Amazon Bets $10B on OpenAI, Ford’s Reality Check, Paramount Deal Unravels | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in under 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:01John Coogan?

  SpaceX is potentially going out, gonna Hoover up 30 billion of capital.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  They're going.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  They're going out at 1.5 trillion. They're talking to bankers now. They're gonna Hoover up all the capital.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  They're Hoovering.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  The public market's gonna be tapped out, right? Well, Sam Altman would like a word with Andy Jassy and he says, I need 10 billion. And Andy says, sure, as long as you buy a bunch of trainium chips. That's basically the story. Closing out the story with the Ford F-150, of course, this broke earlier this week. CEO Ford did a round of press interviews talking about the news, which is that Ford, the historic automaker, is killing the F-150, lightning their electric truck. Sales fell 72% year over year. That is a 72% decrease specifically in last month, which is post EV tax credit going away. I mean, the first question that I was sort of toying with, that we've been debating is,

• 0:56John Coogan?

  did truck buyers ever really want to go electric? Was that even, was that ever a good idea? Because it always seemed like, who's the last person that's gonna buy an electric car? The truck buyer, right?

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  So one thing that I was thinking about is I feel like the Cybertruck probably got truck buyers to, like traditional truck buyers to go electric, but it wasn't because it was electric. It was because it looked electric.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it looked crazy.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  It looked wild.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  I completely agree with this. Yeah, there's this weird thing where like the F-150 silhouette is iconic, but you sort of...

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Forgot I had my elf ears on.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Ballpark, how many ads, how many billions of dollars have been spent on ads that associate trucks with like...

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Being a cool dude.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Guy, dude.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  Guys being dudes.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Driving through the mud. And a big part of that is the engine note and a big part of that is the actual exhaust coming out of the back.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  All that advertising worked on me. I grew up in a Toyota family. We only had Toyotas growing up. And we had one point, we had one point had two Priuses, right?

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  And, but as soon as I was an adult and I could afford it, I bought a Ford Raptor. It was black on black on black on black. It was lifted.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  I just wanted the truck that I was that that was advertised to me as a kid.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some interesting data that Ford was sharing that they were framing as positive when the F-150 Lightning launched, but I think in retrospect might have actually been sort of a canary in the coal mine.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  So the first stat was that of the people that reserved the F-150 Lightning, 50% had never owned a truck before. And then 75% of the reservation holders had never owned a Ford before. And so Ford was celebrating this. It's like, we did it.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  We did it.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  New hero product. New hero product. It's going to bring new people into the Ford ecosystem. It's going to be a bring new people into the truck ecosystem. We are expanding the market. And in hindsight, what it feels like is the truck buyers didn't want it, the Ford buyers didn't want it, and they're the two biggest markets. And so, yes, there were a class of people that were like, oh, I would always, I've always, an electric truck, that sounds really interesting. I love the idea of a 220 volt. I'm a, I'm a unique purchaser. And they're like, this is a niche product. And they go hard for the niche product. They show up immediately and they'll do it no matter what.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  Andy wrote in the newsletter, the first electric truck was the Rivian.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  And that had only launched a few months.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  Six months earlier.

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  So the Rivian came out in September of 2021. That's the R1T. Ford shipped in April of 2022. That's actually very impressive to me. I was very impressed with how fast Ford was able to respond to the idea of electric trucks happening. This feels like they were like, no, we're, we're moving in the first wave. They did successfully. A lot of that's because they built off of the F-150 platform. They were able to reuse a lot of equipment there and the, and the, and the supply chain. But ultimately, they didn't ship a product that delivered at the level of the R1T. I was thinking the Rivian name. Do you like the Rivian name?

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, I think it's fine.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  It's weird, it, it, it, it sticks out to me. It was also weird when I first heard it.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm neutral on it.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  It, it, it was weird when it first stuck out. It, it sounded like something that came from like a, like a brainstorming session at a pharmaceutical company. You know, because it's like this weird, like, like what does the name actually mean? I guess it means river and Indian kind of portmanteau.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  The name itself is a blend of syllables from the river, symbolizing adventure and connection to nature.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  I always looked at Rivian as, as something like the, the Whole Foods of cars, right? Like the, the REI of cars, right? It's like, people go to REI.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  Like the average person going into REI is not necessarily like buying gear for the most rugged adventure.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  Like they might be buying gear for their backyard or like going on a hike that weekend. And again, like, I feel like the Rivian cars, again, I mean, we had the CEO on, but like have that range where it's like, it really is just like a good daily.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  But they've built it. It's super powerful. It's very capable.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Ford's plan is to pivot. So they are going to be pivoting to hybrid, hybrid trucks and hybrid designs. But what's interesting is that it's one of those, uh, it's this extra long range hybrid where you have an electric powertrain that is charged by a gas motor. And so you can get like 700 miles of range. Here's a, here's a question. Here's something that people don't like about Rivian's. They don't have CarPlay. Is that a deal breaker for you?

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  I think it's solid. The thing that I find annoying is the fact that the cars that I've owned are all defaulting back to the, the actual operating system.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Wait, what do you mean they're defaulting?

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  So in, I have two Mercedes. They have like the regular Mercedes operating system. And then like Apple, CarPlay is layered on top. But I still find myself like turning on the car sometimes and it's the stock system. And I'm like, so I just wish there was a single operating system. I wish as a.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  So Apple's trying to do this because I, I've noticed this in my car.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  But the manufacturers are like, well, we sell the Android and we don't want you to control us forever.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  Uh, Amazon is in talks to invest over $10 billion in OpenAI.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the valuation be higher than 500 billion. The Amazon investment would help OpenAI afford some of the commitments it has made. Some to rent servers from cloud providers, including from AWS.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is like. It's like there's somewhat, there's some circularity, but it's not entirely circular.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Not fully beating the circular allegations on this one. OpenAI last month announced it would spend thirty eight billion renting servers from AWS over the next seven years, making AWS one of at least five cloud providers OpenAI uses to develop AI. The deal also could help Amazon find a new customer for its Trame AI chips, which compete with the Nvidia chips.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  This is kind of like a rebate, you know, it's like they, they said, hey, we're, we're gonna buy forty. And they said, here, take ten back.

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  And we'll take a piece. Honestly, the more notable news here is that Amazon and OpenAI have discussed commerce partnership opportunities.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  That's very interesting.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI wants to turn ChatGPT into a shopping hub and has discussed earning fees for referring customers to retailers. It isn't clear whether Amazon opening ideal would involve any arrangement related to such features in ChatGPT or AI powered shopping features that Amazon is developing. So I just look at this in the same way as like the Disney deal, which is like, hey, we're gonna invest, but we're gonna give you access to this thing. And I would expect that, I mean, you can imagine OpenAI has been working on getting referrals to, from, from, basically getting a revenue stream from referring products out to Amazon for a really long time, right? They've done the Etsy deal, they're, they're doing deals with Shopify. They have not done eBay notably, and they have not done Amazon notably.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  And I think there's been some, there's just been some general hesitance to let, again, let the fox into the hen house, right? Because you can think about it, like, the Google search experience is, like, or sorry, sorry, searching for products on Amazon is extremely profitable for Amazon, right? If, if consumers start just going to ChatGPT to find products on Amazon, that, like, Amazon needs to be really careful around that because, yes, they can get a referral fee, or they'll, they're, they're getting a customer, but then they, Amazon, or sorry, OpenAI wants to, them to pay them for that customer, and that's a customer that didn't just go look at a bunch of ads, right?

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  And I do not like searching for products on Amazon because the experience is, I'm just trying to find, I always use the example, like, paper towels, right?

• 8:33John Coogan?

  It's been so maxed out.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  It's so frustrating to search on there because I just wanna buy, like, I'll spend twenty to thirty dollars on this thing. And then it's like, three pages of like six dollar versions of the product that I know are gonna be terrible, and a bunch of ads for those things, right? And so, being able to go into ChatGPT and just say like, hey, I want to buy. This item from a manufacturer or a brand that has been in business for more than 30 years, like pre e-commerce.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  I want a brand that has just been making this thing well for a really long time. And so I would be defaulting to the LLM and skipping Amazon entirely.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you want to fight, you want to fight to be the aggregator, you want to like, I guarantee that although Amazon shows up on Google search results, like they want people to open the app and search in the app and be the main starting point for their commerce, their entire commerce journey. We've seen this with Shopify as well. Shopify obviously would love for the commerce journey to not start on Facebook or Meta properties, instead start in the shop app. They're working towards that. The same thing is true of Amazon and every aggregator is acutely aware of aggregation theory and acutely aware that they should not let someone

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  Amazon is apparently projecting 60 billion of advertising revenue.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  Just growing way faster than the core retail business. They're sort of like, the core retail business is probably growing at the rate of overall e-commerce penetration, whereas this is just like extremely high margin, fast growing, and they want to protect that.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  And probably bigger than what they could make off of a referral fee on top, deeper in the stack, if they're deeper down. Well, the other side of the Amazon OpenAI deal is that the deal could also help Amazon find a new customer for its Tranium AI server chips, which compete with Nvidia AI chips that OpenAI primarily uses today. As part of the deal being discussed, OpenAI plans to use Tranium chips, two of the people said. The cloud deal Amazon announced with OpenAI last month only made mention of service powered by Nvidia. So if, the interesting thing here is, is what will they be doing with those Tranium chips? Will they have a specific model that runs on Tranium?

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Will they, will they set up some sort of abstraction layer that they can run any of their models on any hardware or any ASIC, basically? Like, like, will you see, or will it be like, okay, we still have GPT-4O workloads. Let's recompile 4O for, for Tranium and let it just chill there and Tranium is our, is our pool for

• 11:14John Coogan?

  For 40, or you know what? Trainium is going to be our workhorse for image gen or video gen. And let's do our image gen optimized for that particular stack. The Wall Street Journal highlighted real time video as an interesting place where Trainium could potentially outperform. They weren't making the case, at least to the Journal, that Trainium is what you want if you're going to do the biggest, most massive training run. That was sort of the narrative that the TPU was pitching with the latest Anthropic round, like runs. But they did highlight, you know, real time video, video generation.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  And so what I'm, what I'm interested in is that is, is, does Trainium get abstracted to a point where it's sort of like model agnostic? Or is OpenAI like the, the ChatGPT, the app has a whole host of models? Because these models are now mixtures of models and there's model routers and there's different products, video, audio, image, you know, deep research. Is one of those going to be on Trainium? Or will Trainium be a, like a liquid pool of compute that cuts across the entire stack? Do you have any, you know, instinct on this or?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think the abstraction thing is pretty hard, right? Cause you always hear about TPUs and how the TPU team and like the Gemini team are so closely integrated, right? Like every, all, all the model architectures like interlinked with the, with the GPU architecture, TPU.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  So I, I think it's hard to actually abstract all the way up, but it's interesting. I mean, Anthropic has been like multi-platform, platform for a while now. So I'm, I'm curious how, how they think about this stuff.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Something that's interesting, if I search on Gemini for a product on Amazon, find me the best blank on Amazon, it takes me, it says top recommendations on Amazon. And then I click the link and it takes me to a Google search for that product that is a sponsored result on Amazon.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Then I click. Who's paying?

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  So Amazon is paying, Amazon is paying Google to appear in search results.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  AdWords, okay.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  In AdWords.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  And then Gemini is routing basically to AdWords to get the click through there.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:30Jordi Hays?

  So there's no direct integration at all.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Yes. Google has so many odd advantages. It's crazy. Like, the, the, the, the, the fact that the Google bot just sees so much more of the internet feels extremely important. And yet, I just don't know how, if it will be enough to win in consumer in some meaningful way. Does it mean 50% of the value of consumer? Does it mean that they can win, come from behind, defeat OpenAI, ChatGPT? Feels so important, and yet, it also feels extremely hard to actually pass that message through.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  The Amazon investment would help OpenAI afford commitments, including from AWS.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  That's very funny.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  Um, liquidity is showing the gang standing around. All right, Jeff, you're up next to invest in OpenAI.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Oh, Amazon, $10 billion investment in OpenAI in the form of AWS credits. You got Satya Nadella.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  I couldn't find where.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  2% for Amazon, maybe less, if it's, if it's at above a $500 billion valuation. So Andy Jassy's getting 1.5% of OpenAI. Satya's sitting there with over 20. He's pretty happy, pretty happy, looking at the screen. Jared Kushner is pulling out of the Paramount bid hours after his father-in-law took aim at the Ellison clan, apparently. The, the latest news in the Paramount bid for Warner Brothers, this story that just keeps on giving, um, is in back-to-back salvos Tuesday, the president and his former, and his family, distanced themselves from Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Brothers Discovery.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  I think we know what's going on there. It's about Foghorn Leghorn. It's about. Tweety Bird. It's a rebuke to owner David Ellison's attempt to leverage relationships with the White House to close the $108 billion takeover effort. President Trump Tuesday afternoon said he had been treated far worse by the Ellison-owned CBS since the family closed a deal for CBS parent Paramount.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  Which is so interesting because I've seen a bunch of people have been riled up about Barry Weiss running CBS. The reason that you maybe would say that she's doing an effective job as a manager of that asset is because people are talking about CBS content in a way that I have not seen ever. Do you ever remember, like, maybe a couple times a year you'd see something and she's clipping CBS content? It's like she's doing stories that-

• 16:03John Coogan?

  It feels like it's working. No shade to the people that were running CBS before, but like, what? What content was on that?

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we just don't know what they were doing before.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  It's like it didn't exist. And now it exists. And you can like it or you hate it, depending on your political persuasion, but you can't deny that it exists now.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  And I always looked at this as like-

• 16:23John Coogan?

  It's a thing.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  The Ellison's were like, hey, we can get a truth engine.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's definitely like, the brand is still great. Like CBS feels like a solid news source, so I agree with that. But the distribution was so far behind that people weren't talking about what was going on there.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  The reason, one way to think about the value of CBS is what would it cost and how long would it take to recreate a brand like CBS? Probably cost, it would take you decades.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  I don't think you can buy it. Like, I actually don't think, I think you could, I think you could be Sam Altman and Marshall a $50 billion fundraising round.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can't just snap your fingers and get a CBS company.

• 17:02John Coogan?

  And it would still take 50 years to get there. If you get 50 billion, what do you have to do? You have to go buy the legacy IP because there's only, you can't just, you can't just, you can't snap your fingers and create a brand overnight. Like, it just takes time.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  So Warner Brothers sent a letter to shareholders this morning, basically saying that they're riding, they want to, the board of directors still wants to go with Netflix. They believe it's superior in a number of different ways. One thing that stood out to me is that Paramount has consistently- They said Paramount has consistently led WBD shareholders that its proposed transaction has a full backstop from the Ellison family. It does not and never has. Paramount's most recent proposal includes a $40 billion equity commitment for which there is no Ellison family commitment of any kind. Instead, they propose that you rely on an unknown and opaque revocable trust for the

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  certainty of the crucial deal funding, despite having been told repeatedly by WBD how important a full and unconditional financing commitment from the Ellison family was, and despite their own ample resources, as well as multiple assurances from Paramount Skydance during our strategic review process that such a commitment was forthcoming, the Ellison family has chosen not to backstop the Paramount Skydance offer. And a revocable trust is no replacement for a secured commitment by a controlling stockholder. The assets and liabilities of the trust are not publicly disclosed and are subject to change. So they're basically like have this entity being like, yeah, we're guaranteeing it, but it's not actually them saying like, you know, they could move assets out of that trust.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, got it. So strength of the offer not as strong potentially as Netflix. You know Netflix is good for it. It's a huge company. They've already signed a deal with a massive termination clause and they've, I believe they've raised debt for this, like they're, they're ready to rock. So bird in the hand is worth, not too in the bush.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing is Paramount has not offered to reimburse the breakup, the termination fee. It's a 2.8 billion dollar fee. There's also financing costs that they're going to have to take, that Warner Brothers would have to take on if they don't, you know, complete the debt exchange. So, yeah, at the end of the day, what do the, what do the Ellison's do at this point? Right? They've been, they've been doing deals, right? They've got CBS now, they've got the UFC, they're trying to build this streaming platform. Again, going back to some of the conversations that we've had, like this entire, the entire strategy to date has been predicated on getting this Warner Brothers asset.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And it seems like it might not happen, but game's not over.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Announce the $1 trillion backlog.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  Every out of home agent I've ever talked to has offered 50% reductions in price when doing a large scale campaign. Most of the inventory is actually pretty cheap if you don't focus on the most premium assets. Where haven't you seen a friend.com billboard? The 101. You haven't seen it, you know, in the iconic places. He hasn't done the Times Square buyout. He's in the subway, right? Like when we saw him, you always make fun of this one. There's one that's like up against a wall. I saw one just on a random bus in my hometown. It's like, there's just, there's like random places, but there's so many of

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  them. Some of the alpha and out of home in LA is there's so much traffic that you're kind of moving slowly by some areas.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  And you'll just see random stuff. And so, yeah, I was kind of fighting on you, fighting you on this. Like, was this truly one of the greatest campaigns of the year? And hearing his extra context, it's, it's incredible. He might have unlocked some entirely new strategy of just like the go big massive billboard campaign. I, I wouldn't be surprised if next year is the year of the copy paste this strategy for, you know, a company that has a million dollars to spend on a big campaign. Let's do an interesting billboard campaign.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they have a million dollars in revenue, too.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Ideally, yes. Ideally, ideally, yes. I mean, he, he clearly like, it was, you know, he's, he's like risk on exploring, testing new things, like learning, but just the core, the core arb of like a big billboard campaign paying off, I think you gotta credit him. You gotta check in with, with Avi Schiffman.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  Did you see his other post? He said, SF is over. Still a beautiful place to live. Hype around LLMs has subsided. It's not an interesting place to be anymore. Why go to a hackathon? It's not like GPT-4 just came out. There's nothing too interesting to discuss at a party anymore. All the big companies are too mature now. Most of what is new is just why see slop startups? If you're still in pre-seed exploring stage, it's mostly too late. The directions have been positioned in. It's just a performative scene left. There are always a cycle to these things and this is fine. I've enjoyed, I've enjoyed 2022 to 2025. I hereby declare New York the new bastion of what matters in the near future. Could not disagree more with every single, pretty much every single word in here. I

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  think Avi has shown, you know, brilliance in, in some ways, even though many don't. But this, this was, I put this up as one of the worst takes of the year.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, it's literally like saying like, it's like saying in the early days of the internet or in the early days of the iPhone, like, hey, like, yeah, it's over. Just don't build anything.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Also, you should get in, if you're bored with the hackathon, you're bored with the YC demo day, get into shark diving. Go dive in the bay. Put on the, the seven mil wet suit. Swim out to Alcatraz, take on a shark head to head and emerge victorious. I think that will really give you the sort of the glory. You'll be excited again. You will have survived a shark attack. That will energize you in a way that GPT 5.2 might not be energizing you.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  Fighting head on with a great white shark in the San Francisco Bay. That's something you can only do in the Bay Area.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Or who's making, who's making friend.com for sharks, right? Like a wearable pendant that a shark could use to, you know, better navigate. Maybe they're lonely out in the high seas, right? It's cold, it's dark.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, you know, in between hunts, right? They're just kind of hanging out, right? Yeah, just having, having a digital companion. Why reserve digital companions for, just for humans, right? Like all life, all life matters. Think bigger. The other thing I was thinking, why has no one made like a telemedicine for anabolic steroids for your pets?

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Somebody has, right? Wasn't, isn't that a real thing?

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  I want to see a golden retriever as a mass monster.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  I think that's just a rottweiler.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Well, so, I mean, you can make your, like cattle really jacked, right? That's like what sarms are. So you could just, you, couldn't you just give it to your dogs?

• 23:46John Coogan?

  You know way too much about performance and using drugs.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just saying the word sarms is like, just, just say that you've been deep in bodybuilding forums, Styler.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. We got a Christmas present from friend of the show, Sahil Bloom. Let's open it up.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Also, I got a belt on today. I'm looking much more Santa.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  Belt it up.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Okay, so this is from Sahil Bloom himself. Look at this. Look at this.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  New brand alert.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  I love this. So he said, I got sick of putting things on my skin that I'd never put on my body. So I spent 18 months creating the perfect solution. The perfect solution, Wild Roman. I can smell it. Everyone says the TBP Ultra M smells bad now. Smells great. This, this actually smells fantastic. So, uh, Wild Roman is 100% natural skincare for men made with grass-fed tallow, cold-pressed oils, and wild botanicals. You can order today at wildroman.com. Just wanted to give him a shout out and then.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is good stuff.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  You've been using this?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  I've been using this for about like two weeks.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  And I think it's working so far.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Two weeks on Wild Roman and you look like that?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's been, you know, it's helped with like beard growth and just skin clarity.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  You look fantastic.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're, you're glowing. You're really glowing. Truly never stop using this product.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  Because I do not want you to go back. I don't want you to go back. Never churn. I think you're a customer for life.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  What do you think it takes to win in this category? Sahil's obviously a, an influencer, an author. Uh, he has a massive newsletter. He has 1.1 million followers on, on X, um, and has an audience. But something we've been keep, we keep coming back to is like, an audience might not be enough to truly win in a category.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  I think he's got to go hard on Target. Like this feels, this feels like a good brand to introduce like tallow.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  To the Target audience, right? This feels, uh, again, like going, going for the set, a bunch of products out the gates. This, uh, this screams end cap to me. Uh, I, I was talking to a friend and they have a brand that, uh, does over a hundred million a year only in Target.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  They don't sell anywhere else.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so it's just such a, such a massive channel. And so I think Sahel can probably leverage his brand to just go really hard into Target early, but I'm sure, but I'm sure he can, he can at least get some initial traction D to C. The main thing that people miss with like personality led, kind of like influencer brands like this is that no matter how big your audience is, you can be Kim Kardashian. And in order to build a truly big business, you get this initial boost from your audience. But, uh, but, but the, the nature of like any audience is that the longer that you just advertise against it, you can saturate it. So like Kim K can post like five times in the first week, but then eventually you have to go find new, net new people that aren't

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  necessarily getting exposure.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool says, breaking, I am proud to announce in our continuing 20 plus year evolution, we are now partnering with Netflix for exclusive video podcasts. And the way he frames this in the video is remarkable. So let's play it.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Emergency press conference time. If you haven't heard the news, I'm proud to announce that Barstool has partnered with Netflix for three of our top podcasts.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  One Netflix.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Exclusive video only on Netflix starting next year. I'm talking, you want to watch a video, part of my take Netflix. You want to watch a video of spit and chicklets? Netflix. I actually spit there. That's just my brain. You want to watch a video of Ryan Rusillo Show?

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Where?

• 27:38Speaker 03

  Netflix, Netflix, Netflix.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Five, Netflix, six, seven.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Video, audio, stay the same. Video where? Netflix, Netflix, Netflix.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Eight, nine, 10.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  We're proud to partner one of the best and breed companies. That's what we do at Barstool. Evolve, rotate, evolve. Video next year, PMT, chicklets, Ryan Rusillo, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  Founders, technology founders. Next time you think, oh, I need to film this like crazy cinematic video.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Cinematic, oh, I was gonna, yeah, that's amazing.

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  I need to film this crazy cinematic. I need to, I need a studio shot of me sitting down on a couch. Looking all put together. Dave is sitting there with a bunch of windows behind him that are reflecting.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Actively spitting.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  One shot of this video and it's way more engaging than him just being, you know, trying to be all professional.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  No, this is good. But I mean, to be fair, like in order to do that, 20 years, 20 years of experience. Like, most people cannot just one-shot that on day one of their career. The other big get for, I guess, the modern tech companies is the Oscars are moving to YouTube, which is a bombshell.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so explain the Oscars.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Okay, so it's like, you know how we did the award shows for, you know, random obscure achievements?

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Journalist of the Year.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Yes, Absolute Hitter of the Year. It's like that, but for movies, of course.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  The Oscars are the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And they said they reached a deal with YouTube for exclusive rights to show this, to the show, starting in 2029. Really feels like forever, but I'm sure it'll be upon us in no time, but probably the right time, but does feel particularly, it hits particularly hard because it's, it's like the whole show is about the theater. It's about the movie industry.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  And the movie industry is saying like, yep, like YouTube beat us.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  We're so back, but also it's over.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, folks.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Goodbye.