Peptide Debate Recap, John Ternus Rumors Swirl, OpenAI Nonprofit to Spend $1B | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:Do you know how I got here today? I drove through the Hollywood Hills, drove through the San Fernando Valley, because we're covering Hill and Valley today, but we're doing it from the TBPN Ultronome. We have a whole bunch of news. Who doesn't like it? Anyway, what do you think about this, Jordi? We have to recap some things. There's been a whole bunch of news. We had the great peptide debate of 2026. Brandon Gurell on our team wrote about this in the newsletter today, tbpn.com. You can go subscribe. Who do you think won? I was talking to a lot of people. Very interesting. You had scheduled this.

0:32John Coogan:I wasn't even really aware that there was a peptide debate going on. We talked to some other folks on the show about peptides and how there was a debate. And I was aware of the meme, like the Chinese peptides in Silicon Valley, all of that stuff. But I wasn't aware of like that the debate was boiling to a particular point and that there were a lot of people that were discussing it. So it was great timing. So thank you for organizing that. And thank you to our guests, Max and Martin, who took the time to come and talk to us. and I thought did a really good job of being simultaneously entertaining and also very cordial.

1:05John Coogan:Like, they weren't actually going at each other's throats. They were scoring points, but I don't think that either of them crossed any lines. There was some discussion over, like, should we have done more fact-checking? I genuinely think that the chat is good for fact-checking. Or the experts. Yeah, it's kind of like your view, but I don't know. Yeah, there was a bunch of people that made very fair points and pointing out a study here or a patent here. And it would have been great if we got to a conclusion yesterday and it was like, yeah, this is all bad and it should all be banned or no, they're all good or figured it out.

1:39But that's where we started. That's where we started.

1:42John Coogan:With like, yeah, everyone there agrees that GLP-1s that are owned by pharmaceutical companies are probably not beneficial, blah, blah, blah. And then the really far out stuff that hasn't been studied that's made in a basement is probably risky. And we actually had a good friend of the show sum it up. Creatine cycle, Atlas, of course, said the peptide debate is as follows. Against, I would be worried about unknown unknowns. Pro, while there isn't much human data, the anecdotal evidence is pretty strong. Against, anecdotes are not enough for me. Pro, fair, it is for me. Against, okay, fair. And I think that's a good point.

2:22John Coogan:And truthfully, you know, people can make their own decisions here. I do think interjecting with a ton of fact-checking during the debate would be disruptive. I'm not a fan of that. I sort of just like having one person, like the guest, the debater, fact-check the other person. Because if they know the fact and the other person who they're debating against drops something that's not factual, that's their opportunity to come in and say, no, that's not accurate. Throw that canister, whatever Martin had. throw it throw the flashbang throw the smoke grenade but but i do uh so so i like i like leaving some of the fact checking up to them and and then just trying to recenter the debate as a moderator but i don't know uh should we do more of these let us know uh it seemed like a lot of people had a lot of fun with it and were entertained um it's hard to come up with you know if we were going to try and do this weekly it'd be very hard to come up with like 52 really hot topics that everyone cares about and there are two opposing experts who are willing to hash it out and be entertaining on a live show uh probably not going to happen all that much but when the time is right i think there's an opportunity for us to do another debate someone was saying we should do an accelerationist versus decelerationist uh uh debate i think beff jess was proposing that i think that would be sort of interesting i i i think i could maybe sit in the middle of that and have some interesting discussions there.

3:47Kind of like 60 miles per hour, stay under the speed limit kind of acceleration. Yes, yes, yes. Well, on that vector, I am an extreme accelerationist.

3:56John Coogan:Leading up to the debate yesterday, we had several guests on the show discuss peptides. In February, Andrew Huberman came on and predicted that Retta, essentially a more aggressive of Zempic, would become a trillion-dollar drug. That same day, we had longevity entrepreneur Brian Johnson on the show. He encouraged people, thinking about taking peptides, to be cautious because we don't know what the negative effects of these drugs are. And last week, Maximus CEO Cameron Maximus, which I don't think is his real name. Is his last name Maximus? No, it's not. It's, it's. You can't. But I mean, I like to think of him as Dr.

4:28John Coogan:Cameron Maximus. That is his name on X. Oh, OK, OK. That makes sense. He argued that there's no real reason to be taking RETA, not FDA approved, only available on the gray market, when they could be taking, when people who are, you know, in the market or or you know their doctor recommends something uh they could be taking trisepatide which is essentially has the same benefits can be bought legally and it's fda approved so yesterday screlly argued martin screlly argued that the current peptide craze is more psychology driven than science driven and is essentially a passing fad among silicon valley elites who aren't really expert trusters in his view there is no rational reason to experiment with compounds like RETA when proven regulated drugs like Ozempic already exist.

5:13John Coogan:He thinks gray markets should be shut down entirely. And there was a big debate over how feasible is it to actually try and shut down the gray markets. Gray markets have existed in a whole bunch of other categories. I'm very familiar with the gray market for illegal flavored vaporizers because they have been the bane of the legitimate industry, the nicotine industries. It's been the bane of their existence. Martin argued that the FDA's rigorous approval process exists for a reason. Now, we had Max arguing the peptide bull case. He argued that he doesn't believe all peptides are safe and effective, but that a subset of them likely have real therapeutic value.

5:55John Coogan:He said that since people are already using peptides, a regulated white market would reduce harm compared to the current gray market. Lots to debate there. We'll let you make your own decisions. You can go listen to the full debate and you can see where you weigh in. Not having Tyler Cosgrove in the TBP and Ultradome is it's a death knell for our clapping during the ad read strategy. We need to get some soundboard going. We need to show these supporters, these sponsors some love. Because we're fighting two men down right now, maybe three men down. We're on our last leg over here in the TBP and Ultradome.

6:30John Coogan:Apple is in a completely different situation. They have their heir apparent, John Ternus, the nice guy, potentially taking the reins maybe this year, maybe next year. It could happen any day now. Tim Cook doesn't want to talk about retirement, but John Ternus is emerging as his most likely successor. This is from friend of the show, Mark Gurman in Bloomberg. Go subscribe. This is an interesting profile of John Ternus from March 22nd, 2026. Just two days ago, this was published. And it tells an interesting story of John Ternus. And I think Gurman does a great job of going deeper than some of the other reporting that had like one quote from an employee that left Apple a decade ago and was sort of vague.

7:12John Coogan:And that person doesn't have like any sort of profile. And it was very hard to read into who is John Ternus as a person. I think we're getting a clearer picture now. Let's read through some of this. And then I want you to cosplay as John Ternus and let me know, would you do things differently? Do you agree with his management style? because this might be the management style of all of Apple soon. The company's chief operating officer recently retired. The CFO and general counsel took smaller roles as a way to prepare for their own retirements. And in a single week in December, its heads of artificial intelligence, user interfaces and environmental initiatives all announced their departures.

7:47John Coogan:While part of the exodus was related to Apple's well-documented struggles in AI, it also reflected a logical transition at a company that turns 50 on April 1st. Apple stock made everyone at the top of its org chart fabulously wealthy, and many are entering the stage of life that often inspires people to prioritize family spending some time, finally spending some time with their families instead of the next generation of iPhones. In his response to the employee's question, Tim Cook, the company's 65-year-old CEO, struck an atypically reflective tone. When people get to a certain age, some, he said, are going to retire, letting the word some hang out there in a way that suggested he wasn't talking about himself, drawing laughter from the audience.

8:31John Coogan:It's like, some people, they can't hang. But look at Warren Buffett, 65 to 95, most productive era of his career. Tim Cook, generational run starts now. I like the idea of Cook for the next 30 years. I'm still bullish, Tim Cook. I mean, I love John Ternus, but I think the 30-year run from Tim Cook going 65 to 95 would be particularly fun to watch. Tim Cook was going to retire. Then he started experimenting with some Chinese Pepsi. Oh, you think that's what's going on? He's always looked good. Now he's like, I actually got another few decades in me. I hope so. He's like, actually, it's BBC 157.

9:06John Coogan:It's having remarkable effects on me. All right. So he said, the thing we have to do is to make sure that Apple moves on, reaches the next level and the next level and the next level. And he said he spends a lot of time thinking about who's in the room in 5, 10, 15 years. I'm obsessed with this. This is Tim Cook at his best. This guy can't leave. He can't leave. He's firing me up here. I'm obsessed with this. Somebody's been listening to Senra. Yes, it's amazing. So Cook, who's run Apple since taking over from co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011, probably doesn't expect to be in the room himself for another 15 years, but I do.

9:42John Coogan:I'm betting on him. While he's given no indication of an imminent transition, he's made it clear he wants his heir to come from within the company so he can serve as a mentor. The central candidate is John Ternus, Senior Vice President for Hardware Engineering, who oversees development of the devices that generate roughly 80 % of Apple's revenue. At 50, Ternus is also younger than many of the company's other senior leaders, meaning he could be in the top job longer. Ternus has spent about half of his life at Apple, half of his life, generational run. He cut his teeth developing computer monitors, oversaw product design for the original iPad, and eventually took over development of the Mac, getting the top hardware engineering role in 2021.

10:24John Coogan:He's overseen an expansion in Apple's product lineup, improving quality and focusing on functional improvements around battery life, performance, and connectivity. Earlier this month, when Apple held an event in New York to announce the MacBook Neo, a$599 laptop. It was Ternus, not Cook, who did the big reveal. Little trial run. The next day, Ternus also appeared on Good Morning America to talk up the device, the type of media appearance Cook has generally done himself. Such public signs of confidence in Ternus have been accompanied by steady expansion of his portfolio. Last year, he took control of a secretive unit developing robots, including a tabletop device with a screen that swirls to focus on a speaker moving around the room.

11:03John Coogan:the smart lamp is this what is no it's not a smart lamp it's the iPad that swivel arm yeah the iPad that follows you around so that you can ask you questions and FaceTime with your friends and I think there's a rumor that it can do kickflips but I'd be super into that if it has a motor you've seen those motor those robots that are on the bikes and it's just a big battery pack with like a robotic arm that's attached to it have you seen this oh this is amazing Apple comes out with a with a with a smart iPad device that's that's just called a bicycle for the iPad. It's just a little bicycle. No, no, no.

11:37John Coogan:If you have a weight up here and you have a robotic arm that can hinge down, if you pull that up really quickly, you can actually jump up. And so there's these crazy videos of these robot bikes jumping up onto tables and stuff. It's very fun. Ternus has taken a bigger role in Apple's product marketing, sometimes personally editing copy for the website and even product event materials. And he has become central to the company's work to make its devices more environmentally sustainable. Ternus has also assumed oversight of the hardware and software design teams, making him a key liaison between Apple's vaunted design organization and senior management, meaning he's already one of the most influential people in the company's history.

12:17John Coogan:He has made a mark on Apple's hardware portfolio, reversing a trend of declining product quality as the company prioritized thinness and sleekness over performance he is a very meticulous engineer and a judicious executive says tony blevins the company's chief procurement officer until 2022 who described turnus as an outstanding and obvious choice to succeed cook he's a car he's a car racing enthusiast he's a cycling enthusiast i assume cycling means performance enhancing drugs yeah like trend trend testosterone no He is a bicyclist and a car racing enthusiast. Ternus is known to take his colleagues to upstate Washington for off-road rally car racing.

12:59John Coogan:Let's go. Excellent choice, Tim Cook. I see why you picked it up. So bullish. His love of motorsports notwithstanding, Ternus, like Cook, is risk-averse and reluctant to, as one person close to him puts it, upset the apple cart. That's a good pun. And as one longtime executive says, if you think Tim Cook is doing a good job, then you'll think John Ternus is doing a good job, too. That also feels like an underhanded. Maybe a dig. I have been a staunch defender of Tim Cook. Did well on the supply chain, did well on the tariffs, did well negotiating all sorts of tough things. wound up with a great partnership with Gemini, like wound up in, like always looks bad as you're like investigating one feature on a one month timeline.

13:44John Coogan:But when you zoom out over a decade, incredible amount of value created, incredible performance, and very few weaknesses in the business from my perspective. But you can take the other side of that because I know you're frustrated by every app that they release lately. Who knows? Not just the apps. Not just the operating system itself. Also, I mean, the new material is rough. Like I dropped this phone a lot and it's very scratched. Despite his reputation for personable management, so he's known as a very nice manager, nice guy. He's the nice guy at Apple. Ternus has at times broken with that style in ways that raised eyebrows internally.

14:20John Coogan:Late in the lead up to the release of the Vision Pro headset, my favorite Apple device ever, unironically. For instance, engineers uncovered a flaw that threatened one of the device's marquee features. It's the ability to stream ultra - Well, you're not the average user, John. You use your device. I'm a power user. The average user doesn't use this. Yeah, yeah. I'm like five standard deviations above on the usage. So the ability to stream ultra-low latency audio from the headset to AirPods. This apparently was a capability central to Apple's pitch of a seamless experience for immersive video and gaming.

14:55So you just bought this$3 ,500 face computer.

15:01John Coogan:And$3 ,500 was the headline price. And they're telling you. When I bought one, it was close to five grand. I just think it's so funny that they ship this, you know, three to$5 ,000, you know, computer for your head that's super heavy. And they're like, and you're going to need to grab some AirPods. Yeah, it was clearly important to Apple. Apple's always prided itself on device integration, hardware integration, and they are great at that. Like, you put in the AirPods and you switch over to a YouTube video on your MacBook, and it just plays right there. You switch over to your phone, you take a call, it switches right back.

15:33John Coogan:Like, the connectivity with their Bluetooth strategy and their wireless strategy has always been fantastic. But apparently, it wasn't going well with the development of the Vision Pro headset. So the ability to stream ultra low latency audio from the headset to AirPods, this was a capability central to Apple's pitch of a seamless experience for immersive video and gaming. The problem stemmed from a missing wireless frequency in the then newest AirPods Pro. The only practical fix was to ship a revised version of the earbuds, which the company did at the end of 2023. It was sort of a weird move, probably cost them some extra money to do.

16:12John Coogan:It was a mistake that was caused by a particular hardware engineer on this team. When they launched the Apple Vision Pro in February of 2024, that meant that anyone who wanted this feature, they just paid$3 ,500. They had to spend another$250 on new AirPods that added the ultra-low latency support and not much else. And so this was a debacle, and the debacle reverberated through multiple teams, including hardware, software, testing, and the Vision Pro group. People involved said Ternus alienated some people on staff by focusing initially on finding out whom to blame. Who did it? In the aftermath, a senior AirPods executive was reassigned.

16:53John Coogan:And I'm laughing because I, so I asked Jordy this morning. I said, okay, I gave him like the overall broad strokes of what happened. And what was your first recommendation for? Shut down both product lines. Shut down both product lines. Just shut down both entirely. And then I would have focused on coming out with a pair of wired headsets made of wood using horse hair for the actual connectivity. Yeah, yeah. And then - No wires at all. Yeah, and then sort of like with a leather - Certainly no plastics, no macro plastics or micro plastics. Yeah, it's probably creating some type of tallow to make them more comfortable.

17:37John Coogan:You don't want the wood to get splinters in your ears. Splinters, like a beef. So you lubricate your ear canal with beef tallow. Just go back to basics. Just back to basics. Introducing AirPod Caveman. Caveman, yeah, that's what you want. That's where I would have started. This issue comes down to, from my understanding, this senior executive who is responsible, it was the AirPod, right? Yeah. He did not process that the Apple Vision Pro was coming out and they were selling against this feature. It's a missed requirement. And Apple, yeah, and Apple, the thing that I think they still do really well to this day, even though almost all their other software on the iPhone is a total disaster, is connectivity between the devices and syncing them and things like that.

18:22So they still do that well. And so to come out with this in just a blatant sort of unforced error, didn't communicate properly with the other teams for the AirPods, which are just designed to sync perfectly with all the other.

18:37John Coogan:It would be like if one of the cameras was blurry or something like that. It's like, well, the iPhone, like, yeah, it's not dominating AI crazy features yet, but everyone counts on the iPhone for having a good set of cameras. Like they're always good. And so if you mess up something that is the basis of the strategy, that is risky. Is he a nice guy or is he too hard? Ternus looks at mistakes as systemic problems that could be solved with better leadership instead of by putting the onus on the engineer someone said who worked for him. And this person adds Ternus is a nice guy. It's a throwback to the Steve Jobs era.

19:16John Coogan:Like Steve Jobs would have said, hey, I demanded this. Like you made a mistake, like heads must roll. And that was a bit of the company culture, at least in the lore. And who knows how true that is. But this doesn't seem like it goes too far into like ruthless business behavior. But that's sort of where the discussion is around Ternus. It's like, is he pure nice guy? Does he have a harder edge? I don't know. I think Ternus didn't go hard enough. Didn't go hard enough. Yeah. Should've got after him personally. We were featured in the world's 50 most innovative companies, the definitive guide to the future of business.

19:49John Coogan:We're up there with Tubi, Google, Walmart, BYD. These are some big companies. Ramp got a nod and TBPN got a nod right next to Ramp. And they sent us a very nice letter. and we are sitting here with a nice little mural of a bunch of our guests. Who did we get? We got Brian Armstrong, Evan Spiegel. Tell me who we got beat out. We were the number two media company. We were the number two most innovative media company. We got beat out by a CDN. Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare smoked us. Smoked us. Smoked us. We didn't stand a chance. Just look at the scale of Cloudflare. They distribute so much media.

20:24John Coogan:It's a content delivery network. They deliver content. We try and deliver content. We deliver three hours a day. They deliver probably billions of hours a second. I can't even imagine the scale of that business. It's everywhere. But Matthew Prince is a very innovative leader, and I completely agree with the ranking that he should be. But we're coming for you next year, Matthew. We're coming next year, Matthew. It's on. Producers at CNBC wake up in the morning to look at the public markets in order to plan the day's lineup. John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, co-hosts of TBPN, a daily talk show devoted to the business of technology, wake up and look at what's trending on X.

20:55John Coogan:That's true. And then they gab. That's us. Quote, says Hayes,

21:27John Coogan:sorting what people are interested in. Anyway, you can go check it out. As a boy, I subscribe to the print edition of Fast Company and always looked forward to getting it in the physical mailbox at home. Unwell, Alex Cooper's network is 23. So she must be media. She must be higher than us. What's the category, though? Oh, I don't know. Because if Cloudflare is a media company, Unwell might be. It might be a CDN. Who knows? Let's see. Unwell was ranked. Oh, Unwell is in the advertising and marketing category, but not media news. Cloudflare is media news, and we are second behind Cloudflare. That is interesting.

22:08John Coogan:I would say Unwell beat us fair and square in podcasting. All I have to say is in the words of the Canadian Olympic team, John, silver shines just as bright. We've been on a bit of a silver tear lately. We're the second highest ranked technology show on Spotify. Thank you to everyone who's been subscribing and leaving us five-star reviews over there. And yeah, thank you to Team Canada for... Pioneering. Making it a little bit more... Pioneering COPE as a strategy, as a marketing strategy. OpenAI's new nonprofit foundation announces plans to spend$1 billion this year and has appointed OpenAI co-founder Waj and Jacob of Coefficient, giving to leadership positions, still searching for an executive director.

22:49Sam says AI will help discover new science such as cures for diseases, which is perhaps the most important way to increase quality of life long-term. AI will also present new threats to society that we have to address. No company can sufficiently mitigate these on their own. We will need a society-wide response to things like novel biothreats, a massive and fast change to the economy, extremely capable models causing complex emergent effects across society, and more. So it's great that this has gotten set up. I know you can imagine just how much has gone into this.

23:20John Coogan:I would love to see them. I mean, they have a lot of money here. They're going to be donating a lot of money. I think it's going to be the best funded nonprofit in the history of humanity. That's very exciting. I would love just a little carve out for developing like consumer apps or consumer technology. I mean, they've had so much success spinning things out. It's funded the nonprofit so effectively. Why not keep it going? Yeah. Why change horses in the middle of a stream? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right. In other news, Andrew Bosworth is taking over supervision of the company's efforts to become AI native.