John Coogan

John's top picks

What John uses or recommends most, ranked by how often and how strongly. Paid ads are left out.

What John warns against

Things John says to avoid or be careful with. Other experts don't always agree.

Claude

"I had to go back to Opus and it felt like a huge step back. And I thought to myself immediately, this is as much of a strategic asset as our grid is."

WE'RE BACK: Meta Addiction, Jalapeño, Tim Cook's Last Day, Flocked ▶ Watch at 2:19:57

Riley Brown, Chris Koerner and 244 others recommend it

Whoop

"Will Manitis says, 'It brings me no joy to report I spent a year wondering why I was constantly sleepy and had a low sleep score on my Whoop. That was totally cured by simply stopped wearing the Whoop.'"

🚀 SpaceX IPO Liftoff | Diet TBPN ▶ Watch at 32:24 See all 2 times John said it →

J

This Week in Startups, Ali Abdaal and 11 others recommend it

BPC-157

"The FDA has effectively delivered a blow to BPC-157 for ulcerative colitis, KPV for wound healing, TB500 for wound healing."

Etched Founder Joins, AI Creates Jobs, It's OVER for Peptides, Tristan Thompson in the Ultradome ▶ Watch at 1:16:41

A C

Andrew Huberman, Joe Rogan and 9 others recommend it

All 61 of John's picks

• ChatGPT Uses and recommends it 15 episodes "The generative UI stuff in ChatGPT. We talked about it yesterday and got a chance to demo it. Much better experience with the answers streaming in. I asked it to explain this whole SEC market manipulation thing. I fire off a big prompt and it gets me the answer very quickly, then it explains the laws, then it builds some widgets about different items. It's just a much better UI experience and product experience." +155 others
• Apple Vision Pro Uses and recommends it 8 episodes "I'll watch our entire Lawrence of Arabia from start to finish in a Vision Pro. That's me on a plane. Like I love that thing for movie watching." +3 others
• Dot Uses and recommends it 2 episodes "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, you asked for this and you should follow up because they said that they would do it.'" +2 others
• Call of Duty Uses and recommends it 2 episodes "My Call of Duty campaign review: I've been thoroughly enjoying it. I haven't played it fully, but it's amazing... They did a great job of not making it try to be a multiplayer simulator. This feels like an action movie. It feels very cinematic." +2 others
• Tesla Full Self-Driving Uses and recommends it 2 episodes "The self-driving capability is 100% ready to rock. Brandon on our team was saying that 95% of the miles he's driven in the car have been in Full Self-Driving mode. You add a little bit of teleop for that 5% that's not there. The only time you're driving a Tesla if you have Full Self-Driving on the latest hardware is pulling into your garage or negotiating a parking lot." +5 others
• Codex Uses it 10 episodes "The desktop app that I used was Codex. And then when I wanted to interact with ChatGPT in a chat flow, I would do a new tab. I was doing some research on the most recent story and I just dumped it in Codex — explain how this story is different than what happened with Honey — and it just did it like it was ChatGPT." +96 others
• Midjourney Uses and recommends it 2 episodes "The multiplayer nature of MidJourney — when I jump into the MidJourney Discord, the first thing I see is your crazy prompt. You're 12 levels deep, prompt injecting, thinking of different keywords, doing different SRFs for style references. And I think the reason MidJourney has been successful is because it's so opinionated and it's not trying to just be a stock photo generator." +7 others
• Gemini Uses it 2 episodes "I like Gemini 3. I thought Gemini 3 had a good flavor to it. Maybe it was overly benchmarked, but it felt like it wasn't too verbose. Felt like it answered questions in one page of text, and so I could see the answer and parse it easily, as opposed to getting pages and pages, which some LLMs do." +71 others
• Blender Uses it 2 episodes "I was modeling stuff in Blender. I haven't touched 3D rendering for a long time. And I can — I'm building video games and stuff. I saw that okay, we've crossed this threshold — the spike of intelligence has spiked beyond what's relevant in this particular category." +7 others
• ChatGPT Sites Uses and recommends it "I'm responsible for like 45 of those. I make them for everything. I love them. It's like my favorite product. I love sites. I think it's really good for on-the-fly UI — I was discussing potential guests, had Deep Research pull a bunch of potential people, and instead of just giving me a big long list I was like just build me a website where I can thumbs up thumbs down share with the team very easy." +3 others
• Balatro Uses it 2 episodes "I had Astra use computer use to play a video game that I very much enjoy playing called Balatro. It's sort of like a modified poker game. It did very well. It won. I was not able to win." +1 other
• Neural Frames Uses and recommends it "I found Neural Frames by actually going to ChatGPT and saying I have a Suno song, I want to make an AI music video and I want to do not a lot of work — what do you recommend? It recommended Neural Frames. I've been really enjoying the product. The song is from Suno and then I took the song, put it in Neural Frames and it generated all of this for me and I was able to edit it together." +1 other
• Veo Uses it 2 episodes "I was playing around with V3 or V4 — where are we in the Veo models? So good and yet still not indistinguishable from reality. We're so close and yet so far if you want to generate a video these days. It is cool, you can do it on your phone though." Only John
• Eight Sleep Uses it 2 episodes "But with Eight Sleep, I like the cooling. Like that's nice. Well, and with Eight Sleep, I'm actually interested in like how is my REM versus deep sleep trending, things like that" +16 others
• Turo Uses and recommends it "So I rented a Tesla with FSD on Turo a couple weeks ago. It was a fantastic experience. I wound up just searching or filtering... and I was able to verify that it was Hardware 4." +2 others
• LG TV Uses and recommends it "How likely are you to purchase an LG TV going forward? — I already did. They're the best. Like, I just don't mind it." Only John
• LG G5 Uses and recommends it "I already did. They're the best. The LG G5 that they tried is actually the best looking TV, I think. But I would love a dumb one. I would love one without all those annoying features. The software is the worst part." Only John
• Seance Uses and recommends it "I got completely oneshotted by the new AI video model, Seance 2.5. The big update here is that it replaces the whole person, the whole object as opposed to just a face swap. It just hits way harder." Only John
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Uses and recommends it "I played the beta, got completely addicted, and then I feel like you pulled it from my grasp... I spend a whole weekend. I got a new gaming PC for it. I'm obsessed with this game. It's great." Only John
• DoorDash Uses and recommends it "I recently DoorDashed something from Best Buy and it was an amazing experience because it was faster than me driving to Best Buy and back because they found a local driver who was able to just pick it up. There was like no way that I could ever outperform it." +3 others
• Tesla Model Y Uses and recommends it "I ordered a Model Y L and the self-driving capability is 100% ready to rock. Brandon on our team was saying that 95% of the miles he's driven in the car have been in Full Self-Driving mode." +3 others
• Tesla Model S Uses and recommends it "I'm actually really bullish on the cyber cab. I've tested a Model S recently and the self-driving capability is 100% ready to rock." +4 others
• Twilio Uses and recommends it "We use Twilio for our app where we want to be able to interface with an application via text message. Even though we could go and vibe code that, all of a sudden you're dealing with different mobile carriers and the cell networks and are they going to flag you as spam — and Twilio has all the huge decades of relationships built out in a real network there. That value, even though it's just a tool and it's just consumption software at the end of the day, it has this moat and so it's been doing really really well." Only John
• Yerba Mate Uses and recommends it "What you don't see is that before the show I drink two to three Yerba Mates from Maté, Andrew Huberman's podcast in a can. I also recommend those." +2 others
• Ramp Uses and recommends it "I love the fact that you can open up the Ramp app and just ask a model like, 'How much did we spend on camera equipment last month?' and it'll just tell me. And that's amazing." +3 others
• Shop Pay Uses it "I told Dot in ChatGPT, I need a raincoat. Go find it, buy it, send it to me, just do everything. And it used Shop Pay. And it has arrived." +1 other
• Dithering Uses it "On Dithering, John Gruber and Ben Thompson always kick it off with like three minutes of discussion about sports. And even though I don't follow sports, I'm really into this. This is how I get information about sports." Only John
• Moom Uses it "For years and years and years Apple didn't have that. I used this third-party plugin called Moom, move and zoom, and it would kind of do the window arrangement if you were trying to lay out multiple windows at the same time on Mac." Only John
• Tesla FSD Uses it "I rented a Tesla with FSD on Turo a couple weeks ago. It was a fantastic experience... I was able to verify that it was Hardware 4, which is like the good FSD." +5 others
• Plaid Uses it "Plaid, you know, I've used Plaid in ChatGPT to authenticate a bunch of bank accounts. It's great." +1 other
• Shutterstock Uses it "Really cool business. And yeah, I remember it being really useful for finding stock photos, stock videos. Always a little out of my price range for a while. You'd have to pay per image." Only John
• Unsplash Uses it "I always liked Unsplash, the free versions or the cheaper versions." Only John
• PhotoCraft Uses it "I downloaded the Photoshop decompilation PhotoCraft, used it a little bit. Not bad. Pretty remarkable how many tools did make it over. It actually doesn't have everything that you would expect." Only John
• Wall Street Journal Uses it "Thank you for taking the time to talk to us and thank you for writing in the Wall Street Journal. We read the Wall Street Journal every day here and we appreciate all the..." +7 others
• Snag (domain brokers) Recommends it "Rob and the Snag team are the finest domain brokers I've ever worked with. Rob helped us get TBPN.com back in the day... you should focus whatever energy you were going to put on getting a .si domain on just getting your .com. But I would do it with Rob." +2 others
• Elden Ring Uses it "I've played Elden Ring. I played probably five minutes of Minecraft. Never really got into it, but I played a decent amount of Elden Ring. It's a fun game. I like a Souls game." +2 others
• Deep Research Uses it "I was discussing potential guests for throughout the rest of the year. Had Deep Research pull a bunch of potential people that are one step away from guests we've had on the show, but instead of just giving me a big long list I was like just build me a website where I can thumbs up thumbs down share with the team." +2 others
• Instinct Uses it "I'm using Instinct to make all kinds of purchases. So is my wife, and we see this — it's an inevitable future." +17 others
• iRacing Uses it "Computer use in iRacing is something I'm going to experiment with this week." +2 others
• ChatGPT Image Uses it "Let's see how ChatGPT Images 2.5 is doing. You made OpenAI dev day. It looks good, but I can't find Waldo. Some of this zoomed-in text is really, really good. It's pretty high fidelity. I think we're getting close." +3 others
• Cinema 4D Uses it "I've actually spent hundreds if not thousands of hours in 3D modeling software, mostly in Cinema 4D and Houdini. Cinema 4D's a closed-source piece of software, very expensive — over a thousand dollars to get a license good for a year, then they eventually went subscription." Only John
• Dyson Uses it "Every time I have a Dyson vacuum at home — and I've had various Dyson products over the years — it just feels a little bit creaky, a little bit cheap. But I think you forget how bad it was before Dyson. Vacuums were so rattly and clanky. James Dyson is one of the greatest to ever do it." Only John
• Houdini Uses it "I've actually spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in 3D modeling software, mostly in Cinema 4D and Houdini. Some of those other softwares are better at certain things — some are better at smoke simulations, some are better at water simulations." Only John
• Zillow Uses it "I've already seen on Zillow there is the ability to restyle images. If you're looking at a house on Zillow, you can see the interior photos and then you can say I'd like to redecorate this in a modern style or contemporary style, and it will go and use AI image generation on the back end to do that." +1 other
• Zapier Uses it "I am a featured customer on the Zapier blog from 2015 because I developed a workflow that would record all of our conference calls, send them to a human transcription service, and then upload the transcription into Google Drive." +5 others
• Bring a Trailer Uses it "I've probably bought five or six cars over the years sight unseen where they're out of state, maybe they were on Bring a Trailer or some I just found a spec I liked at some dealer or whatever." +3 others
• StockX Uses it "It actually took me to StockX and it was like, 'Hey, by the way, this is selling for below retail on StockX, so you should just get it here.' And I ended up buying it." Only John
• Pinterest Uses it "We looked at Pinterest a lot for different references, some photos, some catalogs, Ralph Lauren." +4 others
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Uses it "We are coining and we are creating Rust Bench — the level in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. You need to be able to beat Jordy on Rust if you're building a coding agent. We play Modern Warfare, we play Rust." Only John
• Photoshop Uses it "I was using Adobe products recently and in Photoshop, they have an integration with Gemini Nano and you can plug in all the different image models and you can actually use the tools in very interesting ways." +3 others
• XReal Uses it "There's this company XReal. We demoed this. I got a pair for Tyler. Took them for a spin. They're not quite there, but they're way cheaper. You're looking at a couple hundred and you get a screen that's like not even really augmented reality — it's sort of like sunglasses with a screen inside, but then it projects like a 200-inch TV in front of you." Only John
• Instagram Pro Uses it "Instagram Pro recently launched, $3.99 a month I believe, for some premium features. I upgraded instantly. I like the fact that I can extend it to 48 hours because I'm not a daily story person." Only John
• Threads Uses it "I go there for car community, I go there for all sorts of different subcommunities around TV shows and different things. It's not work for me when I'm there. Threads is more fractured, but in a good way." +1 other
• 1Password Recommends it "I've been just texting the 1Password website to people, like if you're scared, it's warranted to be scared, but here's one simple thing you can do to start your personal security journey." +5 others
• Pirates of Silicon Valley Recommends it "I like Pirates of Silicon Valley. Have you seen that? It's the original Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates. Low-budget DirecTV biopic, but it's fantastic. Highly recommend." Only John
• Bloomberg Recommends it "You should go read the Bloomberg report, subscribe and actually read it, because there's way more details." +1 other
• Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Recommends it "I just went to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Dude, so good. Oh my goodness. The best non-canonical collection of modern art museum I've seen. Almost every painting feels like a freeze frame in a movie." Only John
• Infiltrated: North Korea's Secret US Workforce Recommends it "The journal's 30-minute documentary titled 'Infiltrated: North Korea's Secret US Workforce' follows the operation in detail. It's a fascinating watch and I highly recommend that you check it out." Only John
• The Prosperous Society Recommends it "Go listen to it. It's a three-hour, four-part series. And sign up for Mobile Dev Memo if you haven't already." Only John
• Founders Recommends it "Founders podcast and the David Senra show. Go check it out. He's been on an absolute tear, a generational run." +5 others
• The One and the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion Recommends it "The book is The One and the 99. Go pick it up wherever books are sold. Thank you, Ben, for coming on the show." Only John
• Claude Warns against "I had to go back to Opus and it felt like a huge step back. And I thought to myself immediately, this is as much of a strategic asset as our grid is." 246 recommend it
• Whoop Warns against "Will Manitis says, 'It brings me no joy to report I spent a year wondering why I was constantly sleepy and had a low sleep score on my Whoop. That was totally cured by simply stopped wearing the Whoop.'" 13 recommend it
• BPC-157 Warns against "The FDA has effectively delivered a blow to BPC-157 for ulcerative colitis, KPV for wound healing, TB500 for wound healing." 11 recommend it
• Meta AI Warns against "I went to Meta AI in the Instagram app and asked, 'What should I do more of in order to grow my account?' But I got this very generic LLM response — referencing a blog post from a social media management SaaS company. You would think there would be an opportunity to give creators personal super intelligence to just be better creating on the platform." 3 recommend it
• Higgsfield Warns against "You went through this with Higgsfield where you're using Codex to make videos. And somehow Higgsfield has like $500 of yours now and it's locked in there, and it's unclear how you can get it." 2 recommend it
• Meta Quest Warns against "I found out that I had seven passwords because I had a keypad, a code, a Meta password, an Instagram password, a Facebook password, an Oculus VR password. And I showed this whole process of like what it takes to just take it and then play a game. And it was like 15 minutes." 2 recommend it
• Celsius Warns against "It's not a Celsius where I'm going to crash." 1 recommend it
• Sonos Warns against "There are layoffs at Sonos, the smart speaker maker. It's been a rough period for Sonos, battered by customer complaints after a disastrous app rollout. They need a product that actually plays the song that you want without a 10-minute lag when you open the app." 1 recommend it
• Xbox Warns against "Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs by the end of next year. It's not because of artificial intelligence. The newly appointed Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has announced that Xbox will lay off 3,200 staffers by the end of 2027. In some parts of the company, work has to pass through as many as 14 layers of management. In a typical year, Xbox lost 64 cents for every dollar it invested." 1 recommend it
• FIA Warns against "FIA is claiming credit for online sales it didn't actually drive, in violation of many digital platforms' policies. Bloomberg tested the FIA mobile browser extension across more than 50 websites and found that during the checkout process, FIA opened a background tab without user interaction and injected its own referral code that overrode legitimate referrals from other publishers." No one recommends it
• HoloLens Warns against "I used to be an FOV maxer. I used the HoloLens and was like, 'This is unacceptable.'" No one recommends it
• Honey Warns against "MegaLag, the YouTuber that did the Honey exposé — it was an interesting deep dive that got 20 million views because it was using a hidden redirect near checkout to replace the creator's affiliate tag with Honey's." No one recommends it
• Meta Portal Warns against "I actually did get a bunch of them for family members during COVID and we used them like once, and then they started collecting dust. They worked as like picture frames basically." No one recommends it
• Xbox Game Pass Warns against "All they did was cannibalize their existing business. They didn't expand the market for console gamers. All they did was have gamers who would have paid way more to play these games pay way less. And Microsoft ate it. They expected to have 75 million Game Pass subscribers by this year. They have like 30 million. And that number is actually decreasing." No one recommends it
• Nothing matches.