off and just did something completely different with the Switch. PC gaming continued to grow and became more and more accessible on more and more, you know, devices. So even, even a laptop that you might get for school can still play most of the category, of the library on Steam.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  And so you have more competition and then you also have mobile. Like the hyper casual games are taking mind share. People are scrolling TikTok. There are tons of free entertainment resources that they compete with. This is something all the movie studios love to say.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  Some people are making podcasts, like if you didn't have this.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  No, you can be gaming while you watch this. We approve.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm saying because you're making this, you're not gaming.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, okay.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  You were spending, at least back in the day, a pretty penny on games.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. So yeah, they, they're, they're tightening up operations at Xbox. The question I think on everyone's mind is, will Xbox be spun out as a standalone entity at some point? Is it too far afield from the core Microsoft mission? There was a move. Xbox was seen as a foothold into consumer for Microsoft. Of course, with the way Azure's grown and their cloud platform and their cloud business, really, it feels like Microsoft is having the biggest win in, in enterprise and Teams and, and cloud and all of the workforce and productivity tools that they launch. Obviously, they're very big in AI.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  And so the idea that the Xbox would be, at one point, it came with the best 4K Blu-ray player, an Xbox One S, I believe. You can get one of these for a hundred bucks right now. It's actually a great steal if you want to go physical media, which is very popular with parents these days. Instead of, oh yeah, scroll the, you know, endless feed of Netflix and, and Disney Plus. Instead of that, it's like, you like Toy Story? We got you Toy Story on 4K Blu-ray. You can put it in the box and it's a hundred bucks, which is six months of a streaming service. So a lot of people are starting to physical media max a little bit more.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  But the idea was that you would get this Xbox and you would get it because you were a gamer, you want to play games, but you also had an HD DVD player, Blu-ray player. And they would also serve as like your home media console and they would grow from there, get the foothold into the, into the consumer market. But that never really materialized. Most people, if they have an Xbox, they use it to play one specific set of games. They might have a PS5 as well and Nintendo Switch as well. And then if they're in the Apple ecosystem and they play Xbox games on the weekend, they're not lamenting the lack of integration there. They're like, yeah, it's fine. Like I play the games over there. I talk to people on the iPhone. It's fine. So let's read through a little bit of Asha's post to see, because there's this, there's this key...

• 9:16John Coogan?

  Decision to announce 3,200 layoffs throughout fiscal year 2027, but announce only 1,600 today. The question is strategically, what does that do for morale? Like, because you sort of have this guillotine hanging over everyone. Is this a good incentive for everyone to lock in and not and make the cut? Because you know another cut is coming. Is it is it going to stop complacency in the organization? Or is it going to make everyone start looking for other jobs and think, oh, like, I could get fired at any moment. They've already teed up 1,600 layoffs. If I'm likely to be in that, maybe I should be looking for another job right now.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  Now, that could be good, because maybe those aren't the missionaries who you want on the team. But what do you think about the idea of announcing to your company that there there are layoffs today? And there's also a whole bunch more coming down the pipe?

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Xbox slash Microsoft Gaming has around 16,000 employees. So this cut is quite significant.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think that at least in startups.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  It's 10% today, 10% within the next year.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at at least in startups, the uh, the best advice that I've ever gotten. Uh, and and would typically talk with founders in my portfolio about is like, if you need to do cuts, cut deep, right? And this is like, maybe uh, this is like a talking point for at least like five significant founders and investors, right? Like, a lot of people just repeat this, right? And I think it generally holds true. It's better to, I think the question is like, why did they feel like they needed to cut 1,600 today? And then also keep a 1,600 cut in the in the tank?

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Jordi Hays?

  Like, do they need, like, is there some?

• 11:03John Coogan?

  And do they know who those 1,600 people are? And they're like, we just need 12 months to let them finish what they're doing? Or is it that we haven't even identified them? We just suspect.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  And and either way, it doesn't necessarily seem that great, right? Because if you've identified who you're going to cut, like, you should probably just do it now.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  It's much better to just do a big cut and then say, look, everyone who's still on the ship, we're going on the offensive. We're going to be hiring in these areas. We're, this is where we're winning. So everyone get on, because we're going on a big run right now. Uh, we, you know, had to shrink a little bit, but now we're on the offensive in this particular, with this particular strategy.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  But who knows? They they certainly understand the implications of doing this.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Microsoft as a whole is laying off 4,800 employees, which is 2.1% of its workforce. This is a massive company. And you have to wonder, because they're obviously hiring as well, like, will the company shrink this year on the back of these layoffs? Or will they just do 2% layoffs and then wind up growing the company 3%? And so they wind up a larger organization at the end of the year. Uh, there's some interesting history here, because Microsoft has had a long history of rank and yank, stack ranking they invented. It was always a hardcore culture. People sort of forget this about Microsoft, because it's such a dominant tech company that, of course, they got lumped in with the, you know, nap rooms and free lunches.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  But uh, in fact, uh, back in the late 70s and 80s, Microsoft was famously intense, very tiny teams, huge deadlines, technical arguments. Uh, Gates, Bill Gates was personally reviewing work. And they had a culture that rewarded extreme competence. It was sort of a an Elon Musk type endeavor at that time. It was not nice, still founder-led and product-obsessed. Uh, Vanity Fair had a had a profile on the company uh, in 2012, describes young Microsoft as thrilling, but also unnerving, with Gates demanding intense commitment from hires and Ballmer joining in 1980 as the hard-charging business operator.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  So maybe Asha wants the new culture at Xbox to be thrilling and a little unnerving.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. So in the 90s, they started to develop a monopoly in Windows 95, Office. There was a lot of lock-in to Excel, Word. Business was just printing cash. Uh, and Microsoft became enormous, rich, internally competitive. Uh, the company still had the old uh, smart people, brutal review, ship or die energy. But it was becoming more layered, as we saw 14 layers of management at Xbox in some cases. Uh, stack ranking uh, became part of the culture. Um, but no one really knows exactly when, exactly what date it went into uh, effect. But a former Microsoft employee writing in Geekwire said stack ranking had been an integral part of Microsoft culture for decades, and that when he joined in 1999, it was often viewed positively

• 13:55John Coogan?

  as a part of Microsoft's meritocracy. And so so stack ranking was you rank all the employees, you put them on this bell curve. You're sort of grading on a curve. Is are you have a couple A players? But then there's certain people that are falling behind. And and everyone knows where they sit in the organization.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  Could you illustrate this for me?

• 14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  Just with the team.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  That would be helpful.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, I'd give myself S tier, U, F tier. And uh, I think I think we can start and end there. No, uh, but Ballmer came in and uh, and and people started pointing to stack ranking as a little bit more of dysfunction. Of course, there were other uh, strategic missteps during the Ballmer era, and the stock was flat. And this is what what birth stratechery is as soon as Ben Thompson left Microsoft. He had tons to write about, because he was there during the the pre-Sata era, when they were trying to get into mobile and and did so unsuccessfully. Then Satya comes in, the pivot to cloud, the business does very well, and uh, everything's off to the races again. But during the infamous Ballmer era, there was a forced curve performance review. Managers had to distribute employees into buckets.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  So even a strong team had to produce winners and losers. So there, even if you love everyone on your team, the bottom 10% is going to be labeled the bottom 10%. And that creates a lot of stress. But it can also create a lot of incentive and a lot of excitement. Uh, it can be tough but fair sometimes. But uh, ABC.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  Thrilling and unnerving.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Thrilling and unnerving.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  How would you describe your corporate environment? Thrilling and unnerving?

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there. I don't know. You sort of opt into it, you know? Ideally, ideally, this is all out in the open. It comes out in the hiring process. You don't go in blind, you know what you're getting. But of course, of course, cultures change over time. If you've been with a company for a decade, you might say, I I I signed up for, you know, a chill monopoly. Why are we wartime? I'm a peacetime employee, you know? Or vice versa. Um, and then might it might be time to find another opportunity. Uh, so ABC summarized it as managers grading on the bell curve. Vanity Fair's critique was harsher, they said former, and current employees described stack ranking as the most destructive process inside Microsoft, because it made employees compete with teammates instead of competitors. It's a good point.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  So the question is like, is this new? Is this is this a new trend? Or is this just a continuation of the stack ranking process? It actually is new. Stack ranking would push out low-rated people. Sometimes it would block promotions, reduce bonuses, uh, force transfers. But they weren't necessarily doing mass layoffs around it. That's sort of a misconception. So even if they look at all the stack ranking at the end of the year, and they say, okay, these people are clearly in the bottom 10%, they saw it more as an opportunity to reallocate talent from different pieces, different teams. And it wasn't always, okay, every, at the end of every year, we're just firing the bottom 10%.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bottom 10% on one team might be top 10% on another.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  Exactly, which again, thrilling, but unnerving. Overall, is there cause for optimism with Xbox? It's the hardest gaming platform to be excited about. When you think about Valve, it's just a money printing machine on top of PC. Uh, the PC gaming industry broadly is is doing well. And and PlayStation's done such a good job. Sony's done such a good job with PlayStation with creating like true intellectual property. You think about Last of Us, which is now an HBO series. There's fewer and fewer exclusives. And when when Microsoft bought Activision, there was talk of, will Call of Duty go exclusive to Xbox? Because that would be sort of a killer feature that would get a lot of gamers.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Even if they're in the PS5 ecosystem, they say, well, I want to play Call of Duty. I'll get an Xbox as well. Uh, they chose not to do that for potentially antitrust reasons.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  But you you can't necessarily cut.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the uh, I don't follow the video game industry.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Loser alert, loser alert.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  But the thing that's easy to get excited about with Xbox is Modern Warfare 2 Rust and 1V1-ing your best friends.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Yes, but you buy it in the secondary market. That's not putting any pennies in Asha's income statement. It's rough over there. The 12-cylinder is the first car with a gated manual shifter to come out of Maranello since 2012.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Ferrari is building a new car with a manual transmission. This is the 12-cylinder Manuale. As you can see, it's a manual gearbox in a Ferrari. And what it really is, is a mode of the 8-speed DCT. But Ferrari has added a clutch pedal and a shifter. It's a 6-speed shifter. The Manuale goes on sale at the beginning of next year, at the beginning of 2027. The price will be right around half a million dollars for starters. I'm sure most of them will be optioned out with lots of goodies and cost a lot more.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Do you think this checks the box? Does this count as a manual Ferrari? Are they giving their manual fans what they want? Or is this a poor simulacrum of what it means to have three pedals?

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a obvious step in the right direction.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  I think a lot of people will be satisfied with this.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think this checks enough of the boxes.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  The purists are in shambles.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  TJ Parker does not like it. He says, this is far more embarrassing than the Luce faceplant. And people are saying, wow, that's bad. As long as it's fun. Who cares? TJ Parker says he cares. Uh, it's corny, but

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  Look.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Conning Seg approved by the new Bugatti CEO seems

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Look, when I see this, I think that they're gonna sell at least 1,499 Luches.

• 19:28John Coogan?

  The details are hilarious and kind of brilliant. Look at, listen to this. Uh, you can skip gears, heel toe downshift, and even stall the car if you mess up the clutch. But the system will also stop you from doing something truly stupid, like over revving the engine or money shifting the car into the wrong gear. If you're not familiar with the money shift, that's where you shift, you skip a gear too much and it grinds the gears and you have to pay for, uh, to, uh, fix your engine. The Model Y L from Tesla is coming to the United States. It's now available in the United States and Puerto Rico. Deliveries are still a couple of months out, but it's a three row, six seat configuration for the Model Y.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  It's longer than the standard Model Y. It brings exceptional interior space with ample headroom and legroom for all passengers, zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds, 325 miles of range, front row heated ventilated seats. They all have power recline, improved airflow, more trunk space, active damping, staggered tires for enhanced grip, longer tailgate for better rear visibility, upgraded 50 watt wireless charging pads. I haven't seen the wireless charging pads in the wild yet. That seems like a cool innovation for your home charger. Can be a little bit slower because it's overnight, but every night. So you don't even need to deal with the plug. Well, there's other Tesla announcements.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  The Tesla Model Y dual zone fridge, $600, fits in the sub trunk and has two separate compartments that can be fit, set to different temperatures from zero to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. You plug it into the outlet. I, I love this. I think it's so cool that there's like this gadget that fits into the other thing that they have. Like they have the front trunk. No one's really doing anything with it. Why not throw a couple?

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Not a lot of manufacturers are really willing to promote having 30 to 40 beers. Hit the road and having 30 to 40 beers.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  I don't think these are beers in this image. What is this? Is this Ollie Pop? I don't know. I think it's, uh, ooh, blood orange. I don't know which one this is. There was a, a team that figured out how to order pizza with iMessage using artificial intelligence. And, uh, people are not as impressed as they should be, uh, because the, the image is, uh, AI, please press the order me pizza button and it wa- is wired up to press the order pizza button. Yes. DoorDash sort of already created an artificial intelligence for having food delivered to you. There is a button and you can sort of reimagine the UI in a very, in a different way.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Uh, vibe code, a button that orders you the most recent thing or, or interfaces with a text message, uh, somewhat cool. The bull case for what Arlen is working on is that, uh, iMessage is a more universal interface. Text is the universal interface, uh, in a future world where, uh, you know, everything is done via voice or via an agent or via text stream, uh, having a centralized place and not having to use a bunch of different apps and have the best app at the right time. And this one's on discount, that one's not, and this one's your payments information saved. Having all of that happen below the fold is just another layer to the user experience in the modern era that it feels like it's on the way.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  Can we play this video?

• 22:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, from

• 22:52John Coogan?

  Joe Rogan.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Joe Rogan.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Joe Rogan is, uh, talking to the CEO of Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas.

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  Former guest of the show.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  Two paths to curiosity, one that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  The, the brain rot that you're fed every day, which is, you know, this continuous doom scrolling, that's bad. Um, and the one that can supercharge it is AI.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  This is probably true from a maybe more macro sense, like if you're, sometimes good ideas do come to you. Some people say in the shower. To me, it's in the sauna.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think there's clearly inspiration that comes when you're not doing anything at all.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  But that being said, I get so many ideas from the feed.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Ooh, okay.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Don't you?

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Hot take. I like that.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  Like how many, uh, yesterday I sent you something.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  Pro feed. Yeah.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday I sent, I sent you a link that I, that I saw on X and I was like, hey, we should do something like this for this other thing.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  Once I have inspiration, then I'm going to AI, right?

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  Then I'm going and exploring the idea and saying, how, how has this been done before in this way?

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Or I was looking at, uh, incidents where heads of state have interfered with the World Cup.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  Which was interesting.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Yes. He is pointing to something that is correct, which is that, uh, AI feels very pull. You choose what to pull out of the AI system. You prompt, you ask for information about a specific thing. So you have to come with an idea and then you're exploring that idea. And that's very satisfying for curious people. Uh, whereas the algorithms feel very push. You go to YouTube shorts or Tik Tok or Instagram and you're just being fed things. And you're not starting your journey with a, a, an affirmative declaration. I want to learn more about the new Dolce Trilindri Manuale and I'm going down that rabbit hole.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Uh, and I think your frustration that you voiced early about YouTube shoving a bunch of random shorts in your face is that otherwise you would be more likely to search for something specific. You want to learn about a history of a specific thing. And this was the case at the dawn of YouTube. It was just a search box. Where does AI go? Where does perplexity, chat GPT? Where do these apps go? Do they become more push in the sense that you show up and there's already a bunch of interesting prompts already done for you? I was talking about this, uh,

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah. Now that was Pulse.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Pulse was that, but I was also, when there were the rumor about the social network features, I was saying that like, I would love to just scroll a timeline of like, what are the deep research reports that Tyler Cowen is doing? There's a crazy story out of Arizona that's been brewing over the last six months. Back in February, a Circle K customer named Soon Chung Kim asked the cashier for $85 worth of $1 lottery tickets. So she shows up, she wants 85 tickets. After, but after all 85 were printed out, Kim found out that she only had 60 bucks on her, only $60. So the cashier gave her 60 tickets and left the remaining 25 tickets on the counter.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  The next morning, Circle K manager, Robert, uh, Galletsa, learned that the leftover tickets included the $13 million winning ticket. So he clocked out, took off his Circle K shirt and bought the tickets from another Circle K employee, being like, what?

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  No one, no one's gonna notice. No one's gonna notice.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  So when Circle K, the company found out about the purchase, it ordered the ticket be held in its corporate office and filed a complaint against the manager who bought the tickets and the Arizona lottery and claimed that Circle K, the company is the rightful owner of the lottery ticket. As of a week ago, at least three people slash entities are claiming ownership of the, of the, of the ticket.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so the original buyer that didn't have the cash?

• 26:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  The, the manager who's like, I don't care if I lose my job as long as I win the lottery.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  And Circle K is like, we really need a win. We really need, we need a, like,

• 27:03John Coogan?

  We need 13. No, we need this. Yeah. So Galletsa, a Circle K employee that Galletsa got to sign the back of the ticket. Not sure why he had her do all of this. And Circle K additionally, the judge presiding over the complaint has ordered that the woman who bought the tickets but couldn't pay for them, Soon Chung Kim, be found and brought into court before making a decision on who gets it. So she's gonna have to testify and explain her side to, to make sure that that's exactly what happened because this is just claims at this point. How did the, the local Circle K wind up with 25, uh, lottery tickets?

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Who are you going with? I'm going with, uh, manager.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  I'm going with big corporate, big, big, big.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm going with the manager, not because I think it's ethical, but I think that

• 27:47John Coogan?

  I think he's gonna win.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  I think that there's

• 27:48John Coogan?

  No way.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  I think it's unlikely that there is a rule at Circle K that says.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  100% there's a rule that if you work at that company, you can't buy lottery tickets at all from your own store.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  Obviously, because you have the machine right there. You can tamper with it. There's a million things.

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  But they don't, but they don't control.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  That's probably line number one employee handbook.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but it seems very unlikely that, that the circle, like it's, it's a machine that just prints tickets.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  It's like.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Yes, but there's so many ways you could tamper with it. You're watching the news, you're printing the ticket at the right time. You have access, you refill the ticket. Oh, this one's not filling out.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  But you're saying the corporation can buy its own lottery tickets?

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Why? But the manager can't? That seems also strange.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe you got.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  I think I got a ride with the woman.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  You think she's owed it?

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  The manager?

• 28:36John Coogan?

  But then, but then, then the strategy becomes

• 28:38Speaker 02

  The original buyer.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  But then, but then you can just shift the odds in your favor by constantly going to Circle K's and saying, $100 of, $100 of, of tickets. Oh, I only have 50 bucks. And then you're basically doubling your odds because you still have a claim on those original.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Gold Rock says these clerks aren't super hackers, John.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Who paid for the winning ticket? The manager?

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  If it comes down

• 28:58John Coogan?

  But the manager knew that the ticket won. He didn't have to put any money in.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  We don't know that yet.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. He did. He did. So there were 25 tickets there. They looked through them. One wins.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  If there's a rule, if there's a rule that managers cannot buy lottery tickets at their own store, then you're correct. But if there's no rule that explicitly, I, you know, basically spells that out, I think he might, he might, he might be golden.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  He might be golden. You think so? I don't know.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  You have tech news.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  Hit us up.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  You know, it is funny. It is funny. You know, we get into these slower summer months and then all of a sudden you have just insane days.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  So you gotta be live every day. You gotta be ready.

• 29:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the basic cycle of, of tech news will slow down. Venture capitalists are famously on vacation from May 15th to September 27th, right? That's when they go on vacation, right?

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  I think usually mid October is like realistically.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  When they come back. Yeah. Um, but, uh, that leaves opportunities. Last year we got the talent wars. Zuck didn't take any breaks. He was poaching left and right. Uh, so we'll always, there's always a chance we get a wild card, but, uh, things have been slow. So lots of time to discuss vehicles and other fun topics, but stay with us. We will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific. Have a great week. Have a great day.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's go USA.

• 30:21John Coogan?

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