Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, AI Data Center Forecast Jumps, Poppi’s Pepsi Deal | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, this weekend, every time I would refresh, it would be, you can see everything takes. Everyone had all these different opinions and takes. The one that stuck out to me was that there's this, there's a little bit of a, like, you, you watch the movie and most people came away thinking more positively of Elizabeth Holmes, being like, oh, maybe she wasn't, maybe she's not that bad, maybe there's more to the story, maybe she was manipulated. She seems to be manipulated multiple times, potentially, like, maybe, maybe she's more of a victim.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Some people might be like, she's bad, but she'd probably be nice to me if I interacted with her.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a little bit of that. There's, there's some sort of like suspicion that I feel some people in Silicon Valley are having where it's like, oh, it's just like the fake it till you make it thing. It's, you know, it's not that big of a deal. I just can't stop thinking about like, it seems like she's just a bad founder. Like, put aside the fraud, like, it just seems like, like, total slop in terms of the execution of that business. And gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos 2.0.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  And the whole time, I was like, almost yelling at the movie screen because she taught, the way she describes Theranos is like this box and like, it's in the cloud. It's just like, it's, it's so, it's so unaware of the medical device industry, which is so frustrating to me because she, she's making this point where it's like, we even, we have an invention and our invention allows you to test blood for things and like, we test all this stuff. And she's making it sound like it's like magical science. And it's like, I looked it up, there have been 60 plus companies since Theranos started that sold for over a hundred million dollars in that category.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  It's like, it's like someone coming to you and being like, I have a magical, I, we, we invented something. It takes information and it stores it on a database that you can access through a website. It's like, so you make a SaaS product. Literally hundreds of people make those. And there are thousands of people that work in the medical device industry and they've made boxes that look kind of like a Theranos box and it runs a test and they get it approved.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  And they don't go to prison for 10 years.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, they don't go to prison. And she never just says like, look, this stuff happens all the time. It's not crazy that I'm going to be able to build a box that tests for something. Like, this happens all the time. Instead, it's like, it's like, I'm the only one that could possibly do this, which is so weird. It's such a bad frame to not, to not just admit what's, what's really happening on the field, which is that box, diagnostic boxes get built and sold every few years for hundreds of millions of dollars. You could just do that. But instead, it has to be this pie in the sky nonsense. And it really, really frustrates me, as you can probably tell. Nikita Beer broke down a little bit of this concept. He said, one of the things that hasn't been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes, she was created in the era of the TED Talk entrepreneur. And this is exactly what I was picking up on.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  So between 2011 and 2015, after the release of the social network, there was an entire apparatus built around child prodigies, college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations. I watched countless founders of a hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with, with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as faking it till you make it. But Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED Talk era came to an end, when people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook. And in the most scrutinized field, there is medical technology. When people ask how far she, how she got so far, it is largely explained by the period she did it in.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up. And so there's other things, which is that this is strictly regulated by the FDA. So if you're a founder of a medical device company, like, what you are going for is FDA authorization. That's marketing authorization. That's literally the ability to sell the product. It's not illegal to build a medical device. It's illegal to sell it, to market it. And so that also includes, like, you can't, you typically can't go on podcasts and, and media and say, oh, yes, we have this thing that does this thing. We have to say, oh, we're working on this progress. Like, we can't say that it actually works because we haven't been approved to say that by the FDA.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  Spoiler.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Don't want to hear spoilers. Just turn, leave the stream going, but just turn the audio down.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we'll just talk away.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  What spoiler do you want to talk about?

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  So Billy does this side deal to get a cut of profit on the backend of the movie. You would probably know what, what that's exactly called.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, points on the backend.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Points on the backend. So he does this thing.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Incredibly good.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then later, after the movie's totally been, like, finished, he decides, ah, this is going to look pretty bad, backs out, right? Damage has already been done, right? Like, he looks, he looks, he doesn't look great.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  And Elizabeth is trying to say like, oh, I didn't, I don't really know much about the details. So one thing, like, the damage was already done and now the movie is a massive hit and it's going to be, continue to be a massive hit. It seems like it'll be like a cult classic. And I, I can't imagine being 60 years old, being like, I'm going to turn on some Nathan Fielder, just take me back to the good old days. But the funny thing is, do you think that Billy, do you think it made sense for him to do this side deal? Because she has, she claimed in the show, she has hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution to pay. So of course she wouldn't want to make, even if she, she wanted to make money on it, she wouldn't get any benefit of it. So she would want to route it through Billy?

• 5:36John Coogan?

  It's a good question. There's some ambiguity over whether or not they're married. I couldn't get to the bottom of this, but I think they might not be legally married. In which case, it would make sense for him to get those profits and then use that for their kids and their family. But then it doesn't flow to her bank account, which immediately gets grabbed by the investors.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  I think you're, I, I think you might be on to something there.

• 5:58Jordi Hays?

  She gets a lot of the benefit in that it's sort of funding.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Yes, and, and so is your point that if she's in on the deal, sitting there being like, we want to get paid, but just pay it to Billy's account, don't pay it. That's more tricky from a restitution perspective?

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  Totally, I imagine, I imagine a judge would be like.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  Oh, that's an interesting wrinkle. I hadn't thought of that.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a judge would be like, yeah, you're earning money, I don't care.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't care that you didn't.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Billy has to like go behind her back and make it really public that she's, that he's going behind her back.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Huh, yeah, good point, good point. I mean, the wildest part about the whole, you can see everything Theranos thing is that, one, I've talked to Billy on the phone about the Twitter that he was running and all that stuff, answered all those questions, nothing that really was different than what you saw in the movie. But he sort of gave me the pitch for Theranos 2.0 and I was like pushing back, being like, so you should go for like a specific diagnostic, go for, like, do this. Like, I have a buddy who ran this exact playbook, made 400 million dollars in a very short amount of time. Like, this is tractable. And then he was like.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  When did you have this conversation?

• 7:05John Coogan?

  I talked to him like last year. And so my pitch was, I said, look, if we're going to take this Elizabeth Holmes redemption arc seriously, I want to see some great calls about biotech. Because this is sort of what's happened with other individuals who have been rehabilitated. From a branding perspective, my point that I posted about was, was like, I want to see Elizabeth Holmes give an incredible take about peptides and how that market will evolve. And then watch that happen and be like, oh, wow, she was early. I want her to be a good biotech analyst. I want her to be smart on the science. I want her to.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  The crazy thing about the movie, though, I can't remember a single point where she was locked in on anything science related.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was just, it was Billy.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  That's the point.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  Learning about mitochondria.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's my point. Like, like, if, if, if a genius scientist goes to jail wrongfully, I would assume that they continue reading science literature and that they come up with interesting theses around that.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  One simple trick that the medical industry hates.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  You can actually do that, that happens. And, and I want to, I want Elizabeth Holmes to throw down, give me your biotech 2027. Give me your AI 2027 thesis. Let's watch it play out if you're right.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  At the very least, a market map.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  At the very least, a market map. Show me that you understand what Roche.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Or a tier list.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  A tier list. A tier list of, of biotech acquisitions in the medical device space. Yeah, show me you're a student of the industry you're operating in, right?

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, watching Nathan have that lightbulb moment where they're pitching him Theranos 2.0.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  And them not realizing that people have been using the phrase Theranos 2.0 to describe like massive, things that they perceive might be massive fraud.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's great. I, yeah, I, I just also, when I, when I got to YC in 2018, my visiting partner was Diego Ray, co-founder of GeneWeave, who actually built and sold a real diagnostics box, a medical device. And it was basically just a lab testing machine. Previously, size of a dishwasher, add a lab down the street. You shrink it down to the size of a box and you put it at the actual hospital. And then the hospital can test for a specific thing. They were testing for antibiotic resistant bacteria. They developed a chemistry. It's not rocket science, like, it is hard science, but like, it's not magic. It's not future sci-fi magic. And if you can get that data in an hour as opposed to two days,

• 9:32John Coogan?

  everything in the hospital is just going to move a little bit smoother and people are going to be a little bit healthier. And you're going to sell your company for 425 million dollars, which is exactly what happened. They raised 25 million, it's a great outcome for founders, employees. Roche eventually got the product approved by FDA. So in 2019, it got, it got, it got authorized for the COBOS Vivo DX MRSA test, which is like, not going to be on the stage at TED anytime soon, but it should be. It's like real science and it actually moved the needle forward.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  That being said, I came away from the movie, right? Feeling like, okay, Sonny had done some side deal and got way

• 10:09John Coogan?

  You mean Billy?

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Sonny Balwani, the other co-founder. I, my impression was that he was getting way less jail time.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Elizabeth is going to jail for like 11 years.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it seemed like Sonny, they were positioning it as like they, Sonny was able to pin it on her.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  He got out.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  Or at least he got a reduced sentence or whatever. And you told me afterwards, Sonny is in prison for like 12 years or had like a

• 10:33John Coogan?

  It's about a year longer.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  12 years, 11 months was, was a sentencing. Um, Elizabeth got a 10 year sentence.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  Reduced originally from 11 years and three months.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  According to the internet, Sonny didn't sell secondary either.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  I know. That's ridiculous.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  So none of them, they both go down with the ship. They both don't make money.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Jaw dropping moment for me. I was like, least shrewd person in the world potentially. No secondary selling, 11 billion.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  Doing fraud purely for the love of the game?

• 11:03John Coogan?

  For the love of the game. What are you doing? What are you doing? And it's not like I came away being like, it wasn't a fraud. Like it was.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  It was very clear that like everyone there, Sonny heard, they knew it didn't work.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  That really is the Ted, that's really the Ted. That's really like the Ted entrepreneur.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  It goes to prison.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  For the love of the game.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  For the love of the game.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Just, just, just for the vision.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  If you do want to sell secondary, we, there's one, one neat trick, one neat trick. This is a new thing. So if you're a founder and you want to sell 10 million a secondary, a hundred million dollars a secondary, you don't want it to be a negative signal. Here's what you do. Before, so you've, you've grown your company to the point where you're valued in the billions. You don't want to sell secondary because everyone will be like, oh, he's like selling out, she's selling out. Like, that's not good. Uh, that's not a good sign. So what you do is you take out an immense amount of debt. So you get like a hundred million dollars of debt.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Then you sell the secondary, sell another hundred million of secondary, pay off the debt. And then you can tell everyone, look, I just sold secondary to pay off my debt, my personal debt.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And everyone assumes it's like, oh,

• 12:12John Coogan?

  They think it's credit card debt.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  They think it's credit card debt. They don't realize that it was a equity backed hundred million dollar line of credit from a major financial institution. Uh, you don't need to clarify that part. But you can still get away with a hundred mil out of the gate. It's possible.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if anyone's doing that.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  It might be happening. Who knows?

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  Who knows?

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Semi Analysis raised its 2027 data center capacity forecast from 43 to

• 12:39John Coogan?

  50 gigawatts. Wow.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  50 gigawatts.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  50 gigawatts. That's a lot. That's a lot of, uh, a lot of compute. And people are going back and forth on this, right? Uh, did Gerstner say it was too bullish? Something like that? Uh, it seems like Semi Analysis has the data and has been pulling together a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  The Semi Analysis said, so we looked at the data.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  They, they looked at the satellite photos. I mean, a lot of these things, like they were papered a long time ago. Even if the market's like having a hiccup right now, that's not going to stop people from actually pulling out of the building.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  I sent you this, I sent you this, um,

• 13:16John Coogan?

  What'd you send?

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  This morning.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  What'd you send?

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  From RevCap, uh, which is Semi Analysis saying, if you're worried about demand,

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  ARR, don't be, because there's going to be even more supply than you realize. Of course, Semi Analysis is also saying that, that, uh, they have some of the most bullish forecasts for the labs. But it's funny that in the midst of like everyone being worried about ARR growth

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  over the last two weeks, that Semi Analysis is coming out and saying, don't worry. There's an obscene amount of supply coming online within the next 12 months.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, I, I, I believe them on, I believe them on supply. That seems very cut and dry. I don't think anyone has a stronger read on what's actually getting built than them. I think if you look at the satellite photos and you look at the deals that have already been inked, that even though, oh, the NASDAQ sold off 5% last week, like that's not enough to be like, okay, pack up the dump trucks. We're not building this thing. Like maybe in months, if things continue to get bad and rates go up, like some projects will be delayed or stalled or deals will get unwound. But like, right now, it's not that it's full speed ahead. It's just like, it's a train. You can't, you can't slow it down that quickly.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Like it's just going to keep going. On the demand side, I feel like the agentic stuff, the personal agentic stuff is going to be high demand for compute. I am, I'm less clear on what the willingness to pay will be. How many people will be willing to pay the equivalent of a thousand dollars a year for inference related to like their semi-personal prosumer life, shopping and, and all the little agentic features. Now, I think the tech is incredible. Like I, I've been using Dot a ton and I think having an agent that just runs in the background and just tries to go find little opportunities for you is amazing. It just catches things in my email that I never would have gone through or taken the time to do. And it just sends me a little message being like, hey,

• 15:15John Coogan?

  like you asked for this and you should follow up because like they, they said that they would do it.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  You used it to cancel your Roadster order too, right?

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So just like little, little things like that. Uh, it, it's, it's just a better interface. Like I love, I love interacting with the open web through an LLM. It's amazing. No cookie pop-ups, no ads. Like it's truly like the best consumer experience.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  There's a lot of controversial, uh, stuff downstream of that, but like in turn, as a consumer, if I'm trying to learn about something, instead of having like 25 tabs open where I have to accept cookies 25 times, make sure I'm logged into 25 different things and like scroll, find the fact. It's so much better to just have it, oh, put it all together with the exact quotes. I can click out to the link if I need to. And that's starting to happen in the personal agent space. The question is like, how do you get the money from people? Is it the ads? Is it the interchange? Like there's that sort of bearish take that even that the agentic commerce market, if you assign all these take rates, it's like a $40 billion market or something like that. It's like not big enough to justify.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  No, I think what needs to happen is something closer to going from automating tasks, automating certain roles or, or extending the capabilities of people, right? Cause we're in this era of, of obviously there's a viral clip going on over the last 24 hours, talking about somebody's having a 26 hour day.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  Um, because they need to stay up. She's changing and manipulating time.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  Cause they need to be online and available to keep their agents productive.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  Are you saying, are you saying she's crazy?

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm not saying.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Cause she's not crazy.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  She's not crazy. You're crazy.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  You're crazy for thinking that it takes 24 hours to complete a full day.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  And not 26. Um,

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, it's like, the next leg up will probably be

• 17:01John Coogan?

  She's a special case. She's an entrepreneur. Yeah. The question is like, for the 90% of Americans that aren't in

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing that one, we're seeing that a very, very small number of companies are driving all of the adoption. And so there's probably not all the adoption, but, but a massive amount of it. And so there's another leg up there just with the capabilities increase. And then what you're saying is like, the other 99% of businesses, how are they going to be? Or how is their spending going to ramp? Will it ramp beyond

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  the, you know, 20, 100, $200 a month subscription?

• 17:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, in, in, in the business side, like the Jensen take of like, you know, a software engineer who makes 300K should also get 300K in tokens or something like, that seems to be happening basically. It's like, yeah, like a software engineer can deploy AI very efficient, very efficiently and like add a high ROI. It is less clear for a marketer, for a salesperson. It's like, okay, what should your actual token, your inference budget be? If you gave a sales rep $50,000 a month in, in inference, like is there something that they could do with the best models to actually get, generate a hundred thousand dollars in value that they wouldn't have otherwise?

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Like, like those are the economic equations that happen across the business. I'm talking more on the personal side, the consumer side. Like people are using the LLMs.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  No, and I'm, I'm just saying, we don't pay for all this cap, like the capex is not going to be paid for.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  By consumers. Yeah, yeah. I think you're right. So you're saying that's not the, that, that is not the leg up that needs to happen. It has to be diffusion into the enterprise and B2B beyond what it is. It has to, it has to 10x. So, so like the, the small company that has, you know, basically everyone on a $200 a month plan, and they're maybe spending a hundred thousand dollars on maybe 10 mil top line. Um, they need to go to a million dollars in inference a year. Uh, even though they're at a, even though they're a $10 million business, maybe they go to 15 million of, of top line.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of $1 million budgets.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  What, what we got?

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Brett Adcock

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  launched Hark, which is, uh, something like a Muse or an Instinct or, or a Dots. Uh, and they gave away, or tried to give away a million dollars of pizza. Oh, I, I believe it was on Friday.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you just had to download and order from the Hark app.

• 19:28John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I don't know that it went well. I think

• 19:34John Coogan?

  The, the, the summary we have here is an app called Hark tried to do a pizza giveaway, but it quickly turned into a PR disaster. That's the summary.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I mean, clearly they got a ton of people to download the app. Like I think it wasn't working.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  People just don't want to give them the data?

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  Because it needed to be able to We're giving them the data. You have to give them

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Edit Google Drive files? Yes. In order to get this pizza, I will need to edit your tax return.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  See, edit, download and permanently delete your contacts. See, edit, create and delete all of your Google Sheets, spreadsheets. See, edit, share and permanently delete all the calendars you can access. Read, compose and send emails from your Gmail account.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  See and download your organization's workplace directory. I don't know if all of these were, were required.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, sometimes you can just not check those and still get access. It's like when you download an app on the iOS App Store, you can just say like, no thanks. I don't want any notifications. Like

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Um, Armand tried to get a free pizza and, uh, had some issues. And so he used the app to submit a formal complaint to the FTC. Hark said, fair, that's annoying. And I just tried again with no luck. I can file with FTC, but a giveaway that's been flaky for a few minutes on launch night isn't something they'll act on. I'd rather report it straight to Hark's team now with all the details so they can fix it. Want me to send that? No, file a complaint with the federal government.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Submit the FTC complaint about a Hark pizza promotion.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  On October 16th, 2026, Hark publicly advertised a $1 million free pizza giveaway promoted on X and stated users could claim it by typing order of free pizza in the Hark app.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Yeah, interesting. I'm so curious why Brett didn't just do hark as part of figure? Because the whole, like, I don't know, it doesn't make any sense to me. Other than you wanted a fresh cap table that could raise.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Elon kind of created the playbook, right? XAI was a separate thing. You raise fresh funds, you get, it's a way, it would be hard for SpaceX to go to top AI scientists and say, we're going to give you $5 billion of equity. Now, Zuck has kind of broken that glass and been like, I'm just going to do it. But, but the way you get, the way you get, you know, the multi-billion dollar outcome is you give a co-founder role of a new company and then you acquire them in. Like, so I think, I think it's probably that. I don't know. Is there another?

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is Elon had, you know, sold a lot of cars and launched a lot of rockets prior to doing that. And so I think it's the kind of thing that, that makes more sense in the fullness of time.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Anthropic staff expect AI to do 75% of their work by 2030 and GDP growth to reach 17.1%. Now, did they specify if this is real GDP growth? Because they just said GDP growth. Because what if inflation is at like 40%? That would be the equivalent of negative 23% real GDP growth. You got to clarify these things if you're going to be asking the tough questions. But let's assume they went with real GDP growth. You think that's low? You think that's high? There's someone at Anthropic who said it would be 28%. I like that. The

• 22:55John Coogan?

  lowest was 6%. Basically, no one there thinks that GDP growth is going to be, you know, at normal levels. Everyone is expecting a boom within the building. Agree? Disagree?

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Bullish.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Bullish. Drinking the Kool-Aid. I don't know. Just added the FOMC. The FOMC, of course, thinks GDP growth will be 2%. That's the government. Anthropic staff are obviously like the most bullish. Like, they are at 17.1% GDP growth. Reminder, America grows 2% typically. They're saying 17. Huge economic explosion, unlike anything we've ever seen in America. Absolutely fantastic. Like, if we grow at 17%, like, it is so positive sum. There's so much to go around. You can do everything, basically. You can build new roads. You can give people healthcare. Like, everything just solves itself because a rising

• 23:54John Coogan?

  tide lifts all boats.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Where would you really put it, though?

• 23:56John Coogan?

  I'd want, I'd put a 200% GDP growth. I want to be tripling every year. Predict what you want to happen. Manifesting. This is manifestation. I want to manifest it. Site visitors said 12.5%. Again, staggeringly high. But interesting, US adults predict 5.4% just broadly, which is, again, way above where we've been. So like, everyone is bullish?

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  The American mind must be saying.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Spore doesn't buy it. Spore says this is borderline mental illness. I'm sorry, but 20% GDP growth in 2030 is a common belief at Anthropic. What are these people smoking? How does one get so divorced from reality?

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  Cigarettes. They're smoking cigarettes.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Because lung cancer will be solved.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  That was reported from, we talked about this a little bit, but it was reported from Trump's anchor. And has not been widely confirmed beyond his anecdote that he shared, I believe, on Bloomberg or CNBC. But

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't think this is, I don't think this is unique to Anthropic.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  I think, like, clearly, the average American is already insanely bullish.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Exactly. Average American is already more than two and a half times.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  And so if you go to the labs, anybody who like really, truly believes in this current revolution, and that probably is like an average across the field.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  There was a funny, there was a funny exchange in the Tyler Cowen, Dor Cash Patel interview on Interesting Times. He was guest hosting for the now departed, not passed away, but he rotted out that laugh for, I think, CBS and the Free Press or something like that. But Tyler Cowen and Dorkish Patel were going back and forth about AI. And Tyler asks Dorkish, like, when, when do you think I'll walk into a Walmart and see a product that is the product of artificial intelligence? And Dorkish is like, ah, it's really hard to say. Like, I think that there will be a real effect on the economy soon, 2028. I'm very, I'm very bullish on this change in the economy, but I, I, I just, I can't predict

• 26:01John Coogan?

  how it'll be. And I was like, there's already AI slop beach towels in Walmart. Like, you can go into Walmart and get AI products now. Like, there's so many, like, pool floaty that looks like a tank that was sold on TikTok via, like, you know, AI video slop.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  We have signs. We have signs of signs.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Yes, we have signs of signs. Like, like, the AI slop economy is thriving right now. But the, but the AI slop is being sold. And, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, the San Francisco tech people, they need to touch grass. I think if they want to get in touch, they need to touch the gas pedal of a Lamborghini Countach or Lamborghini Huracan in Miami. You got to get in to the mind of the, the course seller, the drop shipper, to understand how AI is changing the real economy. Because that crew is selling AI slop. It's happening. Like, there is definitely AI, AI instantiated products up and down the stack, all over Facebook, Instagram reels, TikTok. This stuff's flying off the shelf.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, says the games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd turn back, will soon become possible, as will the game, the games developers wanted to build but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that he is taking the, the, the white pill on AI. Three Blue and Brown also put out a big, he's a math YouTuber, does these incredible video explainers, these motion graphic explainers of difficult math concepts. And he put out a video saying, like, it is the best time to go into math, very, very optimistic about it. And so, obviously, very divided organizations. But I love that Tim Sweeney went, went back and forth on this. I saw another, I saw another post by him talking about, like, look, I had to migrate from C to C++ from 2D to 3D. Like, I've, I've been through so many tech migrations.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  This is another one. I'm very excited for it. And he'll, he'll, he'll just adapt. He'll improvise, adapt, overcome. If people are, are rolling their own, you know, Fortnite clone in a web browser, decompiled or whatever, I'm sure he's going to find a way to participate in the upside in some way, because he is innovative and flexible. What about this Poppy deal? Have you, have you seen this?

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's really quite funny, because everyone's trying to use it as an opportunity to try to dunk, when it's like, they sold their company for 1.9 billion.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  And

• 28:34John Coogan?

  So wait, here, let me set the table. So, Poppy is a beverage brand. It's a soda, probiotic soda company, sold to Pepsi for $2.2 billion. 300 million of that 2.2 billion was an earn out. So, they got 1.9 billion on the day the deal closed, and then 300 million waiting for milestones. Now, Pepsi announced that instead of paying 300 million based on the performance of the brand, they will only be paying 12 million. And the dunk is like, oh, that stings. They didn't get their earn out. But yeah, they got 1.9.12 billion dollars. Like, it's still an incredible amount of money. And people are like, yeah,

• 29:18John Coogan?

  like, here's how you negotiate an earn out. It's like, it seemed like they already negotiated it. Like, they negotiated it really well. The, the disaster would have been if the numbers were reversed. 300 million for the, for the company and 1.9 in earn out. And if they didn't get that or not, it would be, it would seriously change the economics. But it seems like they got 90% of the deal value. Still, pretty good outcome for the founders of Poppy. But

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Amazing outcome.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  But yeah, Sean Frank chimes in and says, a quarter is what you should expect in an earn out. Most of the time, write off that second bit, that second byte to zero. You shouldn't go into one of these deals expecting to get the full earn out. Because companies have, you know, lots of resources. They control the budget, the distribution, all the success or failure. You're no longer in charge. You're no longer the master of your own destiny. And so, if you put all the chips with them, they might, they might bet them differently than you would expect to. Thank you for tuning into TVPN. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Hit the gong again.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  One more time to close out.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  We love you guys. See you tomorrow.