Novartis Buys Excellergy for $2B, Anthropic Vs. Pentagon, The Mansion Section | 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 https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ 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 Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ 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/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.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/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn 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://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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  So why is no one talking about Xellergy? I love these titles. Very niche company was in stealth mode for five years, but sold this week to Novartis for $2 billion smackaroos. That's a good outcome. Novartis, of course, is the $300 billion Swiss pharmaceutical company. And they just paid $2 billion for basically a five-year-old company named Xellergy.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 0:24John Coogan?

  It's a great outcome. This is an interesting story because it's very much like the biotech playbook done right. They bring in the right CEO.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes, Tyler. Tyler, is $2 billion exit in five years, from your point of view, is this good?

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Is this good?

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty good, yeah. Pretty.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  I agree. It's, but this isn't, this isn't in the sweet spot for typical tech news, but there, there are some interesting, there are some interesting data points. Amir over at the information said, "Leading indicator of AI adoption, drug companies like Novo Nardis, pharma has long been at the forefront of machine learning." Ozempic maker says AI agents are shortening its clinical trials. People think that it's going to a prompt and saying like, cure cancer. It's not. It's like you have a 10,000-page document that you need to send to the FDA. And if there's a comma in the wrong place, they can just send it back to you and say, ah, there's an error. Like, we don't want to deal with it right now. You're back at the back of the queue.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Is that real?

• 1:20John Coogan?

  You can get dinged for crazy, crazy stuff. Like, I, I don't know exactly what I can share, but I've heard of multi-billion dollar companies getting dinged for not showing, like, they will list out, okay, we use this centrifuge to run this assay to understand how this chemical separates. But they didn't say, they didn't list out who the suppliers to that supplier are. They didn't explode, explain the entire supply chain. And there was like very little guidance on it. Like, little things like that come up all the time. And reading through all the documentation, of course, most of this, when you're talking about Novo, it's like they have a direct line of communication with the FDA. So it's, it's different.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  When some type of public company software CEO comes out and says like, everything is accelerating because of AI.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Oftentimes, I look at the business and if, you know, if revenue isn't accelerating dramatically,

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  you think like, okay, this guy just wants an AI narrative. He's just reaching for an AI narrative here. But when I see a pharma company do it, no real context on, on pharma personally, so I'm like, it must be true.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I was working on FDA filings like four or five years ago, and there were so many Word documents that needed to be, it was the same application for multiple variations on the product that the FDA was going to review. And so we actually wrote Python scripts to programmatically interact with the Word documents to basically do like a very advanced version of find and replace. It's like perfect for AI. And it just speeds things up a little bit. You submit a week earlier. You have, you know, you can submit more things, more variations, you can give more information, compile more information, investigate other literature, do deep research reports, what else is out there? Let's review all the IP faster, summarize things, find different threads to pull on.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  Little things like that just squeak out like an extra five minutes here, an extra day there, and it all adds up to acceleration and progress. It's not like an overnight, all of a sudden, everything's completely changed. Maybe that happens. But at least right now, there's clearly, you know, a benefit from this. Overnight success. But this was an overnight success, at least for Alex Eggle, Ted Jardenski, Luke Pennington, and Jeff Harris, who took academic research, which they've been doing at labs at Stanford and burn into what is basically a VC-backed biotech company, a drug company. So the goal was simple. What do they actually make? They wanted to make a better allergy drug. So when people have allergies, they, you know, you have a peanut allergy, if peanuts come in, your allergy cells like flare up and you need to fight that back. So the current,

• 3:50John Coogan?

  the current blockbuster drug in the category is called Zolair. And when someone has an allergic reaction to a food, allergy drugs act quickly to treat the reaction before it does lasting damage to the body. So the key immune molecule at the center of many allergic reactions is called IgE. And Xallergies' lead program, EXL111, targets IgE. So the goal is to work faster, quiet the pathway more deeply, and ideally last longer between doses to fight allergic reactions. And so these will make that less severe. So Redtree Venture Capital seeded the company in 2021, but they stayed in stealth for about five years. The team announced their first big fundraiser, a $70 million Series A led by Sam Bio capital. This is a pretty typical flow for biotech companies.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  University of Science first, then they bring on secondary specialist capital, someone with experience in biotech. It's less common to go to like the big names that we know. The Sequoias, the founders funds, the Andreessen's, they do some stuff in bio. But very often, if it's coming directly out of a lab, going to be IPO'd or acquired in a few years, like that's a pretty traditional biotech VC playbook. And so by February of this year, Xelergy dosed its first phase one patients. So they gave the drug to subjects and it was obviously looking good because the Novartis deal signed a few weeks.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, how well does that phase one trial need to go for somebody to immediately come in and be like, yep, here's two billion?

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Probably really well.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  But it is like standing on the shoulders of giants. Remember the research was done in 2020, 2021, probably earlier than that. And it's building on an existing pathway. There's some interesting stuff going on. So Novartis.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  This guy is such, CEO is such a chat.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, insane. So yeah, I was like, I didn't want to diminish his accomplishments by reducing it to a playbook. But this isn't his first rodeo. The CEO, Todd Zavodnik, Zavodnik, he joined in 2025, sells the company in less than a year. And you've seen the story twice before, when he was at Zeltic, Allergan acquired it for 2.4 billion. And when he ran Dermavant, he sold that company for 1.2 billion in 2024. So he's seen a unicorn outcome two years ago and he gets a new job. He's like, I was going to take some time off, gets back in the arena and immediately sells the company. So clearly a great operator.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  And no one was really surprised by this, at least in the stock market.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  Here's a tip, join his next company.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  That's a good idea. Yeah, just follow this guy around.

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  Three billion dollar acquisitions, back to back. I would, I think it's a good risk adjusted.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  This company. I would love to be a janitor here. I'll actually take all stock. I'll take all stock and I will clean the toilets and get coffee if that's what it takes. Because I know what's going to happen. I've seen this playbook before. Anyway, Novartis, you know, the stock is not really. Moving on this news because this is very expected. This is part of their playbook. Just last year, 2025, they made 1.7 billion dollars in sales of Zolair, the allergy drug that's currently the blockbuster drug in the category. And this is a very logical next act in that category. So key Zolair patents are about to expire. So a next generation IGE asset is strategically valuable right now. Novartis' CEO has previously outlined a pretty broad acquisition playbook.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  It's focused on bolt-on deals in core areas. So when they have a business up and running like immunology, like treating allergies, they have all of the sales and distribution. They have an existing product portfolio. The business is working. Add things on to extend the viability of that business line. And X allergy fits squarely inside of that plan. Now, the $2 billion acquisition price, it's not all cash upfront. It is split between upfront payment and there's milestones based on development and commercial targets. So if they, if they, if they, all of a sudden they flop in Phase II trials, probably some of that gets clawed back. It needs to actually work and like all of the promises that they may have to play out. But they have Novartis behind them to propel them through that.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  And it feels like a pretty standard playbook. So good stuff there. And in general, it's just like, it's cool. Anyone who's dealt with allergies, either personally or with loved ones, it's always a hassle. You know, everyone has a story of like, someone was on vacation. They got a drink that had a nut in it and someone, you know, had an allergic reaction. And anything that can treat that is obviously good. So another arrow in the quiver of modern medicine, which is great to see.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news, huge leak. OMG, did you guys know that Anthropic was training a better model this whole time? This is shocking, according to unemployed capital allocator. Of course, referencing a leak, a scoop.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  I wonder if this will trigger the team at DeepMind or OpenAI to consider training a better model. It feels like, it feels like if they're doing, they're gonna have to respond. So you could see multiple companies training new models based on this leak.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, interesting story.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  It's more from a marketing perspective and how you actually roll out and manage like vibes and hype.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, to me, it doesn't seem improbable that there's been a lot of spud talk on the timeline this week.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  You gotta get, you gotta start pumping Mythos.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  Mythos talk.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  The most powerful AI model ever developed. It's a good tagline.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  And very, very painful for all the SaaS companies out there that, that just sell off.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  Whenever Anthropic does something.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  So Prinz.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  And it's a vicious cycle now.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  Prinz wrote a little summary of this. Anthropic has been testing a new model called Mythos with certain customers. They call it a step change in AI capabilities, including dramatically higher scores in coding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity. I want to know how it will do on Arc AGI V3 because all of the models are under 1% completion on that benchmark. It's the one benchmark that is not saturated. It's not, it's very closely guarded. You can't get into the tests, the actual test set. You can only see the examples. And, and it clearly is, I still, I still love the benchmark and the team over at Arc for what they're doing. So this is part of a new Capybara series of models, which are largely, larger and more intelligent than Opus.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  It's more expensive to run and it's not ready yet for general release, but they are excited about it. Mythos pricing bets coming in from 0.005 seconds. $100 in, 250 out. Subs repriced to $50, 250, and a $1,000 plan might be coming. Who knows? What do you think?

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's pull up this picture of a Capybara just to put, just to put.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  I would love to see some context here.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  This into context, yeah.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Is it a mythical creature? No, Capybara is real. So what's the connection between Capybara and Mythos?

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  They're normally quite docile.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  But they can get violent. Let's look at this picture.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Hey, watch out.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, look at, look at the, look at the chomp on that.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  This is something we should read into. We should say, what are,

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  What did they mean?

• 10:55John Coogan?

  What did they mean by this? You know, they, it's clearly some sort of vague post. They're telling you, they're telling you something that, you know, friendly, cute, but also potentially the end of the world. Do you think we could contain it? Do you think if we had one in the studio, we, it would overrun us? Or do you think we could keep it locked up?

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  That's pretty horrifying.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  I think four or five of these could take you down.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Median weight is between 60 and 174 pounds.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  174 pounds. That's a, that's bigger than my dog. Wow. That's a big capybara.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  They have these at the Santa Barbara Zoo.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  So, so this is the metaphor, you know, like these models are getting incredibly powerful. You need to contain them and think about safety and you need to think about how do you keep the capybara safe? You, you need to lock it in a, in a box, in, in a cage. It cannot be allowed to run free.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think just back on the pricing thing, I think like this is generally right. So basically, 0.005 seconds is saying like, it's just going to get 10x more expensive, right? Cause right now I think it's something like $10 in, 25 pounds out.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  People are ready for, people are ready to pay more though. Like they're paying a bunch through the API. They're, they're paying more in cursor.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  The subscription, like technically it's the same price, but the limits are going down. So it's, the tokens are getting more expensive.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  And, and as you see, like, there's like this insane compute crunch. Like I, I assume that models are going to get much more expensive as they're getting bigger.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. It, it is interesting. I wasn't expecting to be in the regime of like subscriptions as long as we have been. Like just talking to, to Ben on our team about how he sort of bounces around from one subscription to the next. Like he'll, he'll max one out and then move over to the next one and then move over to the different one. And he's, he's like maybe more price sensitive than model sensitive. I would always assume, I'd always assume that most businesses would just be on an API consumption basis.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  So the reason like I'm not hitting the APIs is because it's it is like basically 10x more expensive.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  It's more expensive, yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Than using the subscription.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  The subscription. So you do most of the work in the subscription, which is just, I mean, that's economically rational. I guess what I'm saying is like, I'm surprised by how many people who are in a business context still make that decision and how much of a price war we're in, how much capital matters here.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's pull up this video because I'm not sure, I'm not sure, I'm not sure you guys would be making the same decisions with the Capybara family of models if you knew that Capybaras were capable

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. This is important.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  of this kind of thing.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  They can swim? Wait, this is a human? Is this AI? Oh my God. That's really attacking her.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  This is why they're calling it their most powerful model ever.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  We need to slow down. We need to slow down with the Capybaras.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  All right, we can turn it off. It's horrifying.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  It's horrifying. Yeah, we need to, we need to slow down.

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  I hope they, I hope they, you know, keep this with the safety team for long.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  I think, I think we need all countries to come together and agree to, to control the Capybara population because that is truly horrifying. Take him has a, has a very independent take.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  He's the biggest Nvidia stan and he makes a lot of good points, but he's, he's making the argument that Anthropic needs more GPUs because he's, he's sharing some posts here. To manage growing demand for Claude, we're adjusting our five hour session limits for free Pro Max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  And Take Him is coming on the show Monday.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  I'm very excited to talk to him.

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  We'll ask him what he thinks about Nvidia.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Yes. And so a lot of people are getting into polyphasic sleep because of this. So Claude has different limits at different times. So when the limits are in effect, that's when you need to be sleeping. Tyler, have you gotten into polyphasic sleep yet?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  I'm not there yet, but I'm, I mean, it, the problem is getting worse.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  I think at some point I'm gonna have to.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  I told you, I, I, I told Tyler, sometimes I, I indulge in polyphasic sleep. Uh, after the show, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll sleep for an hour and then, uh, I'll go about my day and then I'll, I'll sleep at night. And he said, that's just a nap. It doesn't count. I guess people really are doing the polyphasic sleep thing, what to monitor, to monitor their agents.

• 15:04Jordi Hays?

  You would think you would know one person that has done that and stuck with it. Cause I feel like a bunch of people have tried that over time.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  And then eventually.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  I mean, if, if you're trying to get around the limits, polyphasic sleep doesn't make sense. You just need to basically be nocturnal, right? Cause you need to be like inverse.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  What like San Francisco hours are, right?

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  So the peak San Francisco usage, you gotta be like.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or just move overseas.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  You could do that.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  That, yeah, but the polyphasic sleep doesn't really help, right?

• 15:29John Coogan?

  No, no, it seems like it's much better to just, uh, uh, again, uh, you know, have, have a, have a compute desk or a, or a prompt desk that is geographically distributed evenly across the globe. So when your American employee stops the prompting, goes home for the night, then your European colleague steps up and starts prompting on the same project. And then your colleague in Asia can pick up when Europe goes to bed, something like that. You know what I mean? So you have 24/7 coverage.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's still like at, at, during one of those periods, it's still like the peak hours, right?

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, because these peak hours are, are, are based around, uh, US, US hours. I, I was more, so there's actually two things going on. There's one where it's like, you're waiting for your agents to respond. And if it's going to take hours for a prompt to return, you should go take a nap. Because you're better off checking in on a prompt every two hours for the whole day, for 24 hours and, you know, in perpetuity. As opposed to doing, you know, a two hour prompt. Watching TV, come back, do that eight times and then sleep for eight hours. That's four more two-hour sessions that you could have been letting it cook and like interacting with it.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  That's separate from trying to get around these, uh, these, these, these, uh, these rate limits. Last March, like a year ago, people were like $50 billion, $100 billion, $200 billion. Is this stuff that useful? Is it slop? Is it actually going to be that useful? Are these things toys? Like, yeah, they're, they're reasonable for this thing, but what's the real economic value? Certainly it can't be more than like 20 bucks a month or $200 a month. And now there's like lots of people that are, maybe they're only paying a few thousand a month because they're using a bunch of subscriptions, but like they're pretty close to justifying like the Jensen, like 250K a year per engineer thing. Like that doesn't feel that far away from companies just saying like, yes, I, I, I

• 17:33John Coogan?

  give you the permission to spend $250,000 a year on AI inference. Be as efficient as possible as you can with that budget, but you have my approval. I believe that with the, with that 250, you will generate more than that in, in value.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think the big thing is like, there's going to be more use cases that like, that have a similar level of product market fit as CodeGen that use tokens on the level that these CodeGen tools do.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  And we haven't fully identified those yet. There's some early evidence that just like general agents.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  Will, will drive that, but, um, like I would say an example is like, it seems very obvious that models will be very useful for making financial models. But do you need to make 500 financial models per day? No, right?

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is interesting.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  And so there are areas where the models are going to be incredibly, incredibly valuable, incredibly important. Used by everybody in any given field. And yet they won't necessarily generate.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  There is, there are some people that that would need to make 500 financial models a day. Like, I think Ro Khanna makes like hundreds of trades every single day. And so if you're doing a proper, like, full DCF, pulling every SEC filing for a company, and you're doing that hundreds of times a day because you're trading.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Or he might have hundreds of his individual positions.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Real-time.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  Models.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Sort of like rebuilding a Bloomberg terminal. For yourself. I think he needs, I think Bloomberg exists and maybe should, should work there. The news is that Anthropic has been granted a preliminary injunction re the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation in California, but is allowing stay for one week. I think a lot of people, like, the tech community broadly came away with this prediction that this wouldn't hold, that this was, you know, that whatever you thought about how you work with the government and the Ben Thompson thesis, there was, you know, the, the supply chain thing wasn't really going to stick. It was, it, it wouldn't necessarily hold up in court, but we'll see where it goes. Dean Ball says, "This is a devastating ruling for the government, finding Anthropic likely to prevail on essentially all of its theories

• 19:47John Coogan?

  for why the government's actions were unlawful and unconstitutional. One of the things she mentions is a hu, is the huge range of amici, amici briefs. I don't know how to say amici, briefs. Supporting Anthropic by way zero."

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Hey, finally, a word that John.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  I lost it.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  Can't nail instantly. You have an incredible mind that we did find.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  We found my limit. We found my limit. "On a personal note," says Dean Ball, "some friends and allies of mine on the right who have been angry at me for my own words and actions and all of this. Anyone who thinks I spoke out for personal gain or trivial reasons against an administration I served in is crazy." Yeah, people forget that Dean Ball served not in the first Trump administration, but the second Trump administration. And he was like, "Look, I wrote the AI policy thing. I worked on that. Like, this is not the right path."

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  So it's a amici.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  It's a amici.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  And it's the plural of amicus.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  It's, this is brutal for me because I studied Latin, and I should be able to nail this because I know it's a Latin word. Anyway. It was a hugely costly decision for Dean Ball, but this judge's ruling shows why I did it. This is a staggeringly illegal act by the government. That is why I'm particularly honored to have been implicitly quoted in the ruling for calling this what it was when Secretary Hegseth made his initial announcement, an attempted act of corporate murder. He is standing with the corporations. This case continues, but Anthropic has scored a very large win here. The real victors, however, are all red-blooded Americans who are, as the founders would have said, jealous of their liberties. I love it.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations, and hopefully everyone can just go back to building good models. You know, all this nonsense in DC has been a huge, huge sideshow, side project, side quest, as the race for compute is so much more important. The race for capabilities is so much more important. The other scoop is coming from Axios. Sam Altman apparently told staff he tried to save Anthropic in the Pentagon clash.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Which he apparently thought was somewhat ironic, given that said competitor openly blasted him on any podcast that they go on.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Last Anthropic story, IPO. They're trying to go public as early as Q4 with a potential 60 billion raise. They're racing, and so let's go over to Kalshi and see who is likely to announce an IPO this year. Anthropic's up at 70% on this news. They jumped up from 46% to over 70%. OpenAI is at 49%. Jersey Mike's still beating them both, 75%. So you Jersey Mike's heads out there, they do very well in the App Store. I like the sandwiches. SpaceX is at 94%.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Discord also sitting at 63%.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Discord, what a crazy story. I love Jason Citrin so much, the founder, but he is out, I think, and he is... He's just a wild, wild founder story. I made a whole video about it. It's a lot of fun. We gotta hit the management section. One last note on AI before we move on to the really important thing, real estate.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI has surpassed 100 million in annualized run rate on its ads pilot, which was launched six weeks ago. It's expanded to 600 advertisers and plans to launch self-serve advertiser access in April. I am close to setting up a new account and/or just churning momentarily so that I get to experience the ads. You know, I love ads.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  I mean, the first ad being for the Wall Street Journal that we know and love is a very good omen. Clearly, something's going on. They're happy with each other because they're working together. Uh, yeah, I mean, truly, like, the alpha for the audience is like, uh, new ad platforms often deliver really good results before people figure them out. Big companies move slower than you. If you can be the first person to advertise, figure it out, you know Sean Frank at The Ridge is thinking about it, and maybe you should be too. Not to do an ad for ads, but we love ads on this show and we love new ad platforms.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  What's this news before we go on? Apple's talking about opening up Siri to rival AI services.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Weird. I don't know. I'm gonna guess the Germinator.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  Apple plans to open Siri to outside AI assistants as part of a Siri overhaul.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Do we need to give him? Let's give him the golden scoop. Tyler, hold up the golden scoop award for Mark Germain. The Germinator has, has received the golden scoop award for For you, Mark. March 27th, 2026. Congratulations, Mark Germain. It is an honor. Your scoop wins the golden scoop of the day. There we go. Yeah, the scoop. That's good. Scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop. Scoop, there it is. Scoop, there it is.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Things like ChatGPT, MNI, et cetera, could be, uh, allowed to take, effectively take the place of Siri. The company is developing new, uh, tools to allow AI chatbots installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri assistant, enabling users to send queries to services like, uh, LLMs. The change is part of an attempt to turn around Apple's fortunes in AI, where it is lagged behind Silicon Valley peers and could allow Apple to generate more money from third-party AI subscriptions through the App Store.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, because you upgrade through there. That would be good. I think that's part of it. I think there's also the antitrust, uh, angle, which is that they have had to allow you to change. The default search engine in Safari for a while, even though they have that relationship with Google. When you go to the Safari search bar and you just type in some random words, it searches Google. You can actually reroute that to ChatGPT. I did it. ChatGPT is like, I don't use it like I use Google. Google I use for like, really, I want like a five millisecond query. So it, the, the time to actually load ChatGPT and then give you the full answer was not the best experience. But I have wanted for a long time to reroute the Siri button on the side of the phone to just ChatGPT instant fast, ultra fast, just get, just talk to me.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  But every time I do it, I say, ChatGPT, what's the history of the Roman Empire? And it loads and it says, working with ChatGPT. And then it like, takes a little bit too long. And then you get like a short note and then you can open it. And it, it just sort of like, you're always fighting in the UI between like, are you talking to Apple Intelligence? Or are you talking to Siri? Or are you talking to ChatGPT? And you sort of go back and forth. So we will see where this goes. If, I, I would be very surprised if people shift away from the default. Like if, if Apple iPhones ship with the Siri button, just querying their distilled Gemini model or whatever they're going to wind up doing there, that's probably what most people are going to use. But it's exciting that at least there will be some competition in the market.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Barry Diller just paid $11 million for JFK's favorite New York penthouse. Not favorite new. An entity linked to the billionaire purchased Karen Pritzker's co-op at the Carlyle, the same unit where Kennedy famously stayed during his visits to the city. In the 50s and 60s, John F. Kennedy stayed in a duplex penthouse at the Carlyle Hotel so often that it became known as the New York White House. After his assassination, his widow and two children, Caroline and John Jr., lived in the Manhattan Hotel for about 10 months. What's the longest amount of time you've ever spent in a hotel? I don't think I've ever done more than like a week or two. 10 months is a, is a, that's a run.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I never, I never went through and I never. Went through like a whole hotel guy.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  That's like sort of a crazy move.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  That I could, could have afforded to stay in a hotel permanently. But now that I'm a, now that I'm a.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  I was walking in some hotel the other day and I was like, I wonder if I could like live here.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Like it just doesn't, it just like with, with kids, it would just, it would just be, it would just be bad.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Now, an entity linked to Barry, billionaire Barry Diller has purchased Kennedy's favorite penthouse for 11 million dollars. Diller bought the co-op unit from another family of prominent Democrats. Film producer Karen Pritzker, an heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, bought the apartment for 12 million in 2007. Pritzker put the apartment on the market for 12.9, it sold for 12.5 in 2007. The Carlyle opened around 1930 on Manhattan's Upper East Side, one of New York's most storied luxury hotels. It's known for iconic venues like Bemilin's Bar, Cafe Carlyle, a cabaret space that has hosted legendary performers. A portion of the building was converted to co-op units decades ago.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Kennedy stayed at the hotel so often, starting when he was still a senator in the 1950s, that a direct phone line was installed for him in his regular duplex suite. That's cool. After his assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy moved to the hotel, but stayed in a different suite. On rainy days, the Kennedy children played in the lobby. The two-bedroom apartment includes a large foyer with an art deco staircase, the listing says. An expansive corner living and dining room has views over Central Park. There's also a bookshelf-lined breakfast room and a corner solarium with a wet bar. Oh, speaking of wet bars, forget apres ski because homeowners are now building their own bars in custom spaces where they can relax and get toasty after a day on the slopes. This is also from the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal today.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  For Brian Healy, what comes after a day on the mountain sometimes takes precedence over the skiing itself. When he built his Lake Tahoe area vacation home in 2019, he spent about $800,000 to build a bar area on the main floor of the house. An absolute dog.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  Which he can ski to from the slopes. Uh, North Star.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  That's bad.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  That sounds great. So maybe not ski in, but ski out?

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, he said, I've joked that I designed a bar and built a house around it. This is good. This is, this is, this is my dream. I'm gonna build a movie theater and then build a house around it. That's, that's my goal. Uh, what would yours be?

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  John, John was sending me a listing.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Full surfing ability, one of those endless waves? That's what you need. You need an endless wave pool. You know what I'm talking about? What are those called?

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  Wave pools.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Wave pool? Yeah.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  There's like waves. Yeah.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Alright, wait, why are you not excited about this prospect of having a house that's built around this endless wave pool?

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  Because I live in...

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Oh, I guess you just go to the ocean. Yeah, you could just go, you could just be, be, be walking distance from the beach. Anyway.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to be.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Uh, Healy51 is an Ireland na- uh, Ireland native. Let's go. Let's hear it for Ireland. He runs an energy company in the San Francisco Bay area. This is royal flash. I gotta meet this guy. After a day on the slopes, Healy and his pals head to the space dubbed Healy's Bar, leaving their gear in the storage area of the trucky California property. And sometimes other skiers end up at Healy's home after getting lost while skiing through the trees. It's an open door policy. He says, we invite them in for beer. This is our inn. We need to head over to, uh, North Star and get lost and wind up at his bar. Oops. Uh-oh, we're lost, we're lost. We don't know.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  I know some, I know some former guests that are, that are neighbors with this guy.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Any, uh...

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to, we'll, we'll work on connecting.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Could you spare Guinness for us? For two Irish chaps who've gotten lost on the slopes?

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I've read like a children's story of like wandering in the forest and then like, you know, some character offers you something.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Sometimes it's like that.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, usually that can send you on kind of a crazy... Cue one of last year, Mark Zuckerberg texts Elon. "Looks like Doge is making progress. I've got our teams on alert to take down content doxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help." Elon reacted heart. And he says, "Are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others?" Zach says, "Want to discuss live?"

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, Matthew Zeitlin, former guest, says, "You can tell who is used to antitrust investigations."

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Well, stay safe out there. If you're planning on bidding for some IP and you're two of them, you're chatting with the richest man in the world. Uh, yeah, maybe stick to a phone call. Who knows?

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  We love to.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Flashbang!