Dan Wang's Annual Letter, Meta Acquires Manus, Nvidia's $20B Groq Deal | 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 https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp - https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://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

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• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  It is so good to be back.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  It's amazing. 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 should kick it off with Dan Wang's annual letter, his 2025 letter. Dan came on his show during his book tour for his, you know, excellent book that sort of reset the narrative around the AI competition. He doesn't like the phrase AI race.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:28John 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.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  And he says he prefers to say that the US and China need to win, win the AI future. And this echoes what Gurley has said, too.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  True.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

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

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

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

• 0:53John 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 Menlo Park presumably.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  No, I think they're going to stay.

• 1:08John 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.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:21John Coogan?

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

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  The chat misses Tyler.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Oh, they just missed Tyler. How you doing? Also, we signed for 2026.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:47John 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 going to have a lot of fun this year. So, the Dan Wang piece, we should read through some of it. He is reflecting on the AI future, what it takes to win the AI future. 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?

• 2:30John Coogan?

  We need to be able to build big things, new bridges. We need to build high-speed rail. And, uh, and we've failed at a lot of that, obviously. 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, a cultural export of America for a very long time.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Dan's saying we're good, we're very good at making data centers.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  Haven't been so good on the energy side.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  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've 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, uh, all the net new data centers would just be using the new energy infrastructure.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  But that's not exactly what happened. So from 2008 to 2021, uh, America's, uh, annual growth in energy production was 0.1% annually. Really, really bad. Not good, but it is getting better. 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. So it feels like there's something that still needs to change. And then simultaneously you have this, uh, you know, massive political backlash to rising energy prices.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  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, uh, you know, uh, 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. There's no one who's really. Become like the main energy guy or gal, right?

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

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

• 4:46John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  Unclear yet if he's a Joe Rogan CEO.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  Other, other crazy stats. So while we're growing at like 2.4%, 1.7%, China is consistently putting up 6% growth. 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. There are two fields in which China is substantially behind the West. Semiconductors and aviation. 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 rocketry.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

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

• 5:27John 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. 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, uh, this company comes up with some AI app. They, you know, ramp to 100 million. Will it stick around or will they just get, you know, swept by the wayside? And people will go back to doing it the old way or they'll use something else or they'll pay way less.

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

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

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Well, beat the bubble will pop in 2025 allegations.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Like, 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. Like, if you were long AI broadly in 2025, you did very well. In the other section of the Dan Wang piece, uh, he talks about competition. And I thought this was just an interesting, uh, element to read. He talks about Sputnik moments. 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.

• 6:54John 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?

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

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

• 7:04John 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.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

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

• 7:24John Coogan?

  It's a good point, right? Because I think the US continues to systematically underrates 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.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  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. Anyways, go read it, but he called Europe cooked and chopped. Let's talk about Manus.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  This all started because Bill Gurley was an investor in Manus.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

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

• 8:17John Coogan?

  I agree, I agree.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

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

• 8:22John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  He's got pipes.

• 8:24John Coogan?

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

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Jack Randall in the X chat, "Did anyone check on Dalian?"

• 8:39John Coogan?

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

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

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

• 8:46John Coogan?

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

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  Also that, and Patrick Hollis was bull busting.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  So, did Dalian capitulate? Did they capitulate too early?

• 9:02John Coogan?

  No, no, he gets to play musical chairs. He's like, what? I never said anything about Manus. I don't know about that. It's a fine, it's a fine investment. It makes sense. 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.'" 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

• 9:45John Coogan?

  saying that they do not endorse a prediction."

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  He talks about humor within tech and the CCP.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:54Jordi 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."

• 10:06John Coogan?

  I mean, that is. It is funny.

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  That is really funny. That's really funny. This is the key problem for the tech industry in 2026. Is like, how do you need to paint a more, like, the founders need to paint a more optimistic vision for AI. Because it's not working right now. 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. The slop is getting better, right? You look at some of the videos coming out of this Venezuela debacle, right? 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.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  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. The industry needs to figure out how to paint a more optimistic, you know, because 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 in the 20th century, it was like, you know, it was easy mode being a politician or a CEO. Yeah. Cause you could go into a room of business executives and said, okay, you currently spend like, if you were running like an AI company.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Before the internet.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Before everything was recorded, you could go and say like, hey, you currently spend a billion dollars a year on payroll.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

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

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Jordi 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.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  No, cross balling.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  Right? Or politicians could go talk to.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  A labor union here and then go talk to business leaders here.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  And you just.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  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.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

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

• 12:21John Coogan?

  Before you criticize us.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  Just to get some context.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  I, I don't know. I don't know if the AGI pill people are so AGI pill that they think we're going to defeat the speed of light. Every like physicist I've ever talked to has always said like, no, the, the, like that one holds forever. That's not like, oh, quantum computing, it can work, but it's a couple of decades away or fusion or fusion. Like all these other things are like somewhat engineering problems. I think the speed of light is like, going to be around forever. Um, I don't know.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

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

• 12:51John Coogan?

  It is?

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  What does that mean? Wait, I thought they only-

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  2026 Chinese year of the firehorse.

• 12:56John Coogan?

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

• 13:02Jordi Hays?

  It's the year of the fire- We upgraded animals.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  The firehorse.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  It's amazing. So Ramp Labs modeled it out. 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&A comps. It's the fastest to a hundred million ARR in history, just eight months. Wow. And benchmark likely eight to 12 Xed and under a year.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  People were kind of putting the deal between two and three billion. I guess, let's get in, let's get it. What was, I guess, what was your immediate reaction? The thing that I was excited about is this is Zuck buying a product that people love.

• 13:42John Coogan?

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

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

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

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  He, they, they're the, you know, biggest investor in scale, right? But they didn't acquire the product.

• 13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Zuck has been saying, you know, drum, you know, beating the personal superintelligence drum.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  It's been very unclear what that means.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Jordi 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. Like, it's the year of the agent.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  Like, use it, you'll see the future.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 14:22Jordi 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.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  They can go, I think in the context of Meta, I think about like shopping, right? You see something on Instagram that you like and you can, you could trigger an agent effectively, like, go find this product.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Like, you see a car that you like, go find this product. And

• 14:56John Coogan?

  The elusive G T three R S.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  G T three bench.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

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

• 15:06John Coogan?

  And in fact, I would, I would probably argue that L L M's in the chat form where you have a bunch of information with a, you know, knowledge cutoff baked into a into some big model Lama four 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 super intelligence, of personal assistance, 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, 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.

• 15:50Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

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

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of areas where it feels very natural for Google to expand into. It feels very natural for, 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 for, Meta, Meta at work for a while, but they, they, it, it, 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.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

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

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  close, close to the action that apparently like the, the Meta AI trough, the

• 17:08John Coogan?

  Vibes?

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, meta vibes. The usage is actually insane.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Really?

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  No way.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Trough. But I mean, it's terrible in the App Store, right? It cannot be ranked. Even Sora is not ranking well.

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

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

• 17:33John Coogan?

  I M.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

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

• 17:38John Coogan?

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

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  Isle of Chad?

• 17:42John Coogan?

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

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  I've been bone smashing.

• 17:47John Coogan?

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

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  I gotta fix my recessed maxilla.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  I feel like his maxilla is looking different. It's looking better. He doesn't have the filter on.

• 17:58Jordi Hays?

  Wait, Tyler, go like this. Do the.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  The double jaw surgery.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

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

• 18:05John Coogan?

  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? They know really, really well how to build good agents and maybe that's enough.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

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

• 18:28John Coogan?

  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 Meta Mate and Gen AI were highly politicized, sucking up all the oxygen in the room. As always, I was right.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  Hilarious line. As always, I was right.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Ex, ex Meta people are getting spicy. Did you see like Yann Le Cun, Financial Times deep dive? 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 becoming his boss effectively.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  You got leveled.

• 19:05John Coogan?

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

• 19:16Jordi Hays?

  Where did he land on the Metas list, Tyler?

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Tyler, do you have Yann on the?

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he actually wasn't on there.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  He wasn't on there?

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think we were trying to rage bait him or something.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  No way.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he wasn't on there.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Wow, we are so bad. 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 ghost ship type deal where you take the team, take some of the IP, license, pay out the investors.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  Twenty billion dollar deal, what should we do with that, John? Should we hit that app-loving gong?

• 19:55John Coogan?

  We should hit that app-loving gong. We have a new gong, everyone, look at this gong.

• 19:59Jordi 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.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  It's a massive gong.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  And it is a massive gong for a massive company, fantastic company.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  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 we'll have to dig into that a little bit more. But it seems like, in general, everyone sort of got paid. It sounds like Chamath did very well on this. He was a very early player.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I mean Chamath haters were in shamble.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  We need to check on them.

• 20:51Jordi 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.

• 20:58John Coogan?

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

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  Take him out, touch the grass.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  Touch the grass.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Because it's going to be rough for a while. 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.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  What a chat. What a chat. Send the 20 billion dollar wire. Sir, we haven't fully executed the docs. I'm good for my 20 billion.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Why is Nvidia buying Groq? Is it a response to the TPU? We'll have to get some of the semi-analysis folks on the show to dig into it. 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. There's two sides to it. One is like when, if you read the actual social capital memo that Chamath put together, it's, it makes so much sense to invest at the valuation he did. With a lot of the custom silicon, the custom chips, you could, 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

• 22:07John Coogan?

  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. 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.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  Is this offense or defense for Jensen?

• 22:44John Coogan?

  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.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

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

• 23:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Like it's not the kind of like, it's, we take like Jensen took, Jensen personally led this process. It took him two weeks. He wired early.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  You would, you would do the same thing for, for a nice camera.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Holy effing ass. Not swearing really, really hurts the quality or you can read it on the screen. But 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. 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 Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don't care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday,

• 23:53John Coogan?

  and honestly, I hope they sue me. I've been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code get pushed."

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

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

• 24:03John 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. So, "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 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 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.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  First off, the priority delivery is a total scam. 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. Even in this scenario, it's like maybe unethical, but like, this is actually a bull case for paying $2.99.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  If the default service is actually slower and $2.99 gets me five to 10 minutes faster, then I should pay.

• 25:32Jordi 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...

• 25:41John Coogan?

  I'm feeling lucky.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

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

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  You might not get the pizza for three hours.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Do you remember that? Or Uber Pool, those?

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  Amazon does this for packages, too. You get a credit if you like take it up.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you get like a Kindle Store credit or something on Prime. It's kind of interesting. 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 driver for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. 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

• 26:37John Coogan?

  while the full timers get grinded into dust. Then there is the benefit fee. You've probably seen that $150 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.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  That's not really how.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  It's not really how money works, right?

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  It's like route, you know.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  This is earmarked for this.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

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

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  Send it to that.

• 27:12John 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. 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.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm extremely frustrated. I will say this, like, this feels like, this feels like, this feels like fan. Yes.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Really? What restaurant?

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in, uh, in, in high school. I worked at.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  I actually have never worked in a restaurant.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  My first, my first job, first job outside of reffing soccer was picking up cigarette butts with my hands.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  For two hours in the morning.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Jordi 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 butts off.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Picking up cigars.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Wait, people could smoke indoors or something?

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, still around.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  People would sit out, sit outside.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:16John Coogan?

  This is a child in this smoke filled environment.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, disgusting.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  If you're using a delivery app, you should assume the delivery app is trying to get as much money as possible from you.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  And going to psychologically manipulate you.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:41John Coogan?

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

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  And, and as somebody who.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Keep coming back more.

• 28:50Jordi 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, at multiple times in my life worked for, for tips. So having this sort of digital intermediary.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  That is messing with that relationship sucks, right? Anyway.

• 29:13John 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 wanna go to this library.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  So at least hit the librarian with a buzz ball.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  This is the, this is the life, life hack.

• 29:36John Coogan?

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

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

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

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Librarian go, beer me, beer me, brother, if you're gonna be in here posting on Reddit and, and chugging beers all day long, uh, tip me, tip me.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  I hope that 2026 is a year of the buzz ball.

• 29:57John Coogan?

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

• 30:01Jordi 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.

• 30:13John Coogan?

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

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

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

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, I've seen, I've seen them. I've seen them.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

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

• 30:33John Coogan?

  That's pretty strong for a single.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very strong.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  It's more than a single serving of alcohol.

• 30:36Jordi 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.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, and, uh, you go back to whatever, your house or apartment and you, you throw the ball.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  At somebody. If they catch it, they have to drink it.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

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

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  In, in kind of at least the heyday of buzz balls, for me.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:58Jordi 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 a.m. right? 10 a.m. And so you're going to keep your hands down and you're not going to catch it. You'll like, kind of, you'll, you'll sidestep it.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  But now.

• 31:10John Coogan?

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

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, I'm sure there are.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Results in a lot of destruction.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

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

• 31:24John Coogan?

  You hit him with a buzz ball?

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  I hit him with a buzz ball.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  When? A couple days ago.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

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

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Well, I would be unprepared.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  I was like, I feel bad that, I feel bad that you, uh, that you caught them.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Scoot in the chat says, I, I already got the CEO of Substack to drink a buzz ball. Is the, is the, is the culture of the buzz ball alive and well on college campuses? Or do we just send you back?

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm not 21. I've never had alcohol.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  True. 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 seventy to one hundred and forty minutes a week. Roughly ten 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 ten 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 nine AM this morning, Saturday, January third. It's a sunny, warm day here in Austin. My four-year-old son is begging me to play catch in the street.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

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

• 32:54John 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."

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  You have to be another figure.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  What if this is gonna be like a generational, you know, father-son rivalry? 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."

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Tree-lined blocks.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for tree-lined blocks. 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 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."

• 33:58John Coogan?

  A lot of people weighed in. Fourteen million views.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  Part of what he talked about was like how you can make it as an independent writer or creative.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  And so I think you have to view this post from the lens of somebody who is their primary focus in life right now is escaping the permanent underclass.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  But also outside of institutions. 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. This is

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, parenting.

• 34:30John 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? They'll be like, absolutely. I want to play cards. Four-year-old boys have the mind of Dan Bilzerian, effectively. And so if you adopt the mind of Dan Bilzerian, you will have a very enjoyable time with your four-year-old son.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  I think if you're not satisfied with where you are in life

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 35:14Jordi Hays?

  as a man, whose job is to provide for his family. If you're not satisfied with your life, you will not be satisfied by parenting. Thank you for being a part of this. We're so excited for this year.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  It's huge.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  And we hope you have a great Monday.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Goodbye.