Dan Wang's Annual Letter, Meta Acquires Manus, Nvidia's $20B Groq Deal | Justin Mares

(02:25) - Dan Wang's Annual Letter (43:08) - Meta Acquires Manus (59:33) - Nvidia's $20B Groq Deal (01:10:48) - Doordash Responds to Reddit Firestorm (01:43:53) - California Wealth Tax Targets Billionaires (02:00:54) - Scott Belsky's 12 Outlooks for the Future (02:27:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:32:31) - Justin Mares, co-founder and CEO of Truemed, is a wellness entrepreneur dedicated to making preventive healthcare more accessible by enabling individuals to use HSA/FSA funds for health-promoting products and services. In the conversation, he discusses Truemed's recent $34 million Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, the company's mission to shift healthcare spending towards prevention, and the growing adoption of HSAs and FSAs for proactive health investments. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Ramp - https://ramp.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - 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.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, January 5th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we miss you guys.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  We have so many updates for you, but one that's not changing is that this show is still brought to you by Ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. We are very happy that Ramp is staying with us on the journey.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Massive news.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  And new graphics package.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  If you haven't noticed, we worked with John Palmer and Luke over at Area Technology. They updated the overlay, the logo, whole lot of stuff.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  A little globe in there, telling you we're taking you all over the world.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  With news every day.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  That's right. It is so good to be back.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  This, so we met this morning at the gym with the whole team, and I hadn't seen you for more than two weeks.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  It had been the longest.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Which is the longest time we've gone without hanging out since we started the show.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  I mean, last break was crazy. We were still doing, we weren't even live yet. We were doing it just as a podcast, but we still, I was in Yosemite once, and we did like a 20-minute episode that was recorded locally, and we had to sync them up and like edit it together. It was a very odd show.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  We did a show on the eve of Christmas Eve.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  We did.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Very, that felt really unnecessary, but at the same time, there was so much news over the last two weeks. There were a lot of moments where we wanted to be live.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like there were three or four, maybe five, really big stories where we could have had great shows, but there were a lot of days where, ah, you know, it probably would have been us just hanging out, which still would have been fun.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  And there were a lot of situations to monitor, too.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  There were.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  That were kind of outside of our.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Our domain, but, but still interesting, and we'll take you through some of those. But fortunately, we have a ton of content and a ton of stories to get through because so many things have built up. The Groq deal, the Manus deal, Dan Wang's annual letter. There's so many different things that we're going to take you through today. We have a very light lineup today, just Justin Mares from TruMed joining, but we have.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up. Let's see it.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  The linear lineup.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Which explains the run of show, so we're going to be building this out for you.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  And not to keep you guys in the dark.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Show you exactly what we're doing when, so you know when to tune in. But we should kick it off with Dan Wang's annual letter, his 2025 letter. He skipped 2024, apparently. This sort of rocked the timeline. Dan came on his show during his book tour for his, you know, excellent book that that sort of reset the narrative around the AI competition. He uses this phrase, AI, he doesn't like the phrase AI race.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  He likes, he doesn't think it's something that you can win. A race has a like a definite ending. There's a finish line. Whoever crosses it first wins.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  And he says he prefers to say that the US and China need to win, win the AI future.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like he.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  And this echoes what Gurley has said, too.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  True.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, at the time, he was coming out in defense of Manus and benchmarks investment in Manus.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  He was saying, I don't, he's like, I don't know what the AI race is.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  I mean, he looks great now that Manus is, you know, an American company. It's a meta property. So, you know, and I mean, the Manus team, of course, it was from China, but quickly moved to Singapore and now Manus Park presumably.

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  No, I think they're gonna stay.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Stay there. But still, I mean, you have to imagine that a lot of the talent migrates and it's like a fully American controlled asset, essentially, now that it's controlled by America and Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Let me tell you about Public, still with us, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, cryptos, treasuries, and more with amazing customer service. You can see we have a new ticker.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's take it over to Tyler. Let's check in with Tyler.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. What, what, what are we checking in with Tyler?

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  The chat misses Tyler.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Oh, they just missed Tyler. How you doing?

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Also, we signed for 2026. So we signed a massive contract extension with Tyler. He hasn't, he's not technically a college dropout yet, but he may as well be. It's a gap year. It's a gap year. It's a gap decade. It's a gap century.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, Tyler's parents, if you guys are watching, I'm just joking around.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  It's the age of gap years. We're in the age of gap years. We're in the age of research and we're also in the age of gap years. And so we thank Tyler for sticking around, hanging out with us. We're gonna have a lot of fun this year. So, the Dan Wong piece, we should read through some of it. I wrote, it inspired me to think about, you know, what, what am I really looking for this year? We've seen sort of benchmark saturation. AI can kind of do everything now. We'll, we'll talk about the Claude, the Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code, sort of sensational takeover of the timeline. So many people clearly hadn't really tested Opus 4.5 when it came out,

• 4:55John Coogan?

  which was a couple of weeks before the break, but they got their time off. They were, you know, with their families and probably stepped out to the laptop and fired off some Claude Code prompts and had really good experiences.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  Uh, because it is really magical. The first time you go to it and you say, build this website and it just does it. It's, it's actually remarkable for small hack.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  People are throwing around the Claude.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  AGI.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, fortunately, we picked up a goalpost.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  We have a camera view that we can put on this.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Maybe if I go over there.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Just pull it, pull it over. Uh, so we picked up a goalpost, so, you know, as we continue to see AI progress, we can actually move this goalpost ourselves physically here in the studio.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  Physically moving the goalpost now.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  There you go. There you go.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  Because, uh, you might need a connection to AGI, it needs to be able to smell.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  It needs to be able to smell.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  It has to be able to smell. Uh, if it can't smell, it can't do all white collar work because I regard the job of a sommelier as white collar work.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  Certainly is.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Now, AI disagrees with me. I actually went to one of the models and I, and I said, is a sommelier considered a white collar worker? And it said, no. And I think that's all just a psyop. I consider it, I consider it white collar work.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  You often drink wine wearing a white collar.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Do Somalis not wear white collars when they're serving wine? Absolutely, they do. They should be considered white collar workers. And in order to fulfill the AGI promise of automating all white collar work, it must be able to smell, it must be able to decant.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  I sent you that paper, though, that about

• 6:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's actually happening.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  The olfactory sense of training models to have olfactory senses.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Well, well, as soon as it gets baked into the next version of Claude, we'll need to come up with a new benchmark and then we will move the goalposts once again. Because that is the, that is the nature of the show. We continue to move the goalposts endlessly, but you know what doesn't move the goalposts? Gusto, our latest sponsor.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  It's the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  We've both been using Gusto for a decade now.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  I went through YC with them, or they were like right, either right before me. I think they were 2011 or 2013. And yeah, amazing, amazing platform.

• 7:07Jordi Hays?

  I've actually, my entire career,

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  I have been getting paid via Gusto. Used it

• 7:13John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  At my first company.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  I still get paid through it.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  It's

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, highly recommend.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  Continuous, so very, very excited.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Serious, serious endorsement. Anyway, back to Dan Wang, the GOAT. He is reflecting on the AI future, what it takes to win the AI future. And the thing that stuck out to me was that we've seen this amazing, just, you know, this remarkable march of research. The models are getting better, all the benchmarks are getting, you know, completely dominated. Then we're seeing the massive hyperscaler build outs. We're, we were reflecting on like, what does reindustrialization mean? What does American dynamism mean? What does this idea of like, America needs to build big things? We need to be able to build big things, new bridges, we need to build high speed rail. And, and we've failed at a lot of that, obviously.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  But we've, we've succeeded at building multi-billion dollar data centers. No, I, I guess, yes. I mean, truly, truly, media has been a cultural export of America for a very long time.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  But

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, so Dan's saying we're very good at making data centers.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Haven't been so good on the energy side.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Yes. And so, and so I tried to pull some of the data on, you know, my big question was like, we've been talking a big game about Energy being a bottleneck for AI for a long time. It wasn't truly the bottleneck with bottleneck was chips and then data centers and then just moving the energy around. But it feels like the last year, we were just kind of shuffling energy assets around the board. And that's why we saw energy prices go up where if just supply and demand, if we'd been building a ton of energy infrastructure, well, supply would have gone up and actual prices would have fallen or at least stayed flat because all the net new, all the net new data centers would just be using the new energy infrastructure.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  But that's not exactly what happened. So, um, so, um, the, from 2008 to 2021, America's annual growth in energy production was 0.1% annually. Really, really bad. Not good. But it is getting better. The, the EIA's December 2025 short-term energy outlook projects generation growth of 2.4% in 2025 and 1.7% in 2026. That's like, you know, what, 20 times higher? That's great. But also that doesn't feel like, oh, fast takeoff, we're going to be doing 10% jumps. We're going to be really, really ramping up here.

• 9:47John Coogan?

  So it feels like there's something that still needs to change. And then simultaneously, you have this, you know, massive political backlash to rising energy prices. It, and, and I think most importantly, like, we've identified some of the characters that drive AI. You know, we know Dario, we know Demis, we know Sam, right? We also have identified a lot of the people who are, you know, running the Neo clouds or doing, you know, build out of new data centers. We don't really know the characters. Who's the Elon Musk of energy is something I keep coming back to. And we've talked to some of these people. Doug from Radiant is like a contender in the sense that he's building nuclear power plants. Isaiah is also getting in the race with, with, with data centers. Blake Scholl

• 10:29John Coogan?

  from Boom is sort of pivoting or expanding into energy generation. But there's no one who's really become like the main energy guy or gal, right?

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would say like Chase at Crusoe is potentially a contender.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  But unclear yet if he's a Joe Rogan CEO, right?

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  And I feel like when you think about who the Elon of energy, it's somebody that can go and throw down on a three-hour episode with.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Yes, but but also like Chase and like the rest of the NeoCloud founders are are you know, marshalling energy resources, but not really driving the underlying infrastructures, which is I think they're more like, let's go find where the energy is cheap, let's build there, let's do the construction project. So other other crazy stats. So while we're growing at like 2.4%, 1.7%, China is consistently putting up 6% growth. So not great by comparison. China now accounts for one third of global electricity consumption and contributed 54% of global demand growth in 2024. So more than half of the growth in demand came from China.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  So stack that up over a few decades and it feels like the AI future is basically in the bag because if energy is a bottleneck, they'll have a ton of it. Now, I guess the wild card is maybe you go to space. Dan has an interesting point where he let me let me actually find this exact thing.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  You see semi-analysis Dylan was sharing that Venezuela has a bunch of underutilized gas turbines.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  No way.

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  He's showing satellite imagery.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  Did you see their Instagram? It's I don't know if they have like a bug or something, but they posted the same video to Instagram like 50 times. And I think they might just have like automated it and it just like went haywire or something.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  Semi-analysis.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, semi-analysis, like the official semi-analysis.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they cracked the code.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Maybe they cracked the code.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  Maybe like the trough wants.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  It's a funny video of like all these guys in this like bar. I don't know. And then it has some comment. It's just like a funny thing. But I was just like, why did they post this seven times in a row? Anyway, so what what Dan says, he says, I think that I believe that Chinese technological success is now the rule rather than than the exception. He says that, you know, China's obviously caught up in so many different technologies, drones and EVs. There are two fields in which China is substantially behind the West, semiconductors and aviation. The chip sector is gingerly attempting to expand under the weight of US restrictions. Meanwhile, China's answer to Airbus and Boeing is on a very long runway. I grant that these are two critical technologies, but China has attained technological

• 13:04John Coogan?

  leadership almost everywhere everywhere else. And I believe its technological momentum will continue rolling onwards to engulf more of their Western competitors over the next decade. Quickly, let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password requests, and password resets. So there is one that I think he missed, and maybe you put it in aviation, but I think, I think space travel, like, they're way behind on, on rocketry.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he said that Boeing, Airbus, they don't, they don't have that equivalent.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  And maybe you put SpaceX and Blue Origin in the same category as Boeing and Airbus. I particularly don't. I think of them as separate technologies, and I think of this as potentially like the third category that China's way behind in. And if you, I still weighed it with somewhat low probability, like, I'm still somewhat convinced by Delian's take that it's going to be really hard to actually get a ton of data center capacity in space on a short timeframe. But at the same time, it's like, you know, never bet against Elon, he's got to figure something out. There, there's like, it, it just feels like something that could happen. And I don't, I don't understand enough of the physics to really, to really figure out like what timeline it happens.

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  That was also before people went on break and were using Claude Code.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Oh, so now?

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Updating their data.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, now you can get in space.

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  They're like, oh yeah, gonna put this up there.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But, like, if, if, if the end, if the end game really is like, you gotta do, you gotta do compute in space because the math just works so much better up there over, you know, a decade or two, well, then, the advantage kind of flips back to America. But, you know, something needs to change, clearly. We're not asleep at the wheel. There are a lot of companies working on this in America. Some public, public company stocks have already mooned. Lots of people are tracking the gas turbine market. Risky startups that could never get funded a decade ago are pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars now. And we are taking the problem seriously, but I'm interested to see how quickly things can actually change. As the big AI labs mature and probably go public

• 15:13John Coogan?

  this year, or next year, the Neo clouds and hyperscalers build ever larger clusters, and energy prices become more of a political issue. I suspect discussions of what we're doing to make more energy to dominate the conversation in 2026, let's get this growth rate up. So I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic it can happen, but I feel like it's the, it's the new benchmark that I want to be tracking. Obviously, we were tracking the, the, the performance benchmarks of the models. Then we were tracking the diffusion. What's the actual revenue? Is it sticky? Like, there was a lot of risk of like, oh, this, this... This company comes up with some AI app, they ramp to 100 million. Will it stick around or will they just get swept by the wayside and people will go back to doing

• 15:55John Coogan?

  it the old way or they'll use something else or they'll pay way less? All of those, I feel like we kind of beat all of the bubble allegations over 2025 for the most part. What do you think?

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  I don't think that that is a public perception. I would say like the most popular topic.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Well, beat the bubble will pop in 2025 allegations. Like at the start of the year, people were predicting that like OpenAI would not be, would not do an up round, for example. And like that just didn't happen. It was like all up rounds for basically all the major players. There were a few that got kind of stuck in quagmires.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would say that we've

• 16:36John Coogan?

  But like in general, as a basket.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Things have broadly stabilized since the infamous podcast, right?

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, totally. Like if you were long AI broadly in 2025, you did very well and you did not see some sort of collapse. Yeah, Tyler.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's actually a cool chart that Axios put out about like the 2025 news cycle and it's like

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Distribution of like how

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  How often the search was.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I really like that chart.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  So you can look at the AI bubble and yeah, it did peak and we're like definitely not at the peak right now. We're way down.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  Tyler vindicated.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Vindicated, never lost faith over there. Jordy was skeptical. I was maybe a little skeptical from time to time. Tyler never lost faith and that's why he's here, sticking around, riding up.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  Max contract.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Max contract. Let me talk about Linear, still with us. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. So in the other section of the Dan Wang piece, he talks about competition and I thought this was just an interesting element to read. He talks about Sputnik moments and we got to read a little bit of this. So one might have expected the US to have roused itself after this bout of the trade war, but there have been too many declarations of Sputnik moments without commensurate action.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  I hadn't thought about that, but we, at one point, we were memeing like Sputnik moments for Sputnik moments, remember? Do you remember this?

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was super. That must have been like a year ago.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was like a year ago or something, but you know when it becomes like a meme that we're like, you know, everything is a Sputnik moment, like it really is overused.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, so Barack Obama declared a Sputnik with China's high-speed rail. Mark Warner repeated with Huawei's 5G. Mark Andreessen called it with DeepSeek. The more that people use the term, the less likely that society spurs itself into taking it seriously.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  It's a good point, right? Uh, so he says, I think the US continues to systematically underrate China's industrial progress for several reasons. First, too many Western elites retain hope that China's efforts will run out of fuel by its own accord. Industrial progress will be weighed down by demographic drag, the growing debt load, or maybe even a political collapse. I won't rule these out, but I don't think they are likely to break China's humming tech engine. Dan has so many interesting insights. He had this one where he talks to people and he reflects a lot on like talking to people in San Francisco, because I think he just moved from Yale to Stanford and spent a lot of time in SF. And he was saying that like everyone he talks to about Taiwan thinks that China only wants to invade Taiwan because of TSMC and semiconductors. And he has to be like, no, no, this goes back like 60 years.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Multiple, like, yeah.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, like back to the civil war that led to the exile and whatnot. Like, this is not some like new trendy thing where like, oh, they need this particular resource this day.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  This is not about ChatGPT, little bro.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, truly.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  Deeper than that. Um, yeah, I mean, there were, this, uh, I mean, yeah, it was interesting because you could say this was a 2025 letter, but this felt like the best possible summary of the geopolitical economic dynamic between China and the US. Uh, there was a paragraph here that stood out. Uh, he said, third, Western elites keep holding on to a distinction between innovation, which is, uh, mostly the remit of the West in scaling, which they accept that China can do. Dan says, I want to dissolve that distinction. Chinese workers innovate every day on the factory floor by being the site of production. They have a keen sense of how to make technical improvements all the time. American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas, but American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so, again, there's some, uh,

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Interesting commentary in here as well. I forget the exact section. Everybody should go read it. But he basically says like in SF or within our world, it's become popular to just say like, oh yeah, we need to figure out how to build things again, but it's okay because

• 20:29John Coogan?

  AI will solve it.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, the thing that I would say you can be most sure about right now is that AI is not operating with like, you know, you have all this intelligence, all this intellect, this horsepower, but it doesn't have any agency. Like, it's not just sitting there in the background, like fixing American manufacturing, right? And while we have this idea that AI will automate manufacturing and create these sort of like feedback loops that allow us to start making stuff again in the US, currently like manufacturing jobs in the US are actually declining.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  Declining, yeah, yeah.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  A month after a month, so.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, at the same time, there are a bunch of people in SF who make a somewhat convincing argument about like the software only singularity and bootstrapping back kind of everything off of it. I agree, it's a little bit more of a sci-fi scenario, but there are somewhat, there are some good arguments on both sides, but he does make this point about manufacturing that even when you, how do you do an apples to apples comparison? Well, you look at Tesla and how they operate the Gigafactory in America, and then how do they operate the same Gigafactory, building the same vehicles in China? And he says, I hear, I sometimes hear that the US will save manufacturers through automation. The truth is that Chinese factories tend to be ahead on automation. That's a big part of the reason why Chinese Tesla workers are more productive than

• 21:49John Coogan?

  California Tesla workers. And, and he says, what does he say? Gigafactory? Is that in here? He says, according to Tesla's corporate disclosures, a worker at a Gigafactory in China produces an average of 47 vehicles a year. A worker at a Gigafactory in California produces an average of 20. That's like a huge gap, more than twice, because they have more automation over there. And you think of it as like a copy paste thing, like the Gigafactory here should be the same as there, but there really are like more machines, more automation, just walk across the street in China and there's some sort of, you know, CNC factory that has 10,000 CNC machines or something like that. So there's just a lot more to build off of there. So China's automotive success is biting into Germany more than anywhere else.

• 22:33John Coogan?

  I keep a scrap, I keep a scrapbook filled with mournful remarks that German executives offer to newspapers.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Most of what German Mittelsland firms do these days, Chinese companies can do just as well, said a consultant to the Financial Times. Quote, "In my sector, they look at the price point of the market leader and sell for roughly half that," the boss of a medical device maker told The Economist. "It's never hard to find parades of gloomy Germans." Now, more than ever, it looks like their core competencies are threatened by Chinese firms.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anyways, go read it, but he called Europe cooked and chopped.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  Well, you know what's not cooked and chopped? Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. The last section here, so Beijing has been working relentlessly to build up its resilience. While the US talks itself out of Sputnik moments, Beijing has dedicated immense resources to patching up its own deficiencies. It's not a theoretical fear that Chinese companies might lose access to American technologies. So the state is pouring more money than ever before into semiconductor makers and research universities. It is investing in clean technologies, not so much because it cares about the climate, but because it wants to be self-sufficient in energy.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  And that's a huge, huge, just economic incentive. And it's rewriting the rules of the global order with caution, because it's been a giant beneficiary.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  We gotta try to get Dan on again. I'm curious to ask him, get his read on everything that happened in Venezuela

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  over the weekend, just given that the Chinese delegation was there on the ground

• 24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  meeting with him, effectively the night before he was

• 24:19John Coogan?

  What a crazy story.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Wild weekend.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Let me finish reading this. So Beijing has been preparing for a Cold War without eagerness for waging it, while the US wants to wage a Cold War without preparing for it. So here's a potential way that China succeeds. Beijing's goal is to make nearly every important product in the world while everyone else supplies its commodities and services. By making the country mostly self-sufficient and by vigorously policing the outputs of LLMs and social media, Xi Jinping might hope to make China resilient. He is building Fortress China, stone by stone, in order to outlast the adversary. Beijing doesn't have to replicate American diplomatic, cultural, and financial superpower dom. It might hope That its prowess in advanced manufacturing might deter the US and its success in manufacturing

• 25:08John Coogan?

  might directly destabilize the US by delivering the coup de grace over the Rust Belt. The US might shed a few million, few million more manufacturing jobs over the next decade. The job losses combined with AI psychosis, social media, and all the problems with phones could make national politics meaningfully worse. Black pill, but then he says, I don't think this is gonna happen, which is good. Yeah. Anyway, TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Well.

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, should we talk about Manus?

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Let's talk about Manus.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about Manus.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  This all started because Bill Gurley was an investor in Manus. And he, and whenever he's on.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  And I think Bill Gurley has the best voice in venture.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  I agree, I agree.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  The best voice in venture, hands down. Who's got a better voice than Bill Gurley?

• 26:02John Coogan?

  It's, it's amazing.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  He's got pipes.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  He's got pipes. He does have, he does have a good voice for podcasting too. It's, it's great to hear.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, he's going, uh, he's going on a podcast tour.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we're, we're.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  We gotta get him.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  We're, I think we'll be a part of it, so.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  Can expect to, to hear him on.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  So this all started with Alex Wang over at Meta, formerly Scale AI. Uh, he says, excited to announce that Manus AI has joined Meta to help us build.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  Jack Randall in the X chat, did anyone check on Delian?

• 26:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That's funny because Jack, Jack worked with, uh, with Delian.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it, it really, it really is.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Hey, hey, Delian might be taking a victory lap because if Miami comes back because of this wealth tax thing, Delian totally vindicated, right?

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  Also that, uh, and Patrick Hollis.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Was bull busting.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  So did Delian capitulate? Did they capitulate too early?

• 26:56John Coogan?

  No, no, he, he gets to play musical chairs. He's like, what? I, I never said anything about Manus. I, I don't know about that. It's a fine, it's a fine investment. It makes sense. Did I mention that, uh, Facebook was a founders fund backed company? Oh, yeah, I worked in founders fund. Yeah.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there was so, I mean.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  You should put out a look. It's great to see a portfolio company acquire Manus.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  The moment in time that Benchmark invested in Manus.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  It wa, it was a really.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  It was a crazy move.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  I was like. What's going on here? It was just, it was just very strange.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  It was, it was truly like-

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  It was truly contrarian.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  It was very contrarian.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  It was truly contrarian.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the vibes were like, it was the most, it was the most intense, like, part of the trade war. Trump was really putting the screws. He's back in, so he's gonna go extra hard. And it's not like Biden took the, the, his foot off the gas of, you know, the trade war with, uh, with China. Like, the initial volley of chip restrictions happened under Biden. Like, the, like, Chris Miller writes chip war during the Biden admin. And, and everyone really wakes up. All the Anduril folks are talking about it, like-

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's the other thing. So, AI 2027 was released in April of 2025.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark did Manus in April of 2025, same month.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, obviously, a lot of people process AI 2027 as like, cool, this is like sci-fi.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, kind of like, uh, you know, let's just extrapolate a bunch. And, uh, it was kind of a thought exercise, but at the same time, this was kind of the peak in some ways of like the, the AI war narrative.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  And so to have a famed American venture capital firm, you know, backing, uh, a Chinese AI firm-

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Sorry, we gotta go back to Dan Wang. There's so many good things. He talked about AI 2027. I wanna read it. But first, let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast with Figma. Uh, so, uh, Dan Wang says, "The most read essay from Silicon Valley this year was AI 2027. The five authors who come from the AI safety world outline a scenario in which superintelligence wakes up in 2027. A decade later, it decides to annihilate humanity with biological weapons. My favorite detail in the report is that humanity would persist in a genetically modified form after the AI reconstructs creatures that are, quote, 'to humans what corgis are to wolves.'"

• 29:23John Coogan?

  I somehow missed this. I listened to the Dorkesh podcast. I read most of AI 2020. Did you pick up on the corgi line, Tyler? You read this, right?

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't remember that.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  Somehow the corgi line just got completely missed by me, but I love it. It's so funny. It's such a funny detail. I'm gonna control F for corgi.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  It's not pulling anything up.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  No? I don't know. Okay, maybe, maybe Dan's taking some, some, some creative.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you have to like choose the ending?

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, you have to find the corgi ending. That's key.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  We'll take the golden retriever ending.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  It's hard to know. Yes, turn us into golden retrievers. We're ready. We're ready.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  Already did.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  I know. Who's trying to be a wolf? I'm not trying to be on the wolf, the lone wolf Sigma.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to be a golden retriever on performance enhancing drugs. A golden retriever with 4D delts.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we've been growing our hair like golden retrievers, working on looking good. Everything's, everything's lined up for a golden retriever 2026. It's a good time. It's hard to know what to make of this document. He's talking about AI 2027. He says, because the authors keep tucking important context into footnotes repeatedly, repeatedly saying that they do not endorse a prediction. Six months after publication, they stated that their timelines were lengthening, but even at the start, their median forecast for the arrival of superintelligence was later than 2027. Why they put that year in their title remains beyond me. Sort of an interesting, I know why they put it in there because it's engaging.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  It's entertaining and it makes for, it makes for good banter. Anyway, he goes, he goes on to talk a lot about the, the dynamic of how Silicon Valley works, how New York finance works, how, how it's different. It's very interesting. He, he, we, we, we should read a little bit more of this since we have time today.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  He says, you want to go back to Dan?

• 31:14John Coogan?

  I want to go back to Dan.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  We got a Dan, we got a Dan addict over here.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, what do you say about finance? He said like they're wrong before breakfast or something? Finance? Let's see.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  One thing, okay, one thing I, one of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging diverse opinions. Portfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast. So they relentlessly seek new information sources. Consensus is rare, since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market. Tech cares less for dissent. Its movements are more herd-like, in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time. Startups don't need dissent. They want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don't like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. Taking shots. That contributes to a

• 32:11John Coogan?

  culture, I think, of Silicon Valley's soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line, most prominently this year, as many tech voices embrace the right. So, he calls San Francisco a very insular city. He still has a lot of nice things to say about it. Anyway, let's go back to

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  Since you're back here, I thought it was, I, he talks about humor within tech and the CCP.

• 32:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  He gives a line from Sam Altman that is, Sam says, "I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning."

• 32:50John Coogan?

  That is good. It is funny.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  That is really funny. That's really funny.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  It's great. It's also like, maybe true. I don't know. It's like a

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  No, and I think this is the key problem for the tech industry in 2026.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Is like, how do you need to paint a more, like, the founders need to paint a more optimistic vision

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  For AI.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  Because it's not working right now.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  Because people see their energy bill going up, or they even hear about the idea of their energy bill going up, and then they see some of the slop in their feed, and the slop is getting better, right? You look at some of the videos coming out of this Venezuela debacle, right?

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Videos from there.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Well, I saw, I saw Maduro, like, face

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  Dancing.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  To a lot of friends.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  I guess that would

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  So, so the, the, the video is higher definition, etc. But people are

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  People in all types of roles are worried about job loss. And, you know, they see the investment going into AI and they're just scared, right? And so when you you do quotes like this, whether they're serious or not, saying, I think that AI will probably lead to the end of the world. People are starting to ask like, wait, why are we automating all of this in the first place? Can we just stop? Right? Like, I don't, actually, I don't want my job automated. I'll keep doing it, right? So, so the industry needs to figure out how to paint a more optimistic, you know, because there's a lot of way, there's a lot of very opti, you know, I think Dan talks in here about, uh, what is, what is the line he says around, uh, uh, young people, uh,

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  you know, uh, people, you know, maybe in 10 years reminiscing about a time when young people didn't just have shelter and an income provided for them. They had to fend for themselves, right? And so, uh, so anyways, uh, I think that's real. He, he also talks about CCP humor, which was, uh, he's saying, uh, the PM 2.5 back then was even worse than it is now. I used to joke that it was PM 250.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  What is that?

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  Like, he's just saying, like, PM 2.5 is, uh, 2.5 is a, is a measurement for air, like, air quality.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, okay.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  Saying, yeah.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Particles per million.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like PM 250.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me, I have a few rebuttals, but first let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. So, uh, first rebuttal on humor. Some of the tech people are funny and I was noticing this, I, I was remembering this as we watched our year in review video that Jackson and our team put together. And in there, one of the clips is, uh, is us talking to Sam Altman, who Dan highlights as like famously humorless because he's like trying to speak in many levels of and it's this

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  Best Sam joke ever? Him coming on our show. I mean, he was making the joke on the timeline.

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  But nobody got the joke. He was saying, I'd never buy a car for

• 35:50John Coogan?

  For $250,000. Yeah, it was hilarious. So someone, someone posted this, this like, what was GT3RS or something?

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  And they were like, would you buy this?

• 35:59John Coogan?

  It's for $250,000. And Paul Graham says like, oh, what a waste of money. Like, I would never buy this. And, and Sam just said, I would never buy it either. And, and everyone was like, oh, like, he's so out of touch. He has a Koenigsegg, he has a F1. Like, he's, it's ridiculous. Of course you'd buy it. And then he came on our show and explained that no, the joke was that you would never buy a car for 250 because he wants a multimillion dollar car, which is hilarious. And a lot of people that I've talked to who've interacted with Sam a lot behind the scenes, like, in the right context, he, he is truly very funny. But it's just hard because he's trying to speak seven different languages anytime he's on screen. Because he has to speak to politicians who want to regulate him, to people that might be losing their jobs, but to people also who want to come work for him, and also to investors who want to return.

• 36:41Jordi Hays?

  I think it was so much easier, you know, in the, in the 20th century,

• 36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  it, it was like, you know, it was easy mode being a politician or a CEO.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Because you could go into a room of business executives and said, okay, you currently spend, like, if you were running like an AI company

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Jordi Hays?

  before the internet

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  before everything was recorded and before everything hit

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  you know, every single distribution point immediately, you could go and say like, hey, you currently spend, you know, a billion dollars a year on payroll.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to be able to reduce that by 80%.

• 37:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  There's gonna, you're gonna be able to conduct lots of layoffs. And then he could go on TV and say like, AI is going to create an abundant, you know, future. And that, and the, and the clips wouldn't kind of

• 37:25John Coogan?

  No, cross-polling.

• 37:26Jordi Hays?

  everywhere, right? Or politicians could go talk to

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  a labor union here and then go talk to business leaders here, right?

• 37:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we see this on our show. Where, where people come on and we're all having a conversation and we're all like, oh yeah, this makes sense. We all have the context. And then a clip goes out and people are quoting like out of context and being like, oh, I hate this. I hate what they're saying. And we're like, well, we weren't trying to get them to say something controversial, but they

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  Before you hate that you say it, go back and watch every episode of TBN of 2025.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  Before you criticize us.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Just to get context.

• 37:56John Coogan?

  Before you criticize us.

• 37:57Jordi Hays?

  Just to get some context.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Yes. There was, oh, there was one more thing. Oh, thank God, this Dan Wang thing. He, he has a great line in here about, about feedback he got on his book. Obviously, there's criticism and stuff, but he has this great quip. He says, I learned of Leo Rosten's quip that it is the weak who are cruel and gentleness to be expected only from the strong. I thought that was a very good quote. Just very interesting, just saying that like, like the, if you're, you know, like, like the negative comments usually come from a, from a, from a place of weakness. But that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be empathy. Um, there's one more thing about the AI future and the positive future.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  This reminds me of my one and a half year old who will bite my three year old.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  Because he's weak and so he has to take the cruel action of, of trying to chomp the three year old. Three year old's like, hey, look, I'm a little mass monster over here.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. Uh, let me tell you about the two AI futures that are sort of dueling right now that I think are interesting.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  And then we gotta go back to Manus.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  We're gonna go back to Manus.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  You still haven't given your take on Manus.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  We're gonna do Manus. Uh, but let me tell you about Plaid first. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, to save, borrow and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. So.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Very pumped to be partnered with the legends at Plaid.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  We will have to dive into these pieces in more depth at some point, but basically I, I, I do think that even though Dan says that, you know, tech is very insular, it's less contrarian, there's only, you know, everyone aligns themselves around one vision of the future and just like runs at it. And I think he, he is correct in, in some ways. There is some dissension and, and at least conversation back and forth, mainly between Dwar Kesh right now and Ben Thompson. Ben Thompson wrote a piece on AI and the human condition, where he sort of reacts to Dwar Kesh's piece with Philip Trammell, Trammell, called Capital in the 2020, 22nd Century.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  And Dwar Kesh is talking about capital accumulation, inequality, how things might need to be redistributed in the future.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  It's unclear exactly the timeline and if you go out really, really far, it becomes much more, much easier to wrap your head around all of this. Like, at one point, they start talking about buying galaxies, uh, which is sort of like a funny thought experiment. Um, and, and at that point, like, if you were to just say, "Hey, we're going full communist with the galaxies, we're distributing them equally," it's like, well, there's, there's trillions of galaxies. Like, you personally would get a thousand galaxies. And it's like, yeah, that's probably like enough. Like, it takes 25,000 years to get to the nearest galaxy. Like, imagine the life, imagine the life you're living where you're immortal and you're like, just to go between my two, my two galaxies that I own, it takes 25,000

• 40:50John Coogan?

  years. Like, I don't know that I'd be so pissed off that like, "Oh, I, I wasn't able to get more than the one, one six billionth of the galaxies out there." I, I don't know. It just feels like such a crazy scenario.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  Has anybody tried to kind of stake a claim? I know America, we, uh, the moon's ours. It's not legally yet, but it is ours. It's somewhat inevitable.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  I mean, it's crazy, no one's been to the moon. Like, we went there, like, 50 years ago, more, and everyone was just like, "We're good."

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  Lost art.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  Lost art. He'll send some robots. But, but literally, this is a crazy thing. No, no other country has landed a man on the moon. I, I, I don't know why. What are you waiting for? Get somebody up there. Anyway, what are you saying about acquiring galaxies? You want one? You want more than one? You want more than a thousand?

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  I want more than a thousand.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  You want more than a thousand?

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Just say you're, say you're not a, say you're a communist.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  A communist?

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, I want more.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  You want, you want 2,000 galaxies?

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  But, so I, I think that quote was actually referencing-

• 41:43John Coogan?

  Leopold.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was Leopold. And, and people are arguing whether Leopold was being serious, and he was.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  It's sick.

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  It's a great quote. I love it. I, I, I, it, it is, it is sufficiently sci-fi for me. I'm, I'm very, very excited about that quote. Uh, and it's, and it's thought provoking. It's, it's truly, it's truly thought provoking to think about what, what property rights look like in a world where it takes you 25,000 years to get to the place that you own. Like, your vacation home. Unless, I, I don't know, I don't know if the AGI-pilled people are so AGI-pilled that they think we're gonna defeat the speed of light. E- every like physicist I've ever talked to has always said like, "No, the, the, the, like, that one holds forever." That's not like, "Oh, quantum computing, it can work, but it's a couple decades away," or fusion, or fission. Like, all these other things are like somewhat engineering problems. I think the speed of light is like gonna be around forever. Um, I don't know.

• 42:32Jordi Hays?

  Just need a faster horse. It's the year of the fire horse.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  It is?

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  What does that mean? Wait, I thought they.

• 42:38Jordi Hays?

  Twenty twenty six Chinese year of the fire.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  But wait, are they adding superlatives to the animals? I thought it was just horse, snake, dragon, and then they'd rotated through those.

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  It's the year of the fire. It's we upgraded animals.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  Fire horse.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Uh, I'm, I'm a fan. I'm a fan. Manus is acquired. I think, uh.

• 42:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay, back to Manus.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Great, great Chinese century coming up. I think we're gonna be, I think we're gonna be putting on those hats soon.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  So Ramp Labs modeled it out. They, uh, of course Ramp Labs, uh, is AI agent for, uh, spreadsheet software. So you can give it a prompt and it will build the spreadsheet for you. Very, very cool. And, uh, they did a little analysis on the meta acquisition of Manus AI. They said the estimated price is four to six billion dollars based on AI M and A comps. It's the fastest to hunt to a hundred million ARR in history, just eight months. Wow. And benchmark likely eight to twelve X and under a year.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so, so again, they're sort of estimating here. I think, uh, people were kind of putting the deal between two and three billion.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  Is, is what I had heard.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Um, okay.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, so again, so, yeah, I mean, I guess let's get in, let's get it. What was, I guess, what was your immediate reaction? Uh, the thing that I was excited about is this is Zach buying a product that people love.

• 44:01John Coogan?

  Well, that's a debate. But, but I like your take, but, but they're, uh, Mark Zuckerberg has done a number of talent acquisitions.

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what, that's what I'm saying. So, so he just went, he just went through a talent acquisition.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  Era.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he, he, they, they, they're the, you know, biggest investor in, in scale.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:20Jordi Hays?

  But, but they didn't acquire the product.

• 44:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  Um, still.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  And I think they're actually acquiring data from other.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  So historically, Zach has been saying, you know, drum, you know, beating the personal super intelligence drum.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  It's been very unclear what that means.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  Manus has been building. High-quality agents, they're sort of, time and time again, I talk to people that are just very excited about Manus, they're like, "Just use Manus, it's the year of the agent."

• 44:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  Like, "Use it, you'll see the future."

• 44:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  And so, just given Zuck's history, from a product acquisition standpoint, I get excited because this can potentially give us some clarity around what they're, like, one version of personal superintelligence is you have AI agents that can go out on the internet and do things for you.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  They can go, I think in the context of Meta, I think about like, shopping.

• 45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  Right, you see something on Instagram

• 45:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  that you like, and you can, you could trigger an agent effectively, like, "Go find this product."

• 45:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  Like, you see a car that you like, "Go find this product," and...

• 45:22John Coogan?

  The elusive GCTRAS that you can't find.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  GCT3 bench.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically, like, you see, you see a, like, make any image or video shoppable.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  And, and in fact, I would, I would probably argue that LLMs in the chat form, where you have a bunch of information with a, you know, knowledge cutoff baked into a, into some big model, Llama4, and it's vended through, you know, the Instagram search box that you chat with, that just, it can never fully satisfy the, the vision of personal superintelligence, a personal assistant, something that actually can take actions for you. It, it feels like, it's incredible, it's amazing, like, obviously for knowledge retrieval, it's great, but it was never going to fulfill the, the, the real vision there, so, this does feel, this does feel like, I don't know, I would, I would hope that they bake this in in a really interesting way.

• 46:17John Coogan?

  I wonder if, if we are talking about going out and shopping for you off-platform, or if it's more doing things within the meta ecosystem, I don't even know what that would look like, but a lot of the image models that they're training, you can imagine that, that they, that they exist almost entirely within the family of apps ecosystem. So, if MetaTrains, amazing image editing model, a Nano Banana, right?

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:43John Coogan?

  Direct Nano Banana competitor, what's that gonna look like? It's probably gonna look like, you take a photo, you put it in, in Instagram, and then you say, "Hey, change the background."

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  "Make the sky less gray," right?

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:53John Coogan?

  And it'll just do it really, really well, and, and that would exist purely in there, and maybe they open source it, maybe they put it out, but that's not the, that's not the product.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  I was also thinking of, of, I guess, one way that I... I'm thinking about Manus in the context of what Zuck and the AI team at Meta are saying, which is personal superintelligence, right? They're talking about, they've talked about integrating AI into Ray-Ban Metas, right? So when I think, when, and if you're using Ray-Ban Metas, you can say, "Hey Meta", and then you can give it a task, or ask it a question, or things like that. And so I expect that Manus-type workflows will be heavily integrated into a, hey, when you say, "Hey Meta", and you're wearing glasses, like, "Hey, build me a slide deck to help me prep for my final later",

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  And I can imagine, like, effectively, the same product experience that Manus has today will be integrated into Meta AI.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let me tell you about Vanta, Automate Compliance and Security. It's the leading AI trust management platform. I agree with you. At the same time, there's a lot of areas where it feels very natural for Google to expand into, it feels very natural for Microsoft to expand into, Apple to expand into. Like, Apple has a spreadsheet app, right? They have a word processor. They, like, Meta doesn't really have those. They did Meta at work for a while, but they, it doesn't, this whole idea of, like, go to, open Instagram to do your homework feels crazy to me. And the same thing with open Instagram to build a slide deck, that feels crazy to me.

• 48:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but everything that they're doing in AI, they're piping through Meta AI, the new standalone app.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  So maybe they want to...

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  That's a bunch of, like, to me, I look at that as, like, experimental area, that you can just put anything into it. I was told by someone close, close to the action, that apparently, like, the Meta AI trough, the...

• 48:55John Coogan?

  [laughing]

• 48:58John Coogan?

  Vibes?

• 48:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Meta Vibes. The usage is actually insane.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Really?

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  No way.

• 49:04Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 49:05John Coogan?

  Wait, but I mean, it's terrible in the App Store, right? It cannot be ranked. Even Sora is not ranking well. Like, can you just look this up? I don't know.

• 49:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Well, we're looking that up. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card. You see that ticker down in the bottom telling you the crypto prices? That's thanks to Phantom.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  Legends.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Let me try and find. I don't think Meta Vibes is going to rank, but at the same time, they might have gotten a bump over Christmas. Because when you get the Ray-Bans, you unbox those, you have to download the Meta AI app to integrate with the Ray-Ban. So maybe they got a pump from that? I don't know. But Sora, let me see what.

• 49:48Jordi Hays?

  It's not in the top 25.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  So Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson recently wrote, it's also worth noting the relative popularity of human-generated content versus AI-generated content. Sora is down to 59 in the App Store. And I count double-digit, human-denominated, social apps that rank above it. Yet, I get the argument that this is the worst AI will ever be, but it will also never be human, which is what humans want most of all. There's a bunch of great posts about content, where all this goes. And I think Ben Thompson offered a very, very compelling white pill. Dwarkech is a little bit more like, this is going to be extremely rough. So it requires aggressive maneuvers and rethinking the entire social contract and potentially the entire economy.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson is a little bit more like, things can continue as they have been for the most part. At least that was my.

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  One thing with Manus, this is maybe the first acquisition in the billions for a company with an Isle of Man domain. They're Manus dot I M.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  I am.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  You don't see a lot of multi-billion dollar dot I M acquisitions.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Isle of Man. Tyler, is that where you're from?

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  I love Chad.

• 51:00John Coogan?

  You, did you get, did you get into looks maxing over the break?

• 51:05Jordi Hays?

  I've been bone smashing.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  It looks like you got into looks maxing, doesn't it? Doesn't his mid-face ratio look different?

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  I gotta fix my recessed maxilla.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  I feel like his maxilla is looking different. It's looking better. He doesn't have the filter on. Do you, wait, do you guys have the filter on?

• 51:19Jordi Hays?

  I think, yeah.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  I think they do have the filter on. Cause.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  Wait Tyler, go, go like this, do the.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  The double jaw surgery.

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, definitely. They definitely have the filter on.

• 51:30John Coogan?

  Definitely, definitely. Well, speaking of Dwar Kesh, he's sponsored by Label Box. We're sponsored by Label Box. Label Box, we're delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. We love Label Box. We're considering making a physical Label Box.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  And putting Tyler in.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  We will see. We don't want to leak it. We will figure out if we, if we can figure out how to physically.

• 51:53Jordi Hays?

  And wanting to put Tyler in a box.

• 51:54John Coogan?

  I just like boxes. So Signal asks, can someone explain why Meta bought Manus? What's the one pager for Zuck other than we have an F-ton of money, so why not? And Lucas Byer, Metas List researcher, says they know how to build, they know really, really well how to build good agents. And maybe that's enough.

• 52:15Jordi Hays?

  Nick Dobbo says, best tool set on the market. They bought a Swiss Army knife to hand to any AI model. Wide research, virtual browsers, VMs, code interpreter, PowerPoint slides, app builder, connector. So yeah, they're just good at product. I give them.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Eric Mahir says, head in the, head in the box. He's, his handle has box in it. He says, I left Meta because I made a bet that models were going to be commoditized and the value would be in the products on top of the models. But MetaMate and Gen AI were highly politicized, sucking up all the oxygen in the room. As always, I was right.

• 52:46Jordi Hays?

  Hilarious line. As always, I was right.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  Ex, ex Meta people are getting spicy. Did you see the Yann LeCun, Financial Times deep dive? We, we should dig into that, but he took a bunch of shots at a lot of different people, basically just saying like, you can't tell a researcher what to do, especially not me. He was very, very salty over Alex Wang coming in and, and becoming his boss effectively. At the same time, it, it feels like.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  You got leveled.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, it, it is an odd, I mean, it's a bold choice to, to put Yann LeCun on the bench. He's a, I think touring award winner. He's like one of the greatest AI researchers in history.

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  Where'd he land on the Metas List, Tyler?

• 53:26John Coogan?

  Jan LeCoon, how did he do? But he's back with a $3 billion fundraise valuation. But the interesting thing is like, I think there's two ways that you can read into the Ilya Sutskever, we are in an age of research story. Tyler, do you have Jan on the?

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he wasn't on there.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  He wasn't on there?

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  We were trying to rage bait him or something.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  No way.

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he wasn't on there.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Wow, we are so bad. But anyway, you can read Ilya's.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, you were trying to rage bait him. We don't participate in rage bait.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  We don't have anything to do with the rankings. You can interpret the Ilya Sutskever age of research concept as, hey, if you're a hyperscaler, you need a really, really solid research team to go extra hard into research because you want to be the first one to have that research breakthrough. So you need a lot of true researchers. Or you can read into it as like, hey, this is kind of an AI winter and the research has sort of stabilized. So we can pull in all the best research. Yeah, we need to get to the frontier, but we can be a month behind. If we productize really well, we can win and we can have a really great outcome here. And then, you know, when Ilya comes up with something great, it's going to get copy pasted all over the industry because of the SF

• 54:47John Coogan?

  house parties and, you know, papers that get written and, you know, open source implementations that happen pretty quickly. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe this is the one time that technology just stays completely isolated, but typically it doesn't.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 54:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Ollie from Databricks was, at the end of the year, was talking about how he's fantastic. I've got to have him back on. But he was talking about putting people into different buckets. So like, there's a super intelligence, right? There's a super intelligence bucket. I think that when you look at, like, Zuck can say, we are trying to build super intelligence. That is a much more compelling vision than we're trying to make great consumer products that we can monetize via advertising and commerce. That is not a compelling vision that you rally a team around, right? In some ways, OpenAI is doing the exact same thing, right? There are different groups that are taking,

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  you know, maybe Anthropic's taking a different approach in terms of saying like, yeah, we're actually trying to build super intelligence and we're doing it in a very opinionated way.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so I just like to see, I will be very excited to see, hopefully see them try to take what Manus has built and dramatically scale it.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. A quick shout out to 2.6 in the chat. He says he's down 99 pounds. That's fantastic. He's up 20K and he says life is good. So what an amazing start to the new year. Congratulations.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  I also saw Sam Scheffer in the chat earlier. He launched a new product over the break called Timelines. It's like a daily series of games that you can play to better understand the news. So excited to check this out and congrats to Sam.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Potentially the best tagline of all time, the best marketing copy. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the NICE.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  That's how it works. Yeah. Anyway, Groq. So there were two major blockbuster deals before the end of the year. Unclear, I mean, were both sort of these zombie acquisitions? Or were any of them just clean, normal deals? I guess we don't fully know. We know that the Groq Nvidia deal was very much a sort of go ship type deal where you take the team, take some of the IP, license, pay out the investors.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  $20 billion deal. What should we do with that, John? Should we hit that AppLovin gong?

• 57:28John Coogan?

  We should hit that AppLovin gong. We have a new gong, everyone. Look at this gong.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  It's bigger than ever. It's bigger than ever. We actually, it's so big, it's so loud, we have to be kind of careful with it. I mean, it's a John-sized gong. So John is 6'8". If you're just tuning in for the first time.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  It's a massive gong.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  And it is a massive gong for a massive company. Fantastic company.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  AppLovin, which we're incredibly excited to partner with for 2026.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  You're not going to believe this, but AppLovin's next in the stack. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  So, uh, there's been a bunch of chatter, says Dan Primack, about how Groq employees made out in the Nvidia deal. He made some calls to find out. And in short, they did very, very well, even if not fully vested. We did, we did hear that if you were there a very short amount of time and you were not senior at all, you might have had a bad run, but, um, we'll have to dig into that a little bit more. But it seems like, in general, uh, they did, uh, it, it, it was, everyone sort of got paid. It sounds like Chamath did very well on this. Uh, he was a very early

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I mean Chamath haters were in shamble.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  We need to check on them.

• 58:47Jordi Hays?

  If you, if one of your friends doesn't like Chamath, call them. If you haven't heard from them, I would be worried.

• 58:54John Coogan?

  Wellness check. Are you doing okay? Let's just go hang out. Let's go play some golf or something.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, take him out, touch the grass.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  Touch the grass.

• 59:01John Coogan?

  Because it's gonna be rough for a while. Chamath is on a, on a tear. And what, didn't he like, didn't he basically give back the LP capital right before? So it's like 100% of his own money or something. I saw some take about that. I'm not sure if that's when that happened, but I know social capital kind of converted to a family office.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that was, that was way

• 59:17John Coogan?

  That was way after, okay, okay.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  At least the first, I mean, he, I mean, the, the haters will hate to see that he invested mult back to back to back.

• 59:24John Coogan?

  I know.

• 59:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, with conviction, with authority, really.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:30Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, gotta give him credit.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  Uh, so Alex Heath over at sources.news has new details on the Nvidia-Groq deal. The whole process took less than two weeks and was personally driven by Jensen Wong. No other bidders. Wong wired money early and wanted the deal to close before the new year.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  What a chat. What a chat. Uh, send the $20 billion wire. Sir, we haven't fully executed the docs. I've good for my 20 billion.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  That is actually crazy. Uh, yeah, I mean, very interesting. Groq is, we, we were talking about this, like, why is Nvidia buying Groq? Um, is it a response to the TPU? We'll have to get some of the semi-analysis folks on the show to, to dig into it. But, um, I, I think that there is, you know, Groq has been They've been on this like super crazy roller coaster. I think not a lot of people expected them to wind up at 20 billion. A lot of people assume that the

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  Because, I mean, there's two sides to it. One is like when, if you read the actual social capital, the actual social capital like memo that Chamath put together, it's, it makes so much sense to invest at the valuation he did. Because Jonathan, the CEO and the founder was early on the TPU team, the father of the TPU, like the guy understands how to make a chip that does one thing really well.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  This was what, seven years before people in tech broadly knew what the TPU was?

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, very, very early. Yeah, crazy. But the, so there was always like that sort of bull case that it was like, it was a real team, real expertise, building something real. But with a lot of the custom silicon, the custom chips, you sort of like point your bow and then you release the arrow and then you just like wait like five or 10 years. Because like tape out, just, just tape out, just like going from the design of the chip to actually getting the first one made takes like 18 months or something like that. Like it takes years and then, and then you're sort of locked into the specific spec and you're building an ecosystem of developers that can run on your chips. And so like there's this, you, you make a bet on a certain architecture and there's other firms right now that are betting on like, we're going super long with transformer architecture.

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  We're going super long cerebrus, like wafer scale. We're, we want to put the whole model on one chip instead of a rack, instead of a rack of a whole bunch of chips. Or we want to be really memory constrained or have a ton of memory or something like that. So you make your decisions about what trade offs you're making and then you kind of just wait and you hope that people come up with a use for what you made. And with Groq, people were like, oh, okay, it's fast. When, when Llama came out, people were like, oh, it can stream tokens really, really fast. It's very cool. Some of the demos are really cool. But there was, there were also a flip side where people were saying, well, it was very expensive to do those demos and maybe it wouldn't scale properly. But I think there was a little bit of like, like, uh, the, the, the team is great, obviously.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  And I think Groq was probably getting comped, like, you, you were effectively looking at like Groq V2 versus like TPU V7. And you weren't necessarily accounting for like, okay, if you continue to invest in this, like Jensen will, obviously, and the team's great, and they have somewhat of a direction. And there's also some sort of bifurcation of the models where sometimes you need a really big model, sometimes you need a really small model, sometimes you need a model that's in your phone, sometimes you need a model that's in a data center, sometimes you need a model in space.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  And sometimes you need a chip company that sponsors the winner of the Constructors Championship. Groq sponsored McLaren.

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Which they won. It was a good omen.

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:03:03Jordi Hays?

  Jensen saw that. He's like, I got a lot of cash. Why not buy a winning, I mean, they're the, the, the chip company that's sponsoring the winning team.

• 1:03:11John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Pretty compelling. Meanwhile, Red Bull, loser.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  No chips.

• 1:03:15Jordi Hays?

  Works with Oracle. Oracle stock.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  Been down in the dump.

• 1:03:20John Coogan?

  Ridiculous.

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Just doing entirely F1-based analysis. Sponsorship-based analysis of markets. Anyways, continue.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Um, so, yeah, I mean, I, I, I think, uh, as, as this, I, I, I heard an interesting take that, uh, that one of the wafer scale bull cases that if compute does go to space, you don't necessarily want a rack in space because not only does that take up more space, but you, there's so many different points of failure of like, is this connected to this? Is this connected to that? Whereas if you just have like one big, you have the entire model just on one chip, you could potentially put that in space much easier. But Groq made a specific bet and, and it's still, it's not like it, it totally panned out and it's like they're winning right now. Um, like TPU is the hot thing, but then, uh, there's, you know, Nvidia, you know, GB200s are still like flying off the shelves and there's all these debates about Blackwell and stuff. And, uh, and Nvidia is doing great, but

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  I think if you look to the future where there's different models for different things, sometimes you need something really fast, sometimes you need something really smart, then you want to be able to control, you know, all of the different chip architectures, all of the different chips. And, and I remember, didn't Jonathan tell us he doesn't fab at TSMC? I believe he told us that, and I'm, I'm pretty sure that's true. And so there is also-

• 1:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Where would he?

• 1:04:37John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe either Samsung or Global Foundries, I believe. And then I think-

• 1:04:41Jordi Hays?

  By the way, we gotta give a shout out to Ryan, Ryan Seabert, LinkedIn chat. He says, "W-Stream best content on LinkedIn."

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  Let's go, Ryan. Thank you for watching.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  One of our two. We typically will have like three viewers on LinkedIn.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  Thanks for Restream.

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, yeah, thanks to Restream, we are there. So, thank you. Thank you for tuning in.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  So, uh, closing out Groq, there's a few different takes. Tyler Hodge says, "It appears Groq will return over $4 billion to Social Capital and Chamath. I don't know how big the fund was, but it's safe to say this is one of the best venture outcomes of all time. Unbelievable. Power laws rule everything around."

• 1:05:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay, uh, yeah, just getting, so, did you, did you read this as like defensive at all?

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  This? Tyler?

• 1:05:29Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying, I'm saying just buying-

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, oh.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Like, is this offense or defense for Jensen? Clearly, he's got the, he's got the, uh, he's just got a lot of cash. He's gotta do something with it. Divid, he's not gonna just dividend out cash. He's willing to take bets with it. He's investing in all the labs, all the Neo clouds, right?

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  I, I mean, I think he's like, almost, like, even though he's not literally the richest person in the world, he's running the biggest company, so he has the most capital, like, fire around at places.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  And I think to put, to put this into perspective, this is like us saying, investing in a nice camera, right?

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:06Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's not the kind of, like, it's, we take, like, Jensen took-

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, sometimes you send the wire up for-

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Jensen personally led this process. It took him two weeks. He wired early. You, you would do the same thing for, for a nice camera.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  But I don't, I, I, I guess the bigger question is like, is, is Nvidia spread too thin? And, uh, they don't even own a social network. Every other, every other Mag7 company owns a social network, right? Facebook, Amazon has Twitch. Maybe they should.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Nvidia chat just for AI researchers on rumble, something like that. I don't know. But but it feels like it feels like the DJX Lepton, the cloud that was competing with some of their customers. It feels like they sort of pulled back on that. It feels like they've remained as much of a pure play as you can at that scale. And so this feels like, I don't know, maybe it's a little defensive, but it feels just like a very natural extension of what they already do, which is selling chips. It would be very different if we were if we were seeing them like, oh, they're they're they're they're buying power assets. And they're going to build their own data centers and they want to get into or they want to step on Oracle's toes and they want to step on Crusoe's toes or anyone else's toes.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  So I don't know. But let's go into Gavin Baker and what he says about Nvidia buying Grok. He says Nvidia is buying Grok for two reasons. Inference is disaggregating into pre-fill and decode. SRAM architectures have unique advantages in decode for workloads where performance is primarily a function of memory bandwidth. Ruben CPX, Ruben and the putative Ruben SRAM variant derived from Grok should give Nvidia the ability to mix and match chips to create the optimal balance of performance versus cost for each workload. Ruben CPX is optimized for massive context windows during pre-fill as a result of super high memory capacity with its relatively low bandwidth GDDR DRAM.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Ruben is the workhorse for training and high-density batched inference workloads with its HBM DRAM striking a balance between memory bandwidth and capacity. The Grok-derived Ruben SRAM is optimized for ultra-low latency agentic reasoning inference workloads as a result of SRAM's extremely high memory bandwidth and at the cost of lower memory capacity. In the latter case, either CPX or the normal Ruben will likely be used for pre-fill. Two, it has been clear for a long time that SRAM architectures can hit token per second metrics much higher than GPUs, TPUs, or any ASIC that we have seen yet, extremely low latency per individual user at the expense of throughput per dollar. It was less clear 18 months ago whether end users were willing to pay for the speed. SRAM, more expensive per token

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  due to much smaller batch sizes. It is now abundantly clear from Cerberus and Grok's recent results that users are willing to pay for speed. And so we've seen this with a lot of the, you know, the meme of like, you're sitting there waiting for a deep research report in ChatGPT, or you're firing off Claude code and then you're just waiting and you're scrolling or you're doing something else. And, and there's just, there's a lot of like, you know, sitting around waiting around. And now the really good developers are able to orchestrate six different Claude code instances all at once. But everyone would be happy with faster responses. And most people are in this weird in-between where they're paying $200 a month for something that they're using constantly and is doing

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  like all of their job. And so would they pay $2,000 a month for something that's 10 times faster or even two times faster? In many cases, yes, if they're doing extremely economically valuable work. And so anything that can, that can offer a different dimension of optimization on that parade of frontier is going to be interesting. And that's why you're seeing folks try and become not just GPU rich, but like ASIC rich on a particular, on a particular scaler vector of the, of the performance trade off curve.

• 1:10:04Jordi Hays?

  We should get Andrew from Cerberus back on the show because he came on for five minutes. It was one of those days when we had like 20 guests.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  And we were like, this guy's like a legend.

• 1:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Eight billion dollar company.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  I'm glad we could ring the gong for you, but this feels disrespectful at this point. Anyway, let me tell you about vibe.co where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like Meta.

• 1:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Super pumped to partner with Vibe. We love advertising.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  We love advertising.

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  And I have some insight into their metrics. And this is a company that you should potentially join. If you love advertising, I would, I would be excited to go work there.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Oh, great.

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Pumped to partner with them. Uh, should we talk about, uh?

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  DoorDash.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  DoorDash. Well, no, we're not talking about, we're not talking about DoorDash.

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  What are we talking about?

• 1:10:55Jordi Hays?

  We're talking about a post that people assumed was about DoorDash.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, and.

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  Okay, so the, the, the post is titled, "Holy effing ass."

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  Not swearing really, really hurts the quality, or you can read it on the screen. But, uh, he's very sensational. So it's a screenshot from Reddit. It has 36 million views and 207,000 likes. It's a massive post. Um, it got 11,000 uploads on Reddit. So, uh, it says, "I am a developer of, for a major food delivery app. The priority fee and driver benefit fee go 100% to the company. The driver sees 0% of it, $0 of it." So here's where it gets conspiratorial. It says, "I am posting this from a library wifi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don't care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  I've been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code get pushed."

• 1:11:55Jordi Hays?

  I hope they sue me, but I'm on a library wifi with a burner laptop?

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  We're gonna dig into all the different aspects of this, but this is crazy. Some people in the chat already read this, but we're gonna go through it. Um, so, uh, "Just watching the code getting pushed to production. I can't sleep at night knowing I helped to build this machine. You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but reality, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I'm a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings with, where product managers, PMs, thanks." Discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of quote "human assets." That's literally what they call drivers in the database schema. They talk about these people that like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent. First off, the priority delivery is a total scam.

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  It was pitched to us as a psychological value add. Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a Boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up. We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders. We just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by five to 10 minutes by making the priority, to make the priority ones feel faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. Wait, so it does, this is incorrect because he says it is, it does nothing to speed you up, but like you are getting a faster delivery there.

• 1:13:27John Coogan?

  I mean, it's like, it's even in this scenario, it's like maybe unethical, but like this is actually a bull case for paying $2.99. Because like if the default service is actually slower and $2.99 gets me five to 10 minutes faster.

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  This made me think they should add a feature that's, whenever you get around, I'll take it whenever you get around to it. And so it's just like, it's just like, really, really.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  I'm feeling lucky.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, no, it's just like the lowest cost version.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  You might not get the pizza for three hours.

• 1:13:56John Coogan?

  Do you remember that or Uber Pool, those?

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Amazon does this for packages too. So you get a credit if you like take it to.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you get like a Kindle store credit or something on Prime. It's kind of interesting. But yeah, so I use DoorDash pretty regularly. I never pay for priority delivery because the time always seems about the same. And so I just don't care and I never push that button. But this makes me feel like the button works, even though he's saying it does nothing to speed you up. And so that's kind of odd, but anyway, it goes on that to much darker places. He says. But the thing that makes me sick, the main reason I'm quitting is the desperation score. We have a hidden metric that driver, for drivers, that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  If a driver usually logs on at 10:00 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as high desperation. Once they are tagged, the system deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is, why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he's desperate enough to do it for $6? We save the good tips for the casual drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience while the full-timers get grinded into dust. That feels like that might not work, like it might just wind up putting like a strain on the entire system and just slowing. You feel like you would just want to like optimize for the fastest possible delivery at all times, but I don't know. Anyway, theoretically, this could be happening. Then there is the benefit fee.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  You've probably seen that $1.50 regulatory response fee or the driver benefits fee that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like it's you're helping the worker. In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for policy defense and that fee feeds directly into it. That's so, that's so interesting. I, I, I feel like.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  That's not really how.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  That's not really how money works, right?

• 1:15:54Jordi Hays?

  It's like route, you know.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  This is earmarked for this.

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  It's not a guy in linear being like, tag the, you know, revenue from this product.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Send it to that.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  No, no, you know what this is? This is, this is like dude logic for being like, oh, oh, I got, I got a, I got a $5,000 bonus. Like this is watch money. I should buy a watch or something like that. Like, like this, this money is for this thing, right? It's like, oh, I got a bonus. I get, I'm buying a car with this, with this money. Instead of just being like, no, you have a pool of money that is, that is completely fungible and liquid.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I would say so, so in restaurants.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Around LA, you'll see like an employee well-being charge, which is like one, you know, one to three, four, sometimes five percent that is going, and I would assume that is going entirely to. The employees, right?

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Well, so there's two different things.

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  The place we go for breakfast.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, has a charge.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  That, that they advertise as going to the healthcare.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  For the employees.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Jordi Hays?

  And so if it turns out that restaurant owner.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:06Jordi Hays?

  Was taking that money and kind of putting it towards rent. I would be very upset.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  So, so that I can understand the general.

• 1:17:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Jordi Hays?

  The general framing here.

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, all, all of this is, I mean.

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  That, well, so, so, so the key difference is like, is the money actually fungible? Or, or is it a function? Because i- in theory, like tips go to the service workers. And if the restaurant has a great year and lots of people come in and they all tip a lot. Then that money goes directly to the workers as a bonus, right? And so they, they, they get that delivered to them. If you say, hey, the tips go to the workers.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Just say you haven't worked in a restaurant.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  What do you mean? Oh, they, because it's pooled?

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, when I, when I worked in a, at a, at a restaurant, we'd get the tips. I mean, most of the tips were daily. You get paid out.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But, but it is a function of the business. Uh, it's directly aligned with the business progress.

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  And so, and so you would expect that if, if this delivery service, which everyone is alleging is DoorDash. Um, uh, if, if there are a lot of deliveries, there are a lot of people paying $1.50 for driver benefits. And so that creates a larger pool for driver benefits. If the amount of drivers stays flat, then the amount of driver benefits should increase. If that's not happening, then that is a violation of this promise, right? Basically.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Uh, in reality, the money goes straight to this corporate slush fund, they, they say. So, uh, and regarding tips, we're essentially doing tip theft 2.0. We don't steal them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay. Uh, if the algo predicts you are a high tipper and you'll likely drop $10. It offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip zero, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. Uh, the result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver, it's subsidizing us. You're paying their wage so we don't have to. I'm drunk and angry, ask me anything before this gets taken down.

• 1:19:02Jordi Hays?

  I mean, really, I mean, first of all.

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Gotta feel bad for this person who, if it's real, they just quit working at a delivery app.

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Jordi Hays?

  As a software and backend software engineer. Now they're drunk in a public library.

• 1:19:16John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  On a burner laptop.

• 1:19:18John Coogan?

  Are you allowed to be drunk in a library? That feels like you shouldn't be drunk.

• 1:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Drunk and angry in a, in a, in a public library on a burner. Imagine, did they, when did they buy the burner laptop? Did they get drunk before they bought, did they get drunk and then go buy the burner laptop and then hit the library?

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:19:35Jordi Hays?

  Or is this very premeditated?

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's a, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  No, I do. So, so I, I get extremely, I'm extremely frustrated. I will say this, like, this feels like,

• 1:19:47John Coogan?

  Have you actually worked in a restaurant?

• 1:19:48Jordi Hays?

  This feels like, this feels like fan, yes.

• 1:19:50John Coogan?

  Really? What restaurant?

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in, uh, in, in high school.

• 1:19:54John Coogan?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  I worked at a, my first, my first job, first job outside of reffing soccer was picking up cigarette butts with my hands.

• 1:20:03John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:20:04Jordi Hays?

  For two hours in the morning.

• 1:20:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  And then I'd go at a restaurant and then I'd go work at a surf shop. Then I actually worked my way up the restaurant from picking up the cigarette, uh, butts off.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Picking up cigars.

• 1:20:15Jordi Hays?

  It was just pure cigarette butts. I was like, I was like, I think I was.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  Wait, people could smoke indoors or something?

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was like a, it was a brewery.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, still around.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  So people would sit out, sit outside?

• 1:20:25Jordi Hays?

  They'd sit outside late at night and so that they would go until like.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  This is a child in this smoke filled environment?

• 1:20:30Jordi Hays?

  And I'd go in and like, I'd go pick up the cigarette butts with my hands. I didn't even wear gloves. Very, very, very gross.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Disgusting.

• 1:20:37Jordi Hays?

  And so, so I, so this feels like it's fan, fan fiction.

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's certainly some truth to it, which is the truth is that like, if you're using a delivery app, you should assume the delivery app is trying to get as much money as possible from you.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  And going to psychologically manipulate you.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Into feeling better about the order, feeling better about the value, feeling like you're supporting this, this, this person.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  It's on its way. They're gonna do everything they can UX wise to make it a delightful experience or someone that's.

• 1:21:07Jordi Hays?

  And as somebody who.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  Keep coming back more.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  I appreciate the, I appreciate the, the art of tipping. There's an art to it. It's, uh, it's something I've always enjoyed doing because I'm always getting a service and I wanna, uh, and I, uh, at multiple times in my life worked for, for tips. So having this sort of digital. Intermediary.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Jordi Hays?

  That is messing with that relationship sucks, right? Like if I order, if I order groceries and somebody's driving all around, I want to give them.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:42Jordi Hays?

  A meaningful amount of money for doing this service.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  And so if, if you have a, this intermediary that's kind of messing with that and that's super frustrating.

• 1:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Again, I don't, I, I don't know exactly where this goes, right? This is clearly a product that.

• 1:22:01Jordi Hays?

  Participants on both sides are happily, maybe not happily, but they're still like. You know, you can say you hate these platforms, but you're still using them.

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  And people are still accepting.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  These jobs. There are people that as much as they don't like the experience maybe of being the labor side of this equation. Are ultimately still like the flexibility of being able to earn $10 here, $20 there, et cetera.

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  The thing that always bugged me was when there's not enough financial education among the workers that you saw like Uber drivers. Who would be like renting a car or they'd buy a car with high depreciation and they wouldn't factor the depreciation into their wages. And so they were actually upside down on the deal and losing money every month. That felt like, whoa, okay, like there needs to be something that helps that. I know that there, at least with the Uber days, there were some forums where people would go and calculate the highest ROI. Vehicle you could possibly buy. And sometimes it was Tesla. Sometimes it was, you know, oh, you get this version of the Escalade. That's four years old, so it's already depreciated and then you can do Uber Black and it's the highest ROI possible.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  But, but if, if someone's not doing that, then they could actually not be making money, which is very rough. But anyway.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  Tony rebutted this and said, this is not DoorDash and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated this kind of culture. The, the, the kind of culture described in this Reddit post, there's so much wrong with this post. Dashers are not human assets. Having a metric like a desperation score is an abomination. We've never had a driver benefit fee. Why would, why would you charge for faster delivery, but not make it faster? We're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we work every day to make our platform better for everyone who comes to it. What's described here is appalling, and if true, whoever's operating in this manner should be ashamed. And DoorDash, the official account quoted as well and said the awful claims in this post clearly hit a nerve. To be clear, this Reddit post is not about DoorDash. Given how differently

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  we operate, we thought we'd take a moment to share what our approach is actually like. And there was a whole bunch of back and forth. Some people were screenshotting it, saying that it might have been AI-generated. And I think that's not a good rebuttal, because first off, just, you know, I read the whole thing. It doesn't feel like it's written by AI. But even so, if you're, if you're a whistleblower, and you have a bunch of information to share, I don't see a problem with passing that through an LLM to punch it up and get it spell-checked and grammar-checked. Like, it might not do you any good if people feel like it's written by AI, and they feel like, oh, this is just someone trolling on Reddit anonymously. But

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  What I would like to better, what I would like to better understand is how many people, what the actual churn is like on the, on the driver side of these businesses? Because, you know, people talk about, you know, this acceptance rate, and who gets what jobs, and things like that. In a traditional environment, like in a restaurant, if you are like a server, let's say, and your manager is like, hey, like, you're, you're in this kind of zone. Like, you're, you're in the zone of the restaurant. Any table that comes in here, you're handling today. And the server's like, well, I don't want to do that table, because I don't think they're going to tip very well. Or that person always comes in, and they just sort, they,

• 1:25:24Jordi Hays?

  they, they're, they're needy, but they don't order that much, and it's not going to be a big bill. Like, that manager would probably end up, like, firing the person, right? You have to, like, kind of accept the good and the bad, right? Whereas for this, it's different, because DoorDash doesn't actually employ these people. The drivers, I think, like the flexibility of the work. I think that's like a big value prop. And so Again, like it, it creates this scenario where you have to use bunch of weird incentives to make the, to ultimately make the entire, like, if half the time you went on DoorDash, like your food never got delivered, the service would cease to exist because people would just be like, well, I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna drive and go pick it up myself.

• 1:26:08Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure some people would argue that, that, uh, that that's actually good.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  But anyway.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  The big question is, did he tip his librarian? He was at the library drinking. I think, if you're getting drinks at the library, I didn't even know you could get drinks served at the library. That's awesome. I want to go to this library.

• 1:26:29Jordi Hays?

  So at least hit the librarian with a buzz ball.

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  For sure. For sure.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is a life, life hack.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  If you have a 30, if you bring a 30 rack into the, you throw it down on the desk.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Throw a buzz ball to the librarian as a sign of respect.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Librarian, beer me, beer me, brother. If you're gonna be in here posting on Reddit and, and chugging beers all day long. Tip me, tip me. Oh, well.

• 1:26:57Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I hope that 2026 is the year of the buzz ball.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  You're, you're into buzz balls. I was, uh, buzz balls were post my time. I never had one.

• 1:27:05Jordi Hays?

  They were big when I was in college. And what I appreciate now, in college, people were ready for buzz balls. Like you were trained, you were, no, you were, you were trained in the sense of like, if somebody threw a buzz ball at you, your arms are staying at the side.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, wait. Oh, this is a, this is like a prank. I, I'm, I'm completely unfamiliar with it. Tell me the culture of the buzz ball.

• 1:27:22Jordi Hays?

  The culture of the buzz ball. So you get a buzz ball, obviously like near the checkout at any type of like.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  Yes, I've seen, I've seen them. I've seen them.

• 1:27:29Jordi Hays?

  And so the idea is like, you're going to buy the thing that you're actually gonna drink. You just pick up one of these. They have a few, it's the equivalent of a few shots of just terrible alcohol.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  That's pretty strong for a single.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very strong.

• 1:27:39John Coogan?

  It's more than a single serving, about.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very strong. It tastes terrible. So it's like a punishment. You would never drink the, one of these for fun.

• 1:27:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  And, and you go back to whatever, your house or apartment and you, you throw the ball at somebody. If they catch it, they have to drink it.

• 1:27:53John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Normally if you throw something at somebody and they're not expecting it, they're gonna catch it. They're like, what, what's going on?

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  But in, in, in kind of at least the heyday of buzz ball for me,

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28:03Jordi Hays?

  you knew this was something that could, a threat that could come out of nowhere at any time. It could come out at 9:00 AM, right? 10:00 AM. And so you're gonna keep your hands down and you're not gonna catch it. You'll, like, kinda, you'll, you'll sidestep it.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  But now.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  What if it like smashes in the TV? Are there like buzzball disasters that happen?

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure there are.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Results in a lot of destruction.

• 1:28:22Jordi Hays?

  And but now people, people are not, I hit my dear friend Ben, Ben Taft. He's a venture capitalist. He's my neighbor.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  You hit him with a buzzball? When? A couple of days ago?

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  Like three weeks ago. He was fully unprepared, fully unprepared. He just caught it.

• 1:28:37John Coogan?

  Well, I would be unprepared.

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  I was like, I feel bad that, I feel bad that you, that you caught this.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Scoot in the chat says, I already got the CEO of Substack to drink a buzzball. This is good lore.

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  This is good, Scoot.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Good, Scoot. See, see.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Tyler, is, is the, is the, is the culture of the buzzball alive and well on college campuses? Or do we just send you back?

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm not 21. I never had alcohol.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Uh, well, well, maybe we have to send you back for, for, for one, one non-GAAP semester day on your 21st birthday to go experience, uh, college life and, and the life of the buzzball. Anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay, let's, uh, let's go to, uh, one of the more viral posts from the last, uh, few weeks from the holiday.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Kick us off, read this.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you want me to read it?

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:33Jordi Hays?

  You want me to read it?

• 1:29:34John Coogan?

  I've read three or four posts.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I'm kidding. Um, uh, this is just one.

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  We can trade off.

• 1:29:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so Justin says, am I just a monster? It's been four years since I became a father and I'm beginning to fear for my soul. The truth is, I just don't like being around kids for very long. Historically, this is not uncommon among fathers, but today it feels almost illegal. It's causing me a lot of confusion, uh, confusion and anguish. The ideal amount of time I would like to spend playing with my kids is probably about 70 to 140 minutes a week, roughly 10 minutes each day, maybe two times a day, taking breaks from work. My feelings of love towards them are perfectly strong, but I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about 10 minutes. My blood starts to boil. I just want to be working or accomplishing something. I try to be grateful, but it doesn't work. It's 9:00 AM this morning, Saturday, January 3rd. It's a sunny, warm day here in Austin.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  My four-year-old son is begging me to play catch in the street. I was drinking coffee, still waking up, so I didn't really feel like it. But at this age, his desire to play is insatiable. He begged and begged, so I conceded and with a smile. I have no problem being a kind and loving father. The problem is I only, is only that I do not enjoy it.

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 1:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Very, very brave to, uh, to post this. It's not that I'm trying to maximize-

• 1:30:46John Coogan?

  But we haven't seen the other side of this. What if his son is like, "Yeah, bro, I don't enjoy it either."

• 1:30:51Jordi Hays?

  What if, what if this is gonna be like a generational, you know, father-son rivalry where-

• 1:30:57John Coogan?

  Some, some patricide going on, coming from the ground. I don't know.

• 1:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, Justin continues, "It's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure. It just seems wrong that I experience so little delight when my dad friends all claim to experience so much. It was beautiful. We live on a picturesque tree-lined block. I am even relatively relaxed from the holiday rest-

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Tree-lined blocks.

• 1:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for tree-lined blocks. Great places to raise family. Uh, playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic peak experience, yet for every single minute on the inside, I just don't want to be there. I want to be drinking my coffee in peace. Then I feel guilty and absurdly ungrateful and ashamed. When we're done, I know that when he is a teenager, I'll long to have these days back. I have all of this perspective rationally, and I've been very patient and steadfast trying to digest it, but nothing fixes me emotionally. Am I a terrible person, or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal? And it's modern parenting norms that are off. Whether it's my fault or not, I don't even care. I just want to figure this out. Something is wrong, and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this."

• 1:31:58John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, a lot of people weighed in. 14 million views. 3,000 reposts and 5,000 likes.

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would ultimately say this is the, the worst, uh, like-to-view ratio.

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 1:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Means that a lot of-

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  And seven, more replies than likes. Uh, crazy, crazy stuff. Uh, anyway, I, I like Justin. He's been on the show. He, he came and talked to us about Nick Land. He's a very interesting thinker, uh, very interesting writer. Um, I think-

• 1:32:25Jordi Hays?

  And one, one thing that, that, uh, part of what he talked about was like how you can make it as an independent writer or creative.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:34Jordi Hays?

  And so I think you have to view this post from the lens of somebody who is-

• 1:32:40Jordi Hays?

  Like their primary focus in life right now is escaping the permanent underclass.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  But also outside of institutions, like he he's not in an academic organization.

• 1:32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51John Coogan?

  He he could be doing like writing or in-house somewhere at some tech company or something. I think he was talking to us a little bit about that. But but he's been very, very independent and that obviously creates the type of work that consumes all and seeps into all sorts of cracks because there's no moment when you're like, okay, I'm logging off and my boss doesn't expect me to do anything until Monday. It's like, oh, you could always be doing a little bit more when you're effectively an entrepreneur. So there's a little bit of that in here. I think in general, skill issue, skill issue. I love Justin, but skill issue. You have to use what I call the Dan Bilzerian method.

• 1:33:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay, parenting.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Of parenting, the Dan Bilzerian method, especially this works especially well for four-year-old boys. So you just assume you're Dan Bilzerian, but instead of entertaining like an Instagram girl, you're entertaining a four-year-old. So you're like, hey, want to get in a really fast car and drive around fast? They're like, absolutely. That sounds amazing. Want to go look at fine watches? Want to go, you know, want to go look at guns or whatever else? Like whatever Dan Bilzerian does, want to learn poker, buddy? I'd be like, absolutely, I want to play cards. Four-year-old boys have the mind of Dan Bilzerian effectively. And so before you say, oh, yeah, I can't.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  It's even more expansive than that.

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  I can't, I can't afford a, you know, fancy car like Dan Bilzerian. A four-year-old cannot tell the difference between an SF90 and a Dodge Viper. Just get the Dodge Viper.

• 1:34:17Jordi Hays?

  Get a red car.

• 1:34:18John Coogan?

  Get a red car.

• 1:34:19Jordi Hays?

  Ferrari.

• 1:34:19John Coogan?

  They will, they will be, they will be so stoked. My son wants to have a Blackwing themed birthday party. And I'm like, dude, we're not, we're not doing a Cadillac CT5V Blackwing themed birthday party. It is a very weird thing. I got this car half jokingly. I know you love it because it goes room and it goes very fast and he's very excited about it. But truly, like you have to return to like four-year-old boy mentality. And that is the mentality of Dan Bilzerian. And so if you adopt the mind of Dan Bilzerian, you will have a very enjoyable time with your four year old son. But I, I think the bigger picture is that, is that like, Justin probably just doesn't like playing catch. And that's fine. Like, my son is into soccer.

• 1:35:04Jordi Hays?

  I think it's slightly, I think it's slightly deeper than that. I think if you're not satisfied with where you are in life as a man, whose job is to provide for your family, if you're not satisfied with your life, you will not be satisfied by parenting.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  Unless, unless you're behind the, the wheel of Dodge Viper, that's red.

• 1:35:23Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes. But what I understand here is, is my, my reading of it is like, he doesn't feel sad, like, he doesn't, he, he, like, it's maybe a sense of, uh, stress. It's hard to enjoy just playing catch, or going for a walk, or, uh,

• 1:35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, because he can't drive his car.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  Over the last two weeks, I was spending all day with my wife and kids, and it's raining, right? So you're kind of like stuck indoors and you're, and our options are like, going outside, like, I would go outside and we would walk around and like, pick up slugs and like, fucks, right? Because,

• 1:36:00John Coogan?

  Dan Bilzerian.

• 1:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Dan Bilzerian, four year old mode. And I, I felt at peace. I was enjoying that, in part because we worked so hard last year. I was like, you know, norm, historic, historically on Christmas breaks, I was like, I would be annoyed that it was the holidays, because I'd be like, it's inappropriate for me to email somebody and say like, hey, let's talk right. It felt like hitting, you know, needing to slow down for like, this couple of speed bumps, when you're trying to go 100 miles an hour. And so, yeah, I think that's, I, I ultimately think that's, uh, that's just a huge part of it. It's like, the more satisfied you are by your life, as a father, the more satisfied you'll be just doing the simple things of life.

• 1:36:43Jordi Hays?

  With your kids. The other thing, the other thing that's, that, that I've noticed is the more time you spend with your kids, the more enjoyable it is. It's actually like,

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:36:54Jordi Hays?

  If, if you don't spend a lot of time with your kids, you'll spend, you know, 10 minutes, you'll get that sort of endorphin

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:01Jordi Hays?

  rush and that's, that's enjoyable and then it kind of drops off from there.

• 1:37:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:05Jordi Hays?

  But the more like it, it, there's increasing returns to scale.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I've been playing Mario Kart with my son and he beat me for the first time ever, uh, just yesterday. And it was like this, like very interesting moment, very cool. Felt very fun. Uh, but also it's like, I just, I enjoy playing Mario Kart. So,

• 1:37:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  And same with like when we do Legos now.

• 1:37:31Jordi Hays?

  And so now you guys can start.

• 1:37:32John Coogan?

  I feel like it gets better and better.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  You can start gambling his allowance on Mario Kart. Introduce him to, introduce him to, uh,

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  He's not an allowance. Maybe, maybe you should get an allowance. Every once in a while he like acquires coins randomly somehow and like, he's very proud of that. Uh, but yeah, I, I do think that there's, there's something to be said for trying to find activities that align because a four-year-old, specifically a four-year-old boy, I think, I mean, that's not my only experience, but a four-year-old boy with, with a father, uh, is like the most memetic creature possible. Like he's literally just looking to you for everything. So you can say, I like dinosaurs and he'll be like, I'm so into dinosaurs. But you, but if you're not into dinosaurs, you can be like, actually I want to go look at horses today or something. Whatever you're into, like they will be alongside, like, uh, there, there's times when I can like, like, whenever we're in the car, like we, he, he doesn't request.

• 1:38:23Jordi Hays?

  Get ready to read the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  Get ready to read the Wall Street Journal, buddy.

• 1:38:26Jordi Hays?

  I actually am, I actually am excited. I'm excited for that.

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  All, all, I will read, I will read all sorts of stories to him. And yeah, I have to stop and like explain them in like I'm five, literally explain them like I'm four, but it's still fun. And same thing with the music, like, uh, he, he wants to listen to my playlist. Like he wants to listen to rock music and like the songs that I like.

• 1:38:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  And yeah, I do, I do a light filter so that there's no like.

• 1:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Part, part of that is almost leadership. I think, uh,

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  My son loves dinosaur is probably, you know, if there was this Spotify.

• 1:38:58John Coogan?

  And you took a class on dinosaurs.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes, yes. No, but what I was gonna say, if there was like a kid's book Spotify wrapped, he'd be in the top point oh oh oh one percent of dinosaur enjoyers. The problem is like, I read, I read to him before bed every night, right? Seven days a week we're reading. If, if he was just like deciding what we were gonna read, it'd be dinosaurs every night.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  And it's so hard to pronounce.

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  Dude, you gotta give me some dinosaur book racks because uh we.

• 1:39:24Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but let me finish. So where I got to is I'm like, okay, like I, we gotta introduce, we gotta introduce more books because like if, if we're, there, there are like kids oriented books, even for like the four year old range.

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:36Jordi Hays?

  That are more, that are like interesting parables, stories, et cetera, that are just like.

• 1:39:40John Coogan?

  Timeless.

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Timeless and worth reading.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Jordi Hays?

  And so I've like enjoyed massively over the break, like switching it up a lot. We got like a comic book, comic book style, like action comic of the Bible, right? So we're reading that, right? And that's like, he enjoys it, I enjoy it. It's just like, you, you gotta be like switching it up and not, at the same time, like you wanna be leaning into their interests, but not, not overly, uh, just doing whatever, like generate your own ideas.

• 1:40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Turn this semi-analysis deep dive into a children's book so that I can read it to myself about the TPUV seven.

• 1:40:16Jordi Hays?

  There's something, is it something there?

• 1:40:17John Coogan?

  Something there. Uh, you gotta give me some recommendations for dinosaur books because my, my son found a dinosaur toy, took a picture of it, ID'd it with uh, one of the, one of the LLMs and uh, and then he was like, I wanna know more, I wanna read books. And I realized I'm actually like woefully under-resourced when it comes to dinosaur books. Like I have like poop and none of them are particularly good. So, anyway.

• 1:40:43Jordi Hays?

  Breaking, breaking news.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Breaking news?

• 1:40:46Jordi Hays?

  We got some breaking news.

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  What's breaking news?

• 1:40:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Department of Energy just announced that it awarded General Matter 900 million for uranium.

• 1:40:54John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:40:56Jordi Hays?

  Hit that app, love and gone, John.

• 1:41:01Jordi Hays?

  It shakes, it shakes the camera. It shakes the camera.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think we gotta figure out how to hang the gong from the rafters.

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  We do. Yeah, yeah, we, we.

• 1:41:15Jordi Hays?

  We're refining, we're refining. Uh, let's, uh, let's pull this.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  Well, while we do that, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Let's move on to our breaking news. What you got for me?

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's see. So the US awards 2.7 billion worth of orders to boost uranium enrichment. So it sounds like there's a few players here. Uh, Department of Energy announced Monday it was awarding orders 2.7 to three companies to boost domestic uranium enrichment over the next 10 years in a broader effort to reduce US dependence on Russian supply.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. A lot of the, uh, a lot of the uranium comes from decommissioned missiles and stuff. So it's already been processed and then they, they, they break it apart and, and, and we, you know, just buy it from them because they're like basically denuclearizing, I believe. Um, pretty, pretty.

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's American centrifuge operating, General Matter and Orano Federal Services secured the order. The department said, if you want to sell to the government, maybe put federal services in your name.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Well, I, I, I think it's, I think that might be not a startup. I think that might be owned by the government or something like that.

• 1:42:32Jordi Hays?

  Is it? Or is it a private, is it a private? It's, uh, says it's a private company.

• 1:42:40Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, the contracts would require the companies to meet specific milestones, provide enrichment services for low enriched uranium and high assay, low enriched uranium for existing nuclear power plants and new smaller modular reactors. Today's awards show that this administration is committed to restoring a secure domestic nuclear fuel supply chain capable of producing the nuclear fuels needed to power the reactors of today and the advanced reactors of tomorrow, said Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Russia is currently the only country that makes H A L E U.

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  Hey, you.

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Uranium enriched to between 5% and 20%, which is said to make new high-tech reactors more efficient in commercial volumes. Funds to make the fuel domestically in the United States were included in a law to ban uranium shipments from Russia fully by 2028. So, big, big news.

• 1:43:34John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches in their tracks. Check out CrowdStrike. So, the Dvarkesh piece, it's, it's, it's sort of big. We might want to go through it.

• 1:43:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's save it for tomorrow.

• 1:43:56John Coogan?

  Let's save it for tomorrow. Let's skip through this. The, the, the big shift to Miami. Miami is back. This was from Teddy Schleifer in the New York Times. He writes, "News. Larry Page and Peter Thiel are making moves to leave California by the end of the year to avoid a possible billionaire's tax that could hit them where it hurts." And...

• 1:44:20Jordi Hays?

  Patrick Collison said, "Yesterday, Miami posting might be a phenomenon whose time has passed, but having just spent a few days visiting, it really does feel like a boomtown in a way that no other American city that I've spent time in over the past few years does. In some way, it reminds me of Chinese cities." Why was he in Miami? Was he just there for the Soho Beach House? Was he there to...

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  F1, maybe.

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  F1?

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  F1. F1. It takes place in Miami every year. Oh, you think he was in there like this week?

• 1:44:48Jordi Hays?

  He said, "Having just spent a few days visiting..."

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. I don't know.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Because, I mean, to be, to be clear, like, Patrick Collison would be subject to...

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  The, the billionaire tax. That Ro Khanna, Ro Khanna...

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  Former guest of the show.

• 1:45:03Jordi Hays?

  Former guest of the show.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  It was burning up the timeline.

• 1:45:04Jordi Hays?

  It was funny. So, so Ro came on the show and I asked him about something that he had said like a week prior, and he was like, "I don't agree with that." It's like, it seems, he seems to be a guy that does, it's a weak beliefs weekly held.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  Um, so, uh, anyways, uh, but yeah, it was, uh, yeah, David Sacks, uh, announced the, uh, David Sacks announced that he was going to Austin.

• 1:45:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, PT, uh, great press release, PT clearly, uh, press release respecter.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  December 31st. Ro Khanna said, Peter Thiel is leaving California if we pass a 1% tax on billionaires for five years to pay for healthcare for the working class facing steep Medicaid cuts. I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists. When they threaten to leave, I will miss them very much. So Ro Khanna will not be missing, uh, everyone that leaves. There is, the, the, the, the, the debate sort of shifted back to like, okay, if, if billionaires do leave successfully, um, what will the impact be on the technology industry? Uh, and I'm wondering if the question is not, like, Silicon Valley exists in San Francisco and Silicon

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Valley, or like, you know, the Delean idea of like, let's move Silicon Valley to Miami? Like, that didn't really happen. But is there, is there a world, I, I had this theory that Miami could become, you, you're not moving Silicon Valley to Miami, you're moving Sandhill Road to Miami. And like, no startups move to the Bay and are like, I need an office on Sandhill Road. They're like, I'll get an office in San Francisco. When I want to raise money, I'll drive down to Sandhill Road.

• 1:46:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, uh, almost every venture capitalist also just got a presence in San Francisco.

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  No, but, but what I mean is that like, there is a, there's a fundraising hub that, that, uh, that founders go and visit. And whether it's in Sandhill Road, or the Presidio, or Miami, it is accessible if you're doing a roadshow. Like, if you're taking a Series B seriously, you're probably going to spend a week in New York, you're probably going to spend a week in Miami. At this point and maybe Austin too and going around to different locales for fundraising doesn't seem that hard and.

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in in 2021.

• 1:47:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:29Jordi Hays?

  People were doing Miami road shows and they were pretty effective.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32Jordi Hays?

  You could go to Miami and get around.

• 1:47:34John Coogan?

  Miami Tech Week was in many ways that.

• 1:47:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were you were sometimes just calling back to the West Coast doing Zoom calls, but you could meet a bunch of VCs.

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, tight.

• 1:47:45John Coogan?

  And then also like most of these funds have like one or two billionaires at them. And then the vast majority of employees of the fund would not be employed. So you could have the founder or the core GP somewhere else and then the entire team there on the ground taking a ton of meetings. And if it's time to meet the big guy, you fly out or you do a Zoom call.

• 1:48:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:08John Coogan?

  And so, so I don't know that this whole idea of like transplant everyone, I guess it is a question, it is a different question for the founders because like Sam, Dario, these guys like they they cannot be in Miami and actually run an organization in San Francisco. I would imagine they just have to pay this and it'll be very odd. Well, I guess not Sam because he's like, who knows where he is in terms of equity. I mean, he's probably above it broadly, but.

• 1:48:35Jordi Hays?

  Every definition that a.

• 1:48:37John Coogan?

  He's like, would you like some nonprofit credits?

• 1:48:39Jordi Hays?

  No, every, every.

• 1:48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure Sam is close to a billionaire just off of his stripe.

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, just off of other stuff, for sure, for sure.

• 1:48:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  The car collection.

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Here's a theory. Okay, Sam is actually behind this because it's going to force Dario either to pay a massive fine or they're going to have to move, right? That's better for OpenAI because he doesn't have the.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, get the tinfoil hat on.

• 1:49:03Jordi Hays?

  So Sam is actually behind this.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  He's getting everyone out of Silicon Valley so he can stay there.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  I mean, maybe I somehow don't, I somehow don't think that's gonna. Uh, that's what's going on. Uh, anyway, uh, Ro Khanna.

• 1:49:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the funny thing that this whole wealth tax debate was happening almost at the same time as the Somali daycare.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Somali daycare. Yeah, which was very odd because, uh, it's, it, it, there's this question of like, how effective is government? Like, once you get the money into the government, it sounds very nice that it's like, oh, it could be redistributed, but if it all gets like stolen.

• 1:49:31Jordi Hays?

  Which was funny, which was funny, uh, because we, we've had a recurring bit on the show.

• 1:49:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:36Jordi Hays?

  Where we said like, is PT really a billionaire? Like, I've never seen him in Chrome heart.

• 1:49:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:41Jordi Hays?

  I've never seen him wearing Ricoh.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then the guys.

• 1:49:44Jordi Hays?

  I've never seen him with a, with an RM, a racing machine on the wrist, right? And the Somali daycare founder was actually rocking Chrome.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  For a press conference.

• 1:49:54John Coogan?

  It's actually crazy, yeah. You know, uh, on, on the, on the question of like, of like, is the government effective at just redistribution broadly? Um, that I, I was reflecting on this fact that there, you can kind of put the billionaires in two camps. There's like, uh, let's call them like the bleeding hearts that like, they sign the giving pledge and they say, I'm going to give away half my wealth or all my wealth. Um, and then there's like the, the ruthless capitalists say, I'm not giving away anything. I'm just going to pass it on to my kids, right? Uh, and, and so there's those two camps and, and let's, let's call the bleeding hearts, like they really do want to give away. They want to do, uh, they, they want to leave their, their capital behind with other people in better ways. They want it to be given away, right? Uh, no one that I'm aware of, of the giving pledge folks has

• 1:50:39John Coogan?

  ever just said, I'm going to give my money to the government. Like, they've never just been like, oh, actually I should just give it to the federal government because the federal government is an efficient way.

• 1:50:47Jordi Hays?

  Pay down the debt.

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  To distribute, pay down the debt or just like distribute it to people in a tax rebate or something. Like, it's always been, okay, I gotta go and do like this healthcare and this cancer research and this doc, and it, it's always something more specific.

• 1:50:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bill, Bill Gates's, uh, new pledge is specifically. Going to deploy a lot of capital into Africa.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's never, it's never just, okay, yeah, like I built my wealth in California. I'm just going to give my money to the state of California, which is odd. But Rohana puts a lot of context here. He says, my district is 18 trillion dollars, nearly one third of US stock, of the US stock market. In a 50 mile radius, we have five companies with a market cap over a trillion dollar. And we have five companies with a market cap over a trillion dollar companies. This is not AI written, but maybe should be. If I can stand up for a billionaire tax, this is not a hard position for 434 other members or 100 senators, those saying we would not, we wouldn't have a future Nvidia in the bay if this tax goes into effect are glossing over Silicon Valley's history.

• 1:51:50John Coogan?

  Jensen was at LSI Logic and his co-founders at Sun. He started Nvidia in my district because of the semiconductor talent. I, I do, I do sort of agree with this. Like I, I, I think the, the effects would, it would take a very, very long time.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  No, no, the, the, the, the issue I have is the, is, uh, it's just a slippery slope down, uh, uh, the, the, the asset seizure.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. They really, they really got to build the high speed rail. Like, like all of this is just so, like the high speed rail is just such an easy dunk on all of this, like high speed rail, you know? Like, oh, you want me to run high speed rail? High speed rail didn't work. So like, nothing you do works. If I was Gavin Newsom, I feel like I'd just be like, okay, I'm actually going to go finish the high speed rail thing and then you can't say that anymore because I did it. But it's still, and it's like, we were even talking about the high, the high speed rail thing was a meme like three years ago. It's like you've had three years to go build more high speed rail and like, it just hasn't, hasn't happened. And, and I think that's like, it's, I mean, it was the, it was the cornerstone anecdote of Ezra Klein's book, Abundance with Derek Thompson. It's like the main anecdote for like a new order among like liberal Democrats.

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  And I, I thought it, I thought it did, it broke through really well because it met people where they were, which is dissatisfaction with the lack of progress, lack of building, lack of abundance.

• 1:53:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:12John Coogan?

  On, on the left and. And Ezra sort of like reset the discussion a little bit. So I don't know, I'd be interested to see where he weighs in on this particular, is he a fan? Or does he think that this is a good one?

• 1:53:27Jordi Hays?

  Friedberg had some of the best commentary on this. He absolutely mauled Roe, Connors. It was a brutal mugging. There's a quote from the All In Pod X account. They say, "Friedberg, California's billionaire taxes a Trojan horse to go after the middle class's private assets." Friedberg, "The reason they're calling it a billionaire tax is to make it easier for people to vote for it and sign up to this entirely new tax system that they're proposing to put on all Americans at some point and for the first time ever degrading our private property rights. Forget how much wealth you have, forget about how rich you are, forget about the term billionaire, millionaire, whatever it is. We're creating or proposing the creation of a new tax system that allows the government for the first time ever to come in and audit everything you own.

• 1:54:10Jordi Hays?

  All the jewelry your grandma gave you, the value of all the couches in your house, the value of your car, the value of all your stocks and bonds, and the government can come in and for the first time, look through the veil into your personal property and say, here's how much all this stuff is worth, I'm charging you a percentage of that. That's what I need to get paid. And it doesn't matter that it starts with billionaires. What matters is that we're giving the government the right to look into our private property and take a percentage of it every year. The total net worth of billionaires in the US is eight trillion. The net worth of the US, the middle class, and everyone else is 170 trillion compared to the eight trillion of the billionaires."

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  Chamot says they need a way to open the door so they go after the real honeypot. The real honeypot is not 200 people. And Friedberg continues, "Just so everyone understands what the real goal of this is not to tax billionaires because there are other ways to tax billionaires. You could charge them a capital gains tax if they borrow against their assets that they haven't paid capital gains tax on. Very simple, that can resolve this. Another thing you can do, you can raise the capital gains tax rate. Sounds unpopular, I don't agree with that, but that's another way to deal with this, which is to take the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 30%. You could do that. The real goal of this is to create, for the first time in American history, a private property asset seizure tax because they're going after the 170 trillion, not the eight trillion that the billionaires have."

• 1:55:23Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, again, the founding fathers would be absolutely disgusted with the state of our current tax structure. They would be throwing up.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  Cover the New York Post would be crazy.

• 1:55:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think people need to realize like how how far this can go. And I think that the political story of the next of the next seemingly decade, two decades, potentially as our lifetimes is politicians running on, I will raise taxes, I will take assets from people, I will take the assets from private citizens and I will redistribute them to you if you vote for me. And that feels like an incredibly vicious cycle that I don't, I don't see how it how it ever stops. So I'm so blackpilled on it, I don't even want to talk about it anymore.

• 1:56:25John Coogan?

  Well, the number, the number of billionaires has grown globally from 140 in 1987 to over 3,000 in 2025. With enough inflation, everyone will be a billionaire eventually. If we go through a period of hyperinflation, you could see everyone making billions of dollars.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  Introduce billionaire tax, print.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  Yep, hyperinflate.

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  Hyperinflate.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  I mean, you know, there's like countries where like you, there was so much inflation that people would be making billions of dollars for Loaf of Brad, basically, quadrillion dollar bills.

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm reading, reading a book on the banking system in, in the 14th and 15th century right now. And they introduced various governments would introduce wealth. They were always like going to war with other city states. And so various governments would like introduce a wealth tax. And then so people were just constantly trying to argue like, well, this isn't worth that. And they'd be putting, you know, they'd be putting assets into a bank under a bunch of different names. Like, there was tons of, tons of, tons of fraud.

• 1:57:29Jordi Hays?

  But ultimately, people do not enjoy earning, earning dollars, buying assets, and then having those assets confiscated.

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  It does feel like it will create an immense amount of jobs, like assessing all these assets. I mean, like, the, the family offices of these billionaires themselves employs like dozens of people to track everything. And then you have the flip side of that, which is the private, the state effort to monitor all those assets.

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  It's so, it just becomes, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's gonna be. Truly, it's truly an impossible, like, you know, we, we spend all of our, not all of our time, we spend a lot of our time covering the private markets, right? And so if you're a business owner, and you have a, some, uh, somebody in the government coming and saying like, hey, you made X amount, you made, you made a million dollars. We're actually looking at public comps right now, and companies in your category are trading at between 20 and 30 times earnings. So actually, you're worth, you know, uh, you're worth $50 million, and, and we have this tax where if you're worth 50 million or more, which, which, um, Elizabeth Warren has, has

• 1:58:40Jordi Hays?

  proposed a wealth tax, I think like, eight, eight, she's talked about doing like 8% above 50 million, something like that. And, uh, and so, yeah, you're, you're actually, you, you call, congratulations, you qualified for the wealth tax, and the person's like, well, we only had this much net income last year because of this one-time thing, and suddenly you're having to argue against the value of your own.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. It'd be very weird, because a lot of startups want to get the valuation as high as possible for recruiting purposes, and then you have like, for tax purposes, they want to minimize the valuation.

• 1:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's never, it's never gonna work. I was talking, I was catching up with a, a portfolio, a company founder over the break, and technically, I have shares in the company that are marked at close to seven figures, and he's considering a pivot right now, which means that like, the value of the equity is, is, is worth like, is worth like a tiny fraction, like, a tiny fraction.

• 1:59:42John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, the last round, because it's like, completely changing.

• 1:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's starting over, start basically, like, starting over from zero. Also, there's a scenario that he just shuts it down, right? And so it's like, I, I kind of put the, even though, even though like, investors in the company have that equity marked at tens of millions of dollars, I value it at effectively zero. But the government will not. The government will be like, oh, look at this reputable VC that backed, uh, that, that, that backed the company, and they just did it, they did it in the last year. Of cour-, how can you say this is not worth, that this is worthless stock? This looks like- It's worth quite a lot. And anyway, so.

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify and then let's move on to some outlooks for the future. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store.

• 2:00:30Jordi Hays?

  The backbone.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  On mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI.

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  The backbone of the internet economy.

• 2:00:36John Coogan?

  Backbone of my career. I've been using Shopify since 2012, I believe, 2013. So, yeah, over a decade on Shopify. Wow.

• 2:00:44Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's talk predictions.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  What did Scott Belsky predict for the future slash 2026? Number one, he said massive amounts of talent arbitrage. There is much fear and discussion about job losses as a result of AI, but the often young and fearless AI-native talent that is most aggressively engaging with new tech has a fascinating advantage in the current workforce. People with knowledge of the better way will run circles around their colleagues and bosses. For example, companies want to hire answer engine optimization efforts, or experts over search engine optimization practitioners. Most marketing leaders are still not conducting old-fashioned focus groups rather than using AI breakthroughs in market research.

• 2:01:28John Coogan?

  2026 provides a precious work window for younger overlooked talent to gain an advantage as early adopters. Two, the buzzy concerns around AI in Hollywood will be grounded by the reality of what audiences increasingly crave, craft, meaning, and shared experiences. The industry, this is particularly interesting because of course he works at A24. The industry will start to realize that there's a stark difference between content creators, those who willing, those willing to trade control for speed using AI to make ads and social media content, and artists, those not willing to trade control for speed, who only favor emerging technology that preserve control and precision to help new and better stories be told.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  The technology and models that ultimately elevate the craft will get lasting traction in Hollywood while the prompt-based slop tools will focus more on social content creator use cases. Finally, the idea of personalized films with audience cameos will be humbled by the realization that people favor shared experiences. Ben Thompson's talked about this a lot, the shelling point. Like Taylor Swift is a specific event, and when you go to that, when you go to that. Taylor Swift era's tour and you run into someone else who also went to the same show. You can talk about that and it's the same thing and people, even though they like personalized content, they also like being able to say, oh, do you, do you agree with Dwar Kesh's

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  take, not just, do you agree with what AI told you specifically today and you saw something completely different? People do like that shared experience and I think that's something that's a little more tractable than people give credit to. Finally, the idea of, so people want to be inspired by craft and they want a common experience to discuss or even share in theaters with friends. Did you see any movies over the break?

• 2:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is, this is why people enjoy watching TVPN is they can debate, is Tyler using the Giga Chad filter right now?

• 2:03:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:03:19Jordi Hays?

  It provides a shared experience that, that you can have a conversation around. What did, what did you say?

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  Did you see any movies over the break?

• 2:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Sicario one and two.

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  You did? Let's go. I recommended that. Give me your review.

• 2:03:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, masterpiece.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Masterpiece.

• 2:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Goes in my top five films.

• 2:03:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Ever. It's fantastic.

• 2:03:41Speaker 02

  That's because you've only seen four.

• 2:03:42Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's right, but it's still.

• 2:03:43John Coogan?

  Top five by default. Did you like, you know, the difference between one and two, like completely different team? So, so one, one is regarded as.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Wait, Taylor Sheridan didn't do two?

• 2:03:53John Coogan?

  I, I forget exactly the, the difference. I need to look it up, but Sicario two, I, I believe it had a different, I believe it had a different team. The director.

• 2:04:05Jordi Hays?

  He wrote Sicario two, but didn't direct it.

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. And, and I think, I think it got, it got worse reviews than the first one. But did you like one better than what?

• 2:04:15Jordi Hays?

  He snowed. I recommend Zootopia. Just skip Zootopia one.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  Zootopia one is great.

• 2:04:22Jordi Hays?

  Go straight to two.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  Great movie. Another movie with your four.

• 2:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anyways, what, what, what movie do you recommend I watch next?

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  Ooh, that's a tough one. There was a, there, there was a list of movies that was going viral from, was it Bill Simmons? Movie list, movie list. This one.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  Did you watch the ping pong Marty Supreme?

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  I didn't. I didn't get a review. You watched it? What'd you think? Give us a review.

• 2:04:49Speaker 02

  It was pretty good. I enjoyed it. I, I like Safdie Brothers, their movies.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, me too.

• 2:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay, here's the thing. The marketing was so good and so intense that I, it feels very likely without having seen the film, that the marketing overshadows the film itself. Do you think that tracks?

• 2:05:06Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I maybe.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Like, what will we remember? What will we remember more in five years? The marketing or the film?

• 2:05:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's definitely an argument you could have, which is like not, you don't usually like say that about movies. So.

• 2:05:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:19Speaker 02

  Just by saying that, it's like, yeah, probably the marketing.

• 2:05:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe it's a lesson. It's like, you don't make your marketing too good. Otherwise, people.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  They feel like they got the experience. Uh, this is something Derek Thompson talked to us about and Dan Wang called called out again to go back to his piece. Uh, he, he said that, uh, like a really, really short TV hit would sell more, uh, books than going on a really big podcast for an hour. Because if somebody listens to someone lay out their thesis for their book over an hour.

• 2:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Tell the most interesting stories.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  Exactly. They're like, well, it was, it was, I got one hour of this. Do I really want another six hours of this on the audiobook? I kinda got the audiobook version, the summary. Whereas if somebody sees like on, you know, some daytime TV show, somebody shows up for two minutes and it's just gives like one take. You're like, oh, like I could go more. And then also demographically, the TV watchers are more likely to buy books. Um, but we're not talking about books. We're talking about movies and there are some recommendations here from Bill Simmons. He calls these the most, uh, the most re-watched movies of the century. Devil Wears Prada, Social Network, Anchorman, The Town, The Departed, Miami Vice, Hangover, Superbad. Have you seen Superbad? I think that would be a good one for you. It's very funny. It holds up. Think you'd like that. Step Brothers? You've never seen Step Brothers?

• 2:06:34John Coogan?

  Step Brothers, I feel like we did a meme around Step Brothers. Uh, the, the movie that I think you might like, if you like Sicario, might be Taken. Have you seen Taken? Liam Neeson? Great movie. Great movie. Team, team loves it.

• 2:06:48Jordi Hays?

  Studio goes wild.

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  Studio goes wild. John Wick. If you haven't seen the original John Wick, that's a great movie.

• 2:06:54Speaker 02

  John, have you seen Prisoners?

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, Prisoners is great, for sure. Prisoners. Uh, any Denis Villeneuve movie is good.

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  Jordy, maybe you should go, uh, like Art House. Have you tried any of those?

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Art House.

• 2:07:05Jordi Hays?

  How about Capitol House? Do you have any recommendations?

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  Margin call?

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  I saw, I saw Sicario as a double feature. I went to the movie theater, bought two tickets, saw Sicario, walked straight into The Martian, saw that. It was great. Great day.

• 2:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is, this is the year of the Social Network too.

• 2:07:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I somehow think it's not going to be as good as the first one. It just feels like it's going to be mired.

• 2:07:30Jordi Hays?

  I think it depends who plays Dwarshash.

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I hope, I hope that they really go into the

• 2:07:35Jordi Hays?

  It's about, it's a free AI.

• 2:07:37John Coogan?

  Entirely on Jan La Coon's hot takes around the Lama four overfitting of the benchmarks.

• 2:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:43John Coogan?

  That should be where it's, where it's

• 2:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, back to, back to Scott. He says, uh, behind the scenes, proof of craft content will enter the mainstream of advertising and entertainment. As more AI generated content fills our feeds, we will develop a membrane of doubt. That's fake. We'll become a default reaction as we become. That was, uh, kind of the slower reaction to this company pickle.com.

• 2:08:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was interesting.

• 2:08:05Jordi Hays?

  People at first were like, wow, this is super cool. And then people started being like, wait, is this real?

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Fake. Um, we can get to that later. Uh, Scott says, that's fake. We'll become a default reaction as we become increasingly unimpressed by attention grabbing content. This is how I've been with AI generated kind of launch videos and vibe reels. I just, I haven't, I haven't watched a single one.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:28Jordi Hays?

  I assume you'll tell me if one of them is good. Um.

• 2:08:31John Coogan?

  AI generated launch vibe reels?

• 2:08:33Jordi Hays?

  Um, maybe you're not watching them either. Tyler probably watches them still. Pure AI purist over there.

• 2:08:38Speaker 02

  Andy, two cents. That was pretty good. I thought that was AI generated.

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that had, that had like great ideas in it. Uh, it, it was, it was a lot more, it wasn't just, here's a bunch of cool images that, that are trying to make you feel something. I'm skipping over those.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  We got a couple of recommendations from the chat. Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, highly recommend. That is a fantastic movie. Also, uh, famous watch movie. If you're into Rolexes, uh, Alec Baldwin's character says, look at this watch. This watch costs more than your car. And it's a Rolex president.

• 2:09:10Jordi Hays?

  I like the sound of that.

• 2:09:10John Coogan?

  Margin call. I feel like I saw that a long time ago. It's been a wild. Lioness. I haven't seen that. That looks pretty good. I'll have to check that out. Uh, there's a couple of others here. Uh, anyway, cognition. They should make a movie about cognition. Let me tell you about the software engineer, Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 2:09:33Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get Scott back on the show.

• 2:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Update on how things look in 2026. He had some crazy predictions that came 100% true this year. He came on the show very early and predicted the IMO gold medal from AI exactly as it played out. That was a great call and he's always been incredibly tapped in there. So Scott continues, says multiple industries from insurance to healthcare will be impacted by the implications of materially better lifespan, health span and joy span. That's interesting. Well, we have Justin Maers from TruMed coming on the show in just 25 minutes and he's obviously deep in all of this and can tell us more about this particular trend.

• 2:10:17John Coogan?

  Scott says, as health wearables, routine blood testing, increasingly accessible preventative body scans and AI health coaches proliferate the population, humans will have materially more insight and impact over their own health. As we begin to live longer, multiple industries will change. U.S. life insurers with de-risked annuity exposure that are most impacted by mortality, like global life, among others, are poised to benefit from the insured policy living longer. We will also see growth among the underlying plumbing companies that manage blood testing like Quest Diagnostics, biomarker detection and preventative scans of the major consumer apps and Whoop-like devices proliferating our lives. We will also see shifts in travel, entertainment, dating apps and beyond as the societal implications

• 2:11:00John Coogan?

  of longevity become a mainstream conversation. You gotta get on TruMed. We're having Justin on the show in just a little bit. We gotta get on TruMed and figure out the ultimate looks maxing stacks and make sure you're paying for your looks maxing regimen.

• 2:11:15Jordi Hays?

  They offer the peptides?

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, with pre-tax dollars. You gotta be looks maxing on pre-tax dollars. That's key. That's key. And thanks to TruMed, it is now possible to looks max with pre-tax dollars. Hardware becomes a more popular moat amid a surge of hardware startups. Interesting reflecting on this year, there was a surge of hardware startups. We demoed a lot of hardware in 2025. I was, I was asking you about the X-Real, those AR VR glasses. I was super bullish on those, but you churned, I churned. Haven't really been using them.

• 2:11:52Speaker 02

  Wait, were you actually bullish on them?

• 2:11:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, because when I used the Apple Vision Pro, my, the one experience that I really liked was watching movies in it. So I watched Citizen Kane, another great movie you should watch, from start to finish. But Citizen Kane is an extremely difficult to film, to watch by modern standards. Like, Sakurai was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There's always something happening. It's really exciting. You know, you're watching the tactical stuff, the cameras moving, those sweet shots of like the SUVs moving from the aerial. It's amazing. Like, it's so visually stimulating. The color grade's amazing, the sound mix is amazing. Citizen Kane is so slow. It opens with these like really slow title cards and like, it's just the easiest movie ever, if you're not locked in and really into it, to

• 2:12:34John Coogan?

  like pull out your phone and just get, and just get, you know, just like tuned out. Is Tyler watching a movie now?

• 2:12:43Speaker 02

  I mean, Citizen Kane, there's much more boring movies, I will say, than I've seen.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  No, I agree. I agree. It's great. It's a great movie. But, but it's just like any movie that's even more, even before the eighties, I feel like has a slow start, there's lots of exposition, it's just less, it's just less TikTok-ified versus like a modern Fast and the Furious movie. Even if it's not a good movie, it's gonna hold your attention because there's always something happening. And so-

• 2:13:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's probably true. But I mean, Citizen Kane is known for having like the, I forget what the term is, but it has like the, the thing that starts the whole story, right? The like rosebud?

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14Speaker 02

  Like is supposed to like get you-

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a good, it's a good hook. It's a good hook. You, you know what it is? The, the, the initial rosebud where he drops the, it's the, the snow globe, right?

• 2:13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:23John Coogan?

  Isn't it? The snow globe. Have you ever seen those, those brain rot TikToks where it's throwing the bottle of like marbles down the stairs and it smashes and they bounce everywhere?

• 2:13:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  You've never seen those?

• 2:13:32Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  It's like the most brain rot-y content possible. And it's kind of like that. Somebody should make a version of that where it starts out and just smashes and just completely goes everywhere. Anyway, but I was bullish on this because my experience in the Apple Vision Pro was extremely positive when it came to watching films. Like, I enjoyed watching movies in it. You could put on Avatar and it's in 3D in an IMAX screen, which you just can't get at home otherwise. So it was basically like a home theater, just- For yourself. Now, I never had any time to do, to, to use it, and so I returned it. And it was not something that was going to go into my like daily driver. Uh, but we tested a lot of these on Guinea Pig Tyler over there. Uh, we gave him a Quest 3S Ultra Xbox Edition. Didn't play that much. Didn't get, you didn't prestige, right, in COD?

• 2:14:16Speaker 02

  No, I did not prestige.

• 2:14:18John Coogan?

  Skill issue. Uh, and, and the X Reals, you wore them on one flight. You enjoyed it for that.

• 2:14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, on the flight, it was great.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  But you just took a flight and you didn't bring them. You didn't think, ah, I gotta put those in my backpack.

• 2:14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that was.

• 2:14:28John Coogan?

  Not even aspiration.

• 2:14:29Speaker 02

  That was in the summer, I think.

• 2:14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:30Speaker 02

  I last used them.

• 2:14:31John Coogan?

  Yep. And the Rabbit and the Humane.

• 2:14:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, the only, the hardware that I care most about this year.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Is getting a couple of great, uh, uh, racing sims here in this, here at Studio. Uh, we gotta see if we can get one on TrueMed.

• 2:14:46John Coogan?

  I wonder, it is a, it is a sort of a, a lifestyle upgrade. Um, I, I wonder, what is the current meta? I've been watching a lot of Instagram reels about sweet racing sim setups. And I've, and I was wondering what the, is the meta, is the best, uh, is the best racing sim VR? Or is it physical screens these days? I wonder which one is like the true.

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Still physical screen.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  It's still physical screens. Like the F1 drivers use physical screens.

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:11John Coogan?

  They don't do VR. Cause I've, I've done some racing in VR and it's really cool. Like it's, it's amazing, but it is, it is a heavy thing on your, on your face. Anyway.

• 2:15:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Scott continues. Ordinary data becomes a less valuable moat. These days it feels like every company is trying to sync everyone's data. And doing so is becoming easier than ever before. Soon enough, all your products will have all of your data, whether it is via connectors now or computer vision plugins later. As connectors, data between apps become ubiquitous. You can expect, one, the growing importance of proprietary graphs. Who knows who, who works with who, who has access to what, et cetera. Two, more projects trying to make personalization portable for consumers. And three, real-time data sources, whether X or the weather or ocean tide patterns, becoming more valuable and increasingly captured by robots. Graphs, portable memory and real-time data are the new proprietary data moats. Uh, he says, seven, ambient listening and summarization will go mainstream.

• 2:16:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, while many teams use services like granola or Zoom to record and annotate their meetings. Not me.

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  I talked to some people that, that loved the granola wrapped because it had all the context on every, like they, they.

• 2:16:17Jordi Hays?

  You said, nothing on my end. Thanks. Four hundred times.

• 2:16:22John Coogan?

  But I mean, there were some really interesting insights because it had, if you run a remote startup and the vast majority of your day is spent in recorded Zoom meetings, you kind of have a record of every word and you can compress that down, summarize it, and it can actually give you some, at least entertaining insights. I don't know that it's gonna completely reinvent your business, but people, it definitely delighted a lot of people. So that was cool.

• 2:16:46Jordi Hays?

  What if Granola this year just has a pop up and it's like, do you know you can automate this entire role?

• 2:16:55Jordi Hays?

  For a thousand dollars a month, you can replace this.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 2:16:59Jordi Hays?

  You can, I have to imagine that's part of like their

• 2:17:03John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Their pitch to investors, right? Is like, we're gonna understand like what work is actually getting done at these companies and who does what?

• 2:17:09John Coogan?

  And how, how things get made and how things get done.

• 2:17:12Jordi Hays?

  Kind of farfetched, but you never know.

• 2:17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Will Manitis was posting about, about the, like, it was like corporate, it wasn't like corporate espionage, but it was some post about like, about like corporate, like backstabbing and like Machiavellian behavior within corporations. And I think his point was just like, there are, there are so many secrets within businesses about like how things actually get done that don't typically get documented. And so if you can get closer to that, just because like, like if you're running some business and, and the, and the secret to your brand is that you do things a specific way and that's not documented. I mean, we noticed this with, Will, Will go on podcasts and get interviewed and will explain exactly the thesis of TVPN and like how it works. And, and even then,

• 2:17:56John Coogan?

  some, it, there's still some like lost in translation when we lay it out. It doesn't just come out of just watching it. And, and I'm sure that that's, and I think that like that's clearly true for a lot of businesses regardless, like there's just secrets that are kept within internally. And if Granola is like a way to access that, like could be valuable. I don't know. What's the next one?

• 2:18:17Jordi Hays?

  The power in consumer AI will shift to tightly coupled hardware and operating system providers. The desire for local AI, like ambient listening and summarization, will coincide with the shift to AI privately running on your device. As one, open source models that you can download, change and run locally on your device become more capable. Two, consumer hardware, Apple and Android phones, whatever OpenAI is brewing, and our computers become capable of running powerful LLMs locally, while the world is going to change yet again. Implications for the AI stack are tremendous, from the chips that become valuable, the evolution of operating systems, the devices we use and the role of open source AI. I suspect these changes will be a major area of focus over the next year. I'm very excited to see what Apple releases this year with Gemini. I expect

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  it to be, if it's better than the Photos app, if it can be...

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  I have noticed that the text to speech feature has gotten better. I feel like they updated the model at some point, and if I'm on a blog post and I click, like, "Read this to me in the car" or something, it will do a good job and it sounds very human, and they clearly updated that model. I haven't tested a lot of other stuff, but the thing that strikes me as crazy is just that Apple really seems still stuck on this annual release cadence, and in the boom cycle of AI, it feels insane not to just be like, "Yeah, Gemini Deal's going live tomorrow." Like, it's like, okay, you did the deal, like, just put Gemini in Siri today.

• 2:19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, people have been talking about, there was some research paper about whether AI tools are actually benefiting companies, and then you look and, like, it was the models that were out in October. It's like, that's already, like, too late.

• 2:20:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:04Speaker 02

  Opus is much better than the previous plot model.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you think, just getting, like, actual customer feedback...

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  Starting to troubleshoot these things. There's also like just a benefit to I I feel like Apple is in many ways very, very cautious with their brand. They're very thoughtful and they don't want like, like, you know, when Google launched their first image model, now they're loved for Nano Banana. It's remarkable. But remember the first launch that people were doing like the, the, the accurate 1940s soldier and it was very controversial because it got the, the, the, the, the race wrong. And, and that was sort of like a backlash that Google was like moving fast enough that they got through that and it was not that big of a deal. And obviously they had no negative intentions of that. It was just a mistake. But Apple's not really in that, in that mode of, oh yeah, like, like, let's

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  release things and then deal with like the backlash of things that aren't fully polished. But it feels like there's a little bit of an advantage to actually releasing so fast because like OpenAI over 2025 probably had like seven different crises of like AI psychosis and adult mode and all these bad, there were so many bad headlines, but then there were like 22 really great days where people were like, this is amazing. Thanks so much. This is a cool new model. And so like, it's sort of netted out, whereas Apple was sort of like at this low din of like, oh, what are they doing forever? But I'm very optimistic about the next version.

• 2:21:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to skip over a few. One more from Scott. He says, we'll, we'll see the rise of internal development teams as companies replace single purpose bloated SaaS products with their own apps that collapse functions in magical ways. New internal application development teams will be spawned in large companies and they'll vibe code tailor-made software and agent-driven solutions for functions around the company. At first, these efforts will replace SaaS products, especially those that are expensive, private equity-owned, clunky solutions. We, we support private equity here and their clunky solutions, but I can see many of them getting replaced. Over time, these homegrown tools and workflows will start to collapse functions into one another. For example, why must legal and finance tools be so different in an era where the distinct functions of social marketing, sales

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  and customer support are blurring together? Shouldn't new solutions collapse these functions into one? As companies build their own solution, they'll be optimized for a higher level of cross-functional work. Let's give it up for cross-functional work.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the Mark Leonard, the founder of Constellation Software was sort of talking about this, right?

• 2:22:38Jordi Hays?

  It's great. He just came out, sat on an investor call. It's over. It was a good run.

• 2:22:46John Coogan?

  But I mean, like, I so so I was I was wondering this because on it was January 2 or something, the the market opened and all the SaaS companies were selling off. Did you see this? And and people were sort of like, oh, everyone's waking up to the Claude code moment. You'll be able to, you know, vibe code any app and replace all your SaaS. And so it's bad news for all the SaaS companies. And I was trying to think about that. So I pulled some stats on on, you know, the actual revenue of the large SaaS players. And I have some here. I mean, they're all they're all growing. So Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, Palo Alto, Shopify, Workday, Atlassian, Zoom, CrowdStrike, Snowflake, Datadog, HubSpot. These are these are basically the biggest

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  sort of pure play software companies. And they're all they're all growing revenue somewhere between, you know, 5 and 30%. And and for this year, I mean, they're all still up. I guess the question is like, if one of them has a down year, that would be a real indictment. But it would be it would be my initial thesis was like, it'd be hard to justify this idea of like, vibe coded software truly replacing SaaS. If all of the big SaaS companies are still growing, then it's like clearly a Jevons paradox thing. We're just getting more software. But maybe it's the PE backed, small point solution thing that's good that's actually going to get ripped out.

• 2:24:11John Coogan?

  And that might be more of like a collapse that we see. And sure, the big, the big software companies, they're so big and they do so much that, yeah, it's no, you're not going to one shot it with Claude. So like, you're not going to do that. But you do need to be worried about this like long tail software that just sticks around and just raises prices and doesn't add any features.

• 2:24:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the threat to some of these, I guess, more, if you think about like the Joe Lamont style companies where

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  Built to die.

• 2:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Built to die, right? You have the software that You know, an investor allocator like Joe would be comfortable buying, knowing that the revenue is just going to decline and eventually cease to exist. And you could imagine this being like, somebody that makes software for large vending machine companies to manage inventory, something like that, right? And a kind of overlooked category, not big enough for venture. The question is like, will those companies like be super quick to adopt? Will they be super quick to adopt AI products themselves? Or will they be using, will they be like vibe coding? I don't know. The question is you potentially get this sort of like,

• 2:25:22Jordi Hays?

  like explosion of like web developers that just were like thousands, millions of people globally that are gonna, I'm gonna go to business owners and I'm gonna make them a website, right? And you could see something like that happening with like vibe coders, like freelance.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  That's literally his first point, is massive amounts of talent arbitrage, people who with knowledge of the better way will run circles around their colleagues and bosses. So there'll probably be a lot of people that understand these tools and then can go into a mid-sized enterprise and say, hey, we're paying so much for this old piece of software. Or they'll go into that company and say, hey, we can improve it and keep our customers. We can go back into growth mode economically and maybe this thing doesn't need to die. Maybe, maybe with just a little bit of extra work, we can make it great again or make it bigger. I want Tyler's response, but first I want to tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and rerankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Tyler?

• 2:26:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there is some distinction, like you mentioned of the, of the software companies. It's like Snowflake or MongoDB. Like, people aren't vibe coding their own vector databases. It's like a tool. It's not like the full solution. I would be very surprised if those like are the chief.

• 2:26:38Jordi Hays?

  You know, if those are heard a lot by by by coding.

• 2:26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I know. I agree. Also, I mean, anything with regulatory, anything with with proprietary data in involved. There's just a lot of different moats that companies build up. And I think that even companies that seem simple, where they it feels like something you could vibe code. But, you know, they've been aware of moat building for 20 years, and they've been doing it. And you might not know that, oh, they actually have some really solid relationship with this legal decision and this thing, and they can navigate this for you. And it feels just like a SaaS app. But there's something else going on behind the scenes. I think that that creates more durability.

• 2:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Angene has 2026 group chat consensus. One, extraordinary capabilities, progress from Anthropic and Google, leaving out.

• 2:27:28John Coogan?

  Leaving out. What's going on there?

• 2:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Two, sovereign. I mean, he's he's he was an angel in Anthropic.

• 2:27:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:35Jordi Hays?

  He's he's got his team. Sovereign nations as largest customers of open source models. Three, compute scarcity at unimaginable levels. Four, violent public backlash against perceived AI job losses. Hopefully, no violence. But the perceived AI job losses is notable. I saw there was a pretty viral video that popped up on my X this morning. And it was like a montage of like, big tech layoffs.

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:04Jordi Hays?

  And they were positioning it like it was all AI job loss.

• 2:28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:07Jordi Hays?

  And so I think that is going to that's the story right now. On one hand, it's it's CEOs and management team saying, hey, maybe I should do more with less.

• 2:28:19Jordi Hays?

  In some cases, it's I'm doing more with less because of AI. But in a lot of cases, there's just like, you can just exercise willpower, right? This was the Twitter story, which was like, hey, let's do the same. Let's provide the same platform with 75% less people.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. Go check out Railway.

• 2:28:50John Coogan?

  Tomas says 11 predictions for 2026. We got a bunch of prediction posts here. Every year I make a list of predictions and score last year's predictions. 2025 was a good year. He scored 7.85 out of 10. Here are his predictions for 2026. Businesses pay more for AI agents than people for the first time. Whoa, that's a bold.

• 2:29:10Speaker 02

  I don't know that he's saying all businesses. I think he's saying some business.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Waymo rides cost 31% more than Uber on average, yet demand keeps growing. We saw blacked out Uber, or Waymo, which was iconic. I want to get to that one.

• 2:29:24Speaker 02

  Murdered out Waymo? It was a real murdered out Waymo?

• 2:29:26John Coogan?

  It might have been AI. I don't know. We got to dig into it. Vector databases resurge as essential infrastructure in the AI stack. 2026 becomes a record year for liquidity. I saw something interesting where, so he's predicting SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks IPOs, with SpaceX and OpenAI ranking among the 10 largest offerings ever, the pent-up demand. And so, a lot of people were saying like this will drive a lot of liquidity into new companies. I mean, it doesn't seem like new companies are having trouble raising right now, but in theory, you know, if you're a venture capital firm, you return, you know, $50 billion to your LPs, they probably want to sign up for the next fund, and the next fund probably gets bigger. And we've seen a couple charts where it looks like venture dollars are declining,

• 2:30:07John Coogan?

  and the number of funds are declining, but you could see sort of LPs become a little bit more cash-rich, where they, over the last five years, they've been really, really allocating towards venture. They're finally going to get their payoff if they're in the right funds. And now that they have liquidity, maybe they go and do something else with it. Maybe they go fund new managers. Maybe they go double down on the growth funds that have been providing them returns so far.

• 2:30:29Speaker 02

  Maybe they buy land.

• 2:30:30John Coogan?

  Maybe they buy land. There is a question.

• 2:30:32Speaker 02

  They're into land maxing.

• 2:30:33John Coogan?

  AI models execute tasks autonomously for longer than a workday. According to Meter, AI task duration doubles every seven months. Two current Frontier models reliably create complete tasks, taking people about an hour. Extrapolating this trend by late 2026, AI agents will autonomously execute eight-hour work streams. That will be crazy. You will be able to just say, hey, go spend a full day on this project, come back to me, and it will come back to you when it's done. Now, it will come back to you before eight hours, right?

• 2:31:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  It's the equivalent work time.

• 2:31:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there was this, there's a good blog post that came out, I think, a couple days after the break started. It was like critiquing the Meteor evals. And the main thing was like, if you actually look at what the eval is doing. For the, I think it was, I think it was for, for Opus, the, the headline was like, it can do four and a half hours or four or something. And so the way you do that is like you give it tasks that take people on average four hours.

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:33Speaker 02

  But it's pretty hard to find tasks that, that do that, right?

• 2:31:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:31:36Speaker 02

  If you look at it, they only had like 14 actual tasks.

• 2:31:38John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:31:39Speaker 02

  So it's a very small sample size. So it's, it's, it's pretty hard to, you know, reliably see if, if, is that actually true?

• 2:31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. At the same, are you laughing at the chat?

• 2:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Bobby says, did you guys hear about OpenAI's quote pen? And Gold Rock says, is it a vape pen you can gamble on from?

• 2:31:57John Coogan?

  What does that mean? That's ridiculous.

• 2:32:00Jordi Hays?

  That's the most, that's the most 2026 pen.

• 2:32:03John Coogan?

  I wouldn't be surprised. There are a lot of vape pens that have full on LED screens and, and microcontrollers. So people will like run Doom on them or run Tetris on them and Vibe Code on them and stuff. There's a lot of fun, fun stuff there. Let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 2:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Part of Cursor.

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  This is wild. Well, if you want a vape pen, maybe you should try and pay with it with pre-tax dollars using TrueMed. We have Justin Mayers. He's going to tell us that you can't do that. I'm going to tell him I absolutely can.

• 2:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Just try to stop me.

• 2:32:40John Coogan?

  And I will. I will be buying a vape pen on this. We were, we, Justin, welcome back to the show. Great to see you. Happy New Year.

• 2:32:48Jordi Hays?

  John wants to vape Chinese Pepto.

• 2:32:49John Coogan?

  No, no. So I don't, I actually don't, but I do want to, I want you to tell me how I can use TrueMed to build the ultimate looks maxing stack. I want to pay for with my looks maxing stack.

• 2:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What are you using? What are you, what are you, what's your stack?

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  You've clearly been, since you've been on the show, you've gone.

• 2:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Your cheeks are red. I can see you've been bone smacking before this. You're just talking about the fit, right?

• 2:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, the fit's incredible. Your mid-face ratio is completely different than the last time we saw you. Something's clearly going on. TrueMed clearly helping. Anyway, how are you doing? What's new?

• 2:33:18Justin Mares?

  I'm doing phenomenally, doing so well. And you know, one of the things that that I've been using from a health standpoint is obviously bone broth and you know, all of the health benefits that come with that.

• 2:33:28Jordi Hays?

  One hand washes the other.

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  Wait, so so you literally smashed the bones to make the bone broth, correct? So you've been in bone smashing for a decade now?

• 2:33:35Jordi Hays?

  His family actually made their money in bone smashing.

• 2:33:37John Coogan?

  It is a bone smashing company. Might be the best pure play bone smashing company there is, arguably.

• 2:33:44Justin Mares?

  We were decades ahead of clavicular.

• 2:33:46John Coogan?

  I think you were.

• 2:33:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need a looks max index.

• 2:33:49John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 2:33:51Justin Mares?

  Exactly.

• 2:33:52Jordi Hays?

  Kettle and fire can be, when you guys go public, we'll put it in there.

• 2:33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, anyway, just reset the story for us. What's the news? You picked the worst possible day to announce it, but but give it to us.

• 2:34:05Jordi Hays?

  Maybe the best. You guys broke through that there wasn't a lot of noise.

• 2:34:07John Coogan?

  It was sort of a quiet day, but yeah, yeah, take us through it.

• 2:34:09Justin Mares?

  Very quiet day.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Take it through.

• 2:34:11Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I mean, so so we finally announced that we raised 34 million dollars for TruMed as part of the Series A. So.

• 2:34:16Speaker 02

  Hit it.

• 2:34:21Jordi Hays?

  I love that. I love how it shakes shakes the whole camera.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  The first.

• 2:34:27Justin Mares?

  2026 is going to be a big year for you guys.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  The first 2026 gong hit. Anyway, so 34 million dollars. Wait, wait, wait. So when did the deal happen? What was the thesis around launching it, the announcement when you did?

• 2:34:41Justin Mares?

  Yeah, so it happened like earlier last year, in the first half of last year.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:34:46Justin Mares?

  But we basically had a bunch of different things happening at the company level. We wanted to tie it up with a bunch of different announcements. We grew three times, which was fully baked by the end, which is great. Yeah. And so kind of like packaged everything up and decided to announce and kind of mention that, you know, that this this thing that we're doing and this movement that we're building around incentivizing people to invest in prevention and invest in their health while they still have it, is a big thing. And it's a thing that tech and other people are paying attention to and waking up to. So we wanted to announce it later in the year.

• 2:35:16John Coogan?

  And has the elevator pitch changed to consumers or the companies that you're working with? Like, how are you positioning the actual value prop of TruMed, like getting people on board?

• 2:35:28Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I mean, so to brands like Peloton, Eight Sleep, Lifetime, those are our partners. You know, it's quite easy. For many of these brands, yeah, like for many of these brands, exactly, Eight Sleep. For many of these brands, like, they've realized that they are selling a product that oftentimes is expensive. And so if someone can use pre-tax funds and save 25 to 50%, you know, if you're like in the max tax bracket and live in California, you can save 50%. Buying, getting an Eight Sleep or a Peloton at 50% off is like quite a material thing. And so we have, we have merchant partners where we're doing 15, 20% of their total sales are going through TruMed. And for the individual, you know, if you're someone with an HSA or FSA account,

• 2:36:09Justin Mares?

  historically, these accounts have been used under this idea of like, wait until you get sick, get cancer, need surgeries, need like pharmaceuticals late in life, and then you have a tax advantaged account that can pay for everything once you're sick. And, you know, the IRS has been clear, like, the average American is sick today. We should be spending these dollars on things that studies show are effective at treating or preventing different diseases. And so that's what TruMed enables.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  And what's the status of the, of like, HSA? It's usually like an option and you have to pick a specific healthcare plan to be eligible, is that right? Like, are HSA's booming, are people adopting them? Like, what's the actual flow to get one?

• 2:36:48Jordi Hays?

  I maxed out my HSA this year because of TruMed on our TBPN plan.

• 2:36:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:36:55Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I mean, HSA's are growing quite a lot. They grew around 11% last year, I think over the last three years. That's been about right, like 10 to 15% growth. Our thesis, though, is that, you know, you ask the average person, like you, Jordy, before TruMed came along, like, what is an HSA? Do you have one? Why should you care about it? The average person just has no idea. Like, they just do not care. It's considered almost like a boomer savings account. And so one of our hypotheses is that these accounts historically have been high friction and you can't use them on anything that you actually want to prevent disease. Like, who cares about buying Band-Aids tax-free? And so our hypothesis is like, if you can buy something, pay for a lifetime membership, pay for Eight Sleep, pay for these different things that, you know, assuming that you qualify,

• 2:37:38Justin Mares?

  that many, many more people will actually sign up and fund these accounts. And like, I think that over the next decade, there could be a trillion dollars in HSA and FSA accounts, even without any regulatory changes or anything like that.

• 2:37:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, could, is it possible to pull a PT and put startup equity in an HSA? Could I, could I throw a few shares?

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Do you have any availability, like trade in the HSA? Is that a thing people can do?

• 2:38:05Justin Mares?

  That's definitely a thing people can do. Uh, it's not something that TruMed necessarily supports yet. But it's a thing people can do. I mean, I don't know if like there's a, an HSA PT out there yet, but.

• 2:38:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, why do you, do you think we can move? So, so, uh, TruMed is a company that, uh, to me is shockingly political. Like some people hear about what TruMed does and they get angry. They're like, no, you should only be able to spend your HSA funds once you're deathly ill. You shouldn't be able to use an extra, you shouldn't be able to use it to buy something that helps you exercise that even though we know exercise extends your lifespan. So it's like, it's just like crazy, crazy that we're in a place that, um, you know, spending, spending HSA funds is like political and people are angry about it. Do you have any, uh, do you have optimism around that changing over time? Is this just kind of the nature?

• 2:39:00Jordi Hays?

  So much of health is just deeply political.

• 2:39:03Justin Mares?

  Yeah. I mean, honestly, one of, one of the biggest disappointments that I've had in the last couple of years is seeing health become political. Like somehow you have a former, you know, Democratic candidate for president that is now part of the Trump administration and is talking about health and it like means it's a, it's a right wing issue somehow. I think that there's always going to be people that look at this, like within the industry, you know, I came as an outsider from the industry, started kettle on fire before this. And within the industry, it's still like controversial somewhat, whether like bug spray should be HSA or FSA eligible. Like the industry is just very, very behind and very stuck in the ways of, and under the assumptions that the average American is healthy and HSA and FSA accounts are there and exist to help people pay for healthcare when they're sick, on the rare occasion that people are sick.

• 2:39:48Justin Mares?

  That was true like 22 years ago when these accounts were started, when you know, when Congress basically created these accounts. I just think those default assumptions are no longer true. Like you look around and the average American today is sick. Like, you know, 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. 93% have at least a metabolic marker of dysfunction. Like, we are an incredibly sick country, among the sickest countries in the world. And in my view, HSAs and FSAs are one of the best tools that we have in our admittedly very broken healthcare system to try and direct funds towards prevention and towards root cause interventions that can actually make people healthier and treat and prevent many of the chronic conditions people struggle with.

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Is there a lot of volume happening on TruMed that's going towards like Wegovy and people paying out of pocket for weight loss treatment products? Or is that, is that separate?

• 2:40:41Justin Mares?

  No, so, so as of right now, we don't support GLP-1s. Like what, what, you know, I would say that the healthcare industry as a whole, the payment rails are relatively good at allowing people to pay for pharmaceuticals. Like, if you want to pay for pharmaceuticals, you can use an HSA today.

• 2:40:56Jordi Hays?

  But aren't a lot of people paying for GLP-1s out of pocket?

• 2:40:58Justin Mares?

  Yeah, they can, but, but HSA for many people is considered out of pocket as well. And because it's like they can direct where they, where and how they spend these funds. They're their own funds, just they're tax-free.

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:10Justin Mares?

  And so what, what we are basically doing is we are trying to make it legible and bring online a bunch of effective lifestyle interventions, exercise, sleep, supplements, things like that, that the traditional healthcare system like right now doesn't really know how to think about, and people don't really know how to pay for it.

• 2:41:24John Coogan?

  So is there like a big roadmap for you on new verticals that you want to bring online? Is there a process for like actually getting something approved to work with TruMed? Like, did you start with Eight Sleeps and then you added Peloton and it was like a different process? Or is there just one bucket and you can throw whatever you need into it and you just sign the companies as they come up?

• 2:41:43Justin Mares?

  Yeah, so we basically, we have a medical advisory board and a medical team. And we basically look at when an intervention comes to us, when a brand or a merchant comes to us and they say, hey, we want to work with TruMed. We basically look at a couple of things, like what do the studies say about how effective a certain intervention is? Based on that, like what conditions will that intervention be effective for? You know, like you can't get exercise to treat like a toe fungus or something like that. Like that would be a bad intervention. Like a doctor would never prescribe that. And so what we are basically looking for is something like exercise. What are the conditions that exercise as an intervention can treat, reverse, or alleviate? That's the IRS standard. And assuming that there's a good amount of data, research supports that intervention.

• 2:42:26Justin Mares?

  And then we talk to our clinical team and we decide, can we support or not a specific intervention? And so we have a bunch of things, exercise, sleep supplements, and the like that we support today. A big thing that I want to unlock this year is food. Like if you look at the data, like medically tailored meals have incredible efficacy, incredible ROI, but they're very complicated to, you know, it's very complicated. And the IRS frankly has like a heart attack when they hear people are using HSA or FSA to spend on food because like

• 2:42:55Jordi Hays?

  On raising canes. Chicken fingers, chicken finger dream. My chicken finger dream is chicken fingers via my TruMed account. No, no, you're talking about like actual, like, you know, properly portioned

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's been, there's been like a whole history of companies that have tried to do sort of like portion control meal prep. There's been a number of different kits. Obviously, there's varying levels of efficacy, but in theory, that's a really great intervention. I mean, it just seems so obvious. Like you go to any health and wellness influencer and before they tell you about the six different types of magnesium or something, like they're going to lay down the law, which is just sleep, diet, and exercise. Sleep, diet, and exercise. And so it feels like those three should be on TruMed first before, you know, even the creatine gets on there or something and the supplements. But but obviously, like food, it feels like it's a challenge. So you're working on that. So is that is that a goal for 2026?

• 2:43:51Justin Mares?

  A hundred percent. I would say that is one of our big goals for this year, especially as like tens of millions of Americans are going to be on GLP-1s.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:58Justin Mares?

  Things like eating more nutritionally dense food, getting more protein.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  Protein, right?

• 2:44:02Justin Mares?

  Like, these things really, really matter.

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:04Justin Mares?

  For even things like GLP-1s to to work over any long period of time.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And micronutrients too, right?

• 2:44:11Justin Mares?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:44:11John Coogan?

  Is that a place where people people miss out if they're on GLP-1s?

• 2:44:14Jordi Hays?

  How are you? How big's the team?

• 2:44:18Justin Mares?

  We're 51 people now.

• 2:44:19Jordi Hays?

  51 people. And like, what's your kind of like personal ethos as a CEO around building a company like this as, you know, every single day we have more and more AI progress? Are you pushing the team to to to are you pushing everybody on the team to to like, you know, use the tools as effectively as they can? Like, where are you getting the most leverage? All that kind of stuff?

• 2:44:44Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I mean, we're certainly pushing the engineering team to to use things like Claude Code and whatnot all the time. I think that where we are getting the most leverage and where we have started to focus is leveraging a lot of these tools specifically on the like prototyping side of things. Like, we recently stood up a team within TruMed that it's basically me and like two other people, where we're calling it like the Venture Bets Team. It's basically the team that just like moves fast, tries things, prototypes stuff, and sees if it works or not. And the goal there is basically to unlock a new line of revenue, you know, over the next 12 to 18 months. And for that, we are basically doing using almost entirely AI tooling to spin up, you know, landing pages, mini products, like all these sorts of things that are not exactly

• 2:45:27Justin Mares?

  built to like scale, they're not built for, you know, six nines uptime or anything like this, but just with the pure goal of like get as many shots on goal and many as many iterations as possible. And so that's how personally we're starting to use it a lot.

• 2:45:40John Coogan?

  I feel like, do you identify with the label like fintech? Is that a fair category? Or do you think of yourself as like a different category?

• 2:45:48Jordi Hays?

  He'll say he's finance tech.

• 2:45:49John Coogan?

  Finance tech.

• 2:45:52Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I would say definitely we're a fintech company right now.

• 2:45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fair, right? The question I ask is because do you like, do you have any like, are you at war with people that are trying to do fraud on the platform? I feel like that's like a permanent background noise if you're a fintech company. But I don't know if you operate at like an abstraction layer where that's kind of like, oh, you're, it's not a headache for you. Is it a headache?

• 2:46:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think most like a company that does payments online typically is incentivized. It's set up in a way, it's like business joins platform, moves money. If you want more businesses joining the platform, moving money, I think you guys are, I'm sure people have tried stuff, but feel pretty insulated from that kind of like large.

• 2:46:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's not a payroll company. So you can't just immediately do money laundering. But, but is there, is there like a, like a fraud fighting team or how have you addressed that? Is it even a problem?

• 2:46:48Justin Mares?

  Yeah, so I mean, it has been a small problem, but it's been a thing that like honestly Stripe's tools are pretty darn good. And like we, we build on top of Stripe, they're quite good.

• 2:46:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:46:57Justin Mares?

  And so it hasn't been a thing where we're like throwing personnel at it or anything like that. But yeah, I mean, certainly a, the most possible boring explanation of TrueMed is like we're a B2B SaaS company that does compliance for HSA and FSA, you know? And like, given that, like, we're definitely a fintech company.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  New Year's resolutions. Do you have any, do you think they're effective for living a healthier life? What do you think of New Year's resolutions?

• 2:47:23Justin Mares?

  I personally, I find them great. I actually just had my first kid though, so I'm sort of like resolutions out the window.

• 2:47:29John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:47:30Justin Mares?

  Figuring out the parenting thing.

• 2:47:31John Coogan?

  Just keep on, keep it on.

• 2:47:32Justin Mares?

  A hundred percent, yeah.

• 2:47:34Jordi Hays?

  But we were talking, we were talking a few days ago and you said, it's amazing and super underrated, which is a, which is wildly different than another person that we were talking about earlier on the show that said, am I missing something?

• 2:47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, similar name, similar name. What about, what about like big trends in 2026? I feel like you have seen basically every health trend between.

• 2:48:00John Coogan?

  Two and six years early, what do you think we're going to be talking about this year?

• 2:48:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's get into it. Let's get into, I think, the thing that that's been going the most, most talked about.

• 2:48:12John Coogan?

  I mean, that is, in my world, that's the most.

• 2:48:14Jordi Hays?

  Tied to that, but peptides.

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  Oh, peptides, sure. Okay, let's start with peptides.

• 2:48:18Jordi Hays?

  I did, I did a, my first peptide cycle probably five years ago at this point. I'm now at the point where so many people are trying so many different things and there's, and I did this at a time, I did this at a time where I was like, there's, there's really no like, large scale studies on this. But anecdotally, I knew people that had done it.

• 2:48:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:48:40Jordi Hays?

  And they'd done, they'd, they'd tried them for, you know, you, you do it as a cycle. Nobody even back then was saying, take this and never stop taking it, right?

• 2:48:49John Coogan?

  There were also some really big, high profile, like the Hugh Jackman Wolverine, like everyone saw that and were like, oh, whatever that he did.

• 2:48:56Jordi Hays?

  Is that peptides or just anabolic steroids?

• 2:48:57John Coogan?

  I think that was BPC 157. I don't know. Anyone know?

• 2:49:01Justin Mares?

  I don't think so.

• 2:49:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. No, that's the Wolverine peptide.

• 2:49:04John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I just mixed them up. I don't know.

• 2:49:06Jordi Hays?

  It's Wolverine, it's a Wolverine peptide because it helps like.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Oh, recovery. Okay, anyway. Maybe it was just gear.

• 2:49:12Jordi Hays?

  But I, but, but my concern with peptides is like, you basically, I just look at them as like slightly toned down, like anabolic steroids that are more targeted in, in terms of what they do. And so when you have like millions of people that are just trying to buying them from random sites online, they can be contaminated. I have a lot of like, a lot of red flags around that. I'm not kind of diving in any deeper.

• 2:49:34John Coogan?

  So peptides, Faustian bargain or not?

• 2:49:37Justin Mares?

  I, I think that these are going to be incredible tools. I think that the FDA is probably going to release much needed guidance around them this year. Like, there's just too many Americans that are buying cheap, for research purposes only peptides right now. You know, it's, it's just gotten too big that the FDA has to do something. Like, I, I personally know a bunch of people that swear by these things. The efficacy is there. And, you know, they're, they're certainly like, they're endogenous, like your body makes them in many cases. I'm very bullish on them from an efficacy standpoint. I have tons of questions about quality. And I think for me, the thing that you just have to wonder on all these things is like, one thing that our current FDA does a very good job of with pharmaceuticals is figuring out. Are there any sort of like side effects? So like, does pancreatitis risk go up 12%?

• 2:50:22Justin Mares?

  You know, when you take this thing over a year period or whatever? And like, no one is looking at those sort of long tail effects of peptides. Certainly not when you're looking at staying on these things, combining them with other peptides over, you know, some long period of time. So I would say that I'm like bullish but cautious. Whereas I think most of the people in peptides right now are sort of like ripping it.

• 2:50:44Jordi Hays?

  Purely bullish.

• 2:50:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It does, it does feel like we're in a new era of just experimentation and just like, I don't know, like, like a couple decades ago, like, like a TRT or something was something that was like buried in a bodybuilding forum and yet had to know a guy. And now it's like, here's the website that was perfectly coded and will just deliver it to your door. And it's like a completely different experience.

• 2:51:09Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful photography.

• 2:51:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's way more like user experience focused and like just way less risk. I mean, we've seen this with all sorts of substances and just activities where, uh, you know, we've productized them in the way America does best, or it becomes a button.

• 2:51:26Justin Mares?

  And I mean, that's totally true. I also think, to be fair, this is like, the health stuff is the biggest problem in the country in my mind.

• 2:51:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:33Justin Mares?

  The average American is sick. The average American has bad sleep. They have bad energy. Like, the demand for something that can promise you feel better, your joints feel better, you're sleeping, you're losing weight, is like off the charts, has never been higher.

• 2:51:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:46Justin Mares?

  And so I think, given that, like, there's just infinite demand for products that can make someone feel better, give them more energy, lose weight, sleep better, whatever. Uh, which is why I'm just, I, I think peptides are going to be one of the biggest trends of the next five years. Certainly they are going to come with side effects and downsides.

• 2:51:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:59Justin Mares?

  But they're, they're gonna be here.

• 2:52:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Underrated story about American competition, the whole story of how Novo like came up with all this stuff and then just got like, kind of beat in the public markets by Americans, just being like, where, where like the American biotech industry like really ripped it. Anyway, uh, other trends?

• 2:52:18Jordi Hays?

  Novo happened in serious.

• 2:52:21John Coogan?

  But I mean, basically, I mean, they had that problem with like the they didn't file the IP rule or something.

• 2:52:28Jordi Hays?

  What uh, what's the, what's the state of Austin?

• 2:52:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:52:32Jordi Hays?

  We Saks is is opening an office.

• 2:52:34John Coogan?

  Lots of people are getting out of California. Make the pitch for Austin.

• 2:52:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, give us, give us an update on Austin.

• 2:52:40Justin Mares?

  Yeah, look, Austin's great. I think that Austin will do well to the extent that California decides to self immolate. And it seems like right now California is like just pouring gas on the fire. So, you know, we'll, we'll see if the wealth tax thing actually goes through or even gets a medium amount of popular support. Then, yeah, like there is going to be a huge exodus from Silicon Valley, from LA to other places all over the country.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  Is it Austin or bust? Is it Austin or bust? Or are there tech people that are going to Dallas or?

• 2:53:12Jordi Hays?

  Highland Park. What about the, I could see some allocators ending up in Highland Park.

• 2:53:17John Coogan?

  I don't know. Highland Park's in Los Angeles.

• 2:53:19Jordi Hays?

  No, no, Highland Park is a neighborhood in Dallas.

• 2:53:22John Coogan?

  Oh, it is? Okay.

• 2:53:23Justin Mares?

  I've only been to Dallas once. It's, I don't think anyone's going to Dallas.

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  No one's going to Dallas. So if a tech person's leaving San Francisco, they're going to Austin.

• 2:53:30Justin Mares?

  I, I think it's basically Austin, maybe Boulder or Denver, maybe Miami, although I think the Miami thing was kind of not a real thing.

• 2:53:36Jordi Hays?

  I personally, personally, I'm more of an Abilene guy.

• 2:53:39John Coogan?

  Abilene. Straight to the data center. Straight to the data center. I love it. I love it. Yeah, I'm Alaska guy. I say get up there, it's nice and cold.

• 2:53:50Justin Mares?

  There's bears.

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're locked in. But anyway, any, any other, are there any other predictions for just health trends or foods or anything that's like rising and falling? Are we, have we finally reached peak slot bowl? Are we going in a different direction?

• 2:54:06Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm gonna go get a protein cup from, from Chipotle later.

• 2:54:10John Coogan?

  Wait, is that real? Are the restaurants really like downsizing in reaction to GLP-1s? Or is that just like, you know, some random organic thing that's happening?

• 2:54:19Justin Mares?

  You, you are seeing certain grocery chains, especially ones that sell a lot of junk food, are starting to downsize or see like junk food sales go down.

• 2:54:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:27Justin Mares?

  Mainly because people are less hungry and most of junk food is predicated on like people eating them infinitely while snacking all day.

• 2:54:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:33Justin Mares?

  And so I do think there's going to be a renewed focus on nutrient density, on protein, on things like this. I think you have to imagine of like a big trend that I'm, I'm bullish on is. These G O P ones are going to be everywhere. You know, we have the oral version of Ozempic coming this year. There's going to be 50 million Americans on these things in the next five years. I think there is going to be a backlash where people start to see what are the downsides. They start to, you know, get caught up in like micronutrient deficiencies and other sorts of things that just come from, you know, if even if you're eating a bad diet, but you're eating less of it, you're still going to have health problems, even if you may be, you know, less overweight or less obese than you were previously. And I think we'll start to underwrite that more over the next couple of years.

• 2:55:15John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Well, it'll be interesting to track.

• 2:55:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is your second time on the show?

• 2:55:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's make it a, let's make it a monthly thing.

• 2:55:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, next time you're in L.A.

• 2:55:25Justin Mares?

  We love that.

• 2:55:25Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot to talk about and we love you.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 2:55:28Justin Mares?

  We love that. Love you guys. Thanks for the merch.

• 2:55:30John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:55:31Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:55:31John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:55:32Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:55:32John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs.

• 2:55:41Jordi Hays?

  Or in our case.

• 2:55:42John Coogan?

  Theme songs.

• 2:55:43Jordi Hays?

  Theme song.

• 2:55:44John Coogan?

  Our theme song is generated by 11 Labs. Do you want to do some timeline? How, how long, how long do you want to go? Because we could close with this post, this very optimistic post from Elon Musk, replying to Marc Andreessen. Marc Andreessen says, "It's time to grow." This is in response to 4.3% year-over-year GDP growth in Q3. Kind of crazy. Didn't see that coming, says Caleb Hammer. And Elon says, "Double-digit growth is coming within 12 to 18 months. If applied intelligence is in proxy for economic growth, which it should be, triple-digit is possible in five years."

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  Let's pray for triple-digit GDP growth. It would truly be a golden era. A lot of bottlenecks to that, but let's hope it happens.

• 2:56:32Jordi Hays?

  I like the sound of that, John.

• 2:56:36Jordi Hays?

  That's a good place to end.

• 2:56:37John Coogan?

  I think that's a great place to end. We'll cover Lulu's post tomorrow. Lulu's actually coming on the show this week.

• 2:56:41Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  And also, yeah, tomorrow. So, Gabe, you got exactly what you're looking for. And also, we'll have to discuss the prediction about OpenAI buying Pinterest. That's an interesting one to kick around. It was very funny because it was just a prediction post from the information, but people were reporting on it like it's a rumor, like it's like a fact or something. But there's a lot to dig into there. But anyway, thank you so much for watching.

• 2:57:05Jordi Hays?

  It is so good to be back with all of you. Thank you for tuning in. We seriously miss doing this. As a couple of Irishmen, we yearn for labor. We learn to be on the mics, tilling the RSS feed. And thank you for being a part of this. We're so excited for this year. It's gonna be a lot of fun. And we hope you have a great Monday.

• 2:57:31John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Goodbye.