Bezos' $100B AI Plan, Nvida Chip Smuggling, 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?

  First, I wanted to chat more about the breaking news from yesterday. Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion for an AI manufacturing fund. There was a funny post that was like, he has $200 billion. Why does he need to raise more money?

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  No conviction? No conviction?

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  No, it was funny. It was like, it definitely, this, this broke containment and got into kind of the anti-capitalist

• 0:26John Coogan?

  People are not happy.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  part of X and they were like, wait, why are you asking people for money? You have all the money.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  He wants to let other people in on the action.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Well, I want to let, I, I do wonder what his like GP commit will be.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was saying yesterday. I was like, I would expect him to be like, yeah, I'm good for 20.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  20 or 30 or something like that. I don't know. Maybe he'll go even longer. But in general, I think the, I think the idea of going around the globe, because he's an international person at this point, hoovering up money from all over different sovereign wealth funds and then deploying that to help rebuild the American manufacturing base is a good thing. I wrote about it today in the newsletter, tbpn.com. And I also tried to, you know, do some searching and think about like, what do you actually buy for $100 billion? What does a portfolio look like if it's a private equity style roll up? If you're just taking out the market caps and you're sort of assuming the debt and continue to operate the business, but then bring more efficiency to bear. What are some of the top options?

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  I saw.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  What do some of the options look like?

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is I saw a very viral post about someone that seemingly read the headline and thought, don't you have enough money already? Why do you have to buy all these companies and fire?

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  Like they saw automation and they just assume like job loss.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  And when I look at this, I'm like, okay, if he's successful, we will actually start adding

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Jobs.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  a bunch of new manufacturing jobs, which we've been shedding

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  over the last year.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So headline number is funny. If he had done 99 billion or 101 billion, I don't think people would make it, be making as many SoftBank comparisons. But of course, as soon as you hear $100 billion for a mega fund,

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  You think this guy's got vision.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  He's got vision. It's a vision fund for America. I like the idea of an American SoftBank, of an American vision fund. So. I'm generally pro. And but of course, people are going to make comparisons to SoftBank, which has had some huge winners and a few black eyes. Mas is a high vol guy. He's been the world's richest man briefly during the dot com boom. It was reported that he was worth more than Bill Gates. It was pretty temporary, unclear exactly how much. And of course, there was no liquidity at the time. But he's also held the crown for the man who lost the most money in human history after losing $76 billion in two years. You're supposed to see the wah wah for that. But he made it all back. I was preemptively hitting. Okay, yeah, yeah. He did make it all back.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  He's made almost $100 billion twice. I think maybe there was a moment when he had the title of making $100 billion twice, one on Alibaba and then the second one on ARM. He's made money on Nvidia and lots of other things. The idea of an American SoftBank, especially one focused on revitalizing American manufacturing, I like that idea. There are a million reasons why this is an important project. Job creation, economic independence, national security, and you might just get more cool stuff. Like as manufacturing gets cheaper, like the tools that you use, the cars that you drive, the washing machine in your home, the tires on your cars, all these different things get better, not just cheaper, but actually unlock new capabilities and new things that people enjoy. And so I'm in favor of more manufacturing, more, more economic development, basically.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  And so the question about like, you know, Jeff Bezos's role, like he's a great operator and I think he's the right person to take the reins and actually deliver here. So like Mas, Jeff Bezos has been through the ups and downs of the dot com boom and bust. At one point, Jeff Bezos lost 85% of his net worth in like two years.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  But he made it back.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  He did make it back and more. He was worth like eight or nine billion and got down to his last one billion, basically, because of the stock drop in Amazon. But he built it. But he not only kept Amazon alive, which I think everyone knows that, you know, Amazon went up during the dot com bubble and then crashed and then built back up. But he also kept Blue Origin alive during that time because he's founded Blue Origin in 2000. Wow. Before the crash. I didn't know that. Yeah, before the crash. So he was. Was it before SpaceX? Yeah, before SpaceX.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, so.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  Cause I, I, I.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  Elon sold.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Reason I assume, I, I assume that Blue Origin was just memetic with Elon.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  No, no, no. He did it earlier.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Uh, and so he, so he kept Blue Origin alive. And can you imagine how stressful it is? You're like, okay, I'm worth 10 billion. Certainly I can have a little side project as a treat. And you're like, okay, I just lost 85% of my money.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  I deserve, I deserve, uh, I deserve a side project that loses.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  20 million a month.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. I don't know how much they were losing, but like, but that doesn't seem unreasonable. But he was able to keep it going. Uh, of course, Blue Origin was a slow story all the way up until like last year, when they landed New Glenn. Um, and, uh, and so, uh, he kept both alive and he's never given up on the project, Blue Origin, that always has felt behind SpaceX for two, the two decades that it's been operating, but is now sort of unlocking new capabilities and is.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  They were going turtle mode.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, turtle mode for sure, but it's working regardless of the fact that, uh, you know, SpaceX is still ahead of Blue Origin. You have to give him credit for like operating that company efficiently and actually delivering a product that we all saw go up and come back. And so like the rockets did go up and land and come back and he's delivered people to space and back. Uh, and so he's, he's, he's like achieved the goal and not lost all the money and not put the company in jeopardy. And so like clearly there's some operational.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  That's a narrative violation.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  It is a narrative violation. What makes Bezos uniquely equipped to take on this type of project is the nature of his business over the last few decades. So he's never really had the zero marginal cost luxuries afforded to other pure play internet founders. Amazon's just always interfaced with the physical world. So it's been, even though it's a software company and a tech company, it's always interfaced with the physical world. Uh, and they've had to focus on operational efficiencies to scale. So in 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems, which turned into Amazon Robotics, and that's a big risk to buying a big company. And we think that, you know, if this turns into, if this hundred billion dollar fund turns into sort of a private equity roll up.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  You're going to ask the question, can Bezos buy a company for 1 billion, 5 billion, 10 billion, 50 billion, who knows, and operate it and scale it and actually continue to deliver value? And he certainly did that with Kiva Robotics, which turned into Amazon Robotics, which delivered over a million robots that are deployed across the operations network. So from fulfillment centers, warehouse automation, inventory flow, last mile delivery, all of these require tight integration between hardware and software to run smoothly. Bezos clearly loves this stuff. And you can actually see it. When you look at his face, whenever he gives a tour of an Amazon warehouse or an Blue Origin facility, he's just beaming. And he's absolutely obsessed with this technology and the physical world. And so the question I had was like, what should he buy?

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing is like, you know, seeing all the different volume across Amazon and being like, wow, it'd be pretty convenient if that was made here, or this was made here, or at least the, some of the components were made here. And it wasn't, you know, you didn't just have assembly here.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, there is, I hadn't considered that narrative, but there is a different flow where you're

• 7:35Jordi Hays?

  He's not sitting there being like, great, I love that so much of our volume is having to be shipped or flown across the ocean.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Ton of that, yeah. And then also, he's seen attacks from Timu and Shein and Alibaba and AliExpress and a whole bunch of direct from manufacturing plant to customer. And how do you respond to that? Maybe getting into the deeper in the supply chain makes sense. Although, I'm not entirely sure that, there's so little reporting at this point. It's, the only line is that he'll be buying manufacturing companies. So there's a lot in the supply chain. So I wanted to dig through some stuff that could potentially be in the crosshairs for Bezos. The first is Lear. They manufacture seats and electronic systems for the automotive industry. And a lot of these companies have huge revenues and small

• 8:23John Coogan?

  market cap. So Lear did 23 billion in 2025 revenue. The market cap is around 5 billion. And so the business is operationally complex. I mean, on a P/E ratio, it trades at like, I think, 13 price earnings. And so, like, you have these high revenues because you're in the manufacturing business, but you're low margin.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this has been some of the concern around VCs, investing in manufacturing businesses.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  And just a general concern that, you know, they might today be getting valued on a revenue multiple.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  But as they get to the public markets, people will expect them to be valued on earnings. And that is a very different story.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  BorgWarner is another example. They're a scaled auto supplier, 14 billion in 2025 revenue, market cap is 9.5 billion. They're more focused on propulsion and power-related systems. They literally make turbochargers for internal combustion engines, although they have shifted their business a lot to be focused on electronic components, both in terms of making battery packs, motors. But they're actually already getting into selling turbine generator systems for data centers, they're part of the AI boom already. Hexcel is another company, they're guiding to 2 billion in revenue, but the market cap is 5 billion, so a little pricier on a price to sales ratio. Here's a fun one, Goodyear.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  Not only do you get blimps, which has got to be important if you're trying to go blimp for blimp with Sergey Brin, you just jump to the front of the line, it's only a 1.8

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  This revenue multiple is criminal.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's only... So, the market cap for Goodyear is 1.8 billion, and revenue was 18 billion. So, they're trading at a 0.1x revenue.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere out there, there's like a VC-funded tire company.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  It's like 100x revenue. And they're like, we're going to go through at 1,000x multiple compression over the next decade? Yes, you will. But Goodyear is sort of the classic AI for manufacturing case.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  They got to focus, they got to get investors thinking about their advertising blimp monopoly.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  And scaling that business.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Yep. So, quality control is really critical. There's opportunities for downtime optimization, so if you can have better systems that limit downtime, you can produce more tires. The tire market is extremely competitive, you see Chinese tires on cars more and more. And so, these are thin, thin, thin-margin companies, and that's why the multiple's so low. But getting good.

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  Scariest, scariest moment of my life in a car.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, Chinese tires, old Chinese tires.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  Old Chinese tires.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  But, you know, a lot of people go in, they say, I need new tires, just give me whatever's cheapest. And so if you're competing on price and you're a low-cost supplier, every dollar counts. On the bigger side, you have Rockwell Automation. I don't know if you've ever seen those videos for the Rockwell Turbo Encabulator. Have you ever seen these? Look at this.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Research has been proceeding to develop a line of automation products that establishes new standards for quality, technological leadership, and operating excellence. With customer success as our primary focus, work has been proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only provide inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal gram meters. Such an instrument comprised of Dodge gears and bearings, Reliance electric motors, Allen Bradley controls, and all monitored by Rockwell software, is Rockwell Automation's Retro Encabulator.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Retro Encabulator.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Now, basically, the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it's produced by the modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive reactance.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Passive interaction.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  The original machine had a base plate of pre-famulated antelite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing, in such a way that the two spurving bearings run a direct line with a panometric fan.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  Panometric fan.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  The lineup consisted simply of six hydro...

• 12:18John Coogan?

  It's just like such a funny in-joke for electrical engineers, because it's just a whole bunch of like slop, basically. Like, oh, none of those terms mean anything.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Good startup launch video concept.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really, I mean, it helps you like detect, like, are you in-group, out-group, basically? Very, very fun. But they are...

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  You're saying out-group.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  What? Well, were you able to clock it, or were you like, oh, that sounds good? Yeah?

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it sounded silly.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  It sounded silly. So Rockwell Automation is on the bigger side, but they sit right at the intersection of factory automation, software and control. So although that video is a joke, Rockwell does does work on on factory automation already. So the thesis with this one is that the business is already already dedicated to industrial automation and so it's less of a turnaround, but it's a control point for pushing AI to thousands of other factories. So you're deeper in the supply chain. It's expensive at 40 billion, but potentially in the budget.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Do you think there's a world where he just buys a Ford Motor Company?

• 13:18John Coogan?

  That would be crazy.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, I mean, he wouldn't, he would have to lever up.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  What is Ford now?

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  It's 45, but I'm not, but he's not going to just drop like raise 100 billion and then and then buy a company entirely with equity.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  I feel like it will be deeper in the supply chain than a brand, but I don't know. It's possible. It's possible.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  But he might say.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Isn't he already a big investor in Rivian?

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  So like looking deeper into that supply chain and there's a few other car companies that he's been been involved in. I just don't know that there's that like that's where the big opportunity is. It might be deeper in in the supply chain, like bending the metal that goes into the bumper, this and that. And like, you know, it's 12 steps deep. It's more boring, but it's even thinner margins, less, you know, brand risk and brand value, but really focused on, you know, applying that actual like commercial excellence. And then there's also the the option that we get some sort of Elon style mega corp with Blue Origin involved at some point, like, you know, XAI and SpaceX merged. It's possible that Blue Origin and this vehicle come together with Project Prometheus in some in some way,

• 14:26John Coogan?

  and then that goes public as a new entity. A lot of these, he's, he's actually mentioned the whole space data center thing before, I think a while ago. Wasn't it like more than a year ago?

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they also just filed something with the FCC.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, for the new cloud.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, for the new.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  It was like 50,000 satellites.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so he wants like a direct Starlink competitor. And so when you think about the full AI stack, if he's really, you know, off off planet, you know, pilled and thinks he can get, thinks he can get there, even if it's like a year or two behind, or I guess what's the timeline for his Starlink competitor? That would be like three years behind, four years?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, for for the moon, he's supposed to be ahead, right?

• 15:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Maybe this will all go on the moon. Well, either way, it's a big move from an experienced operator with lots of opportunity ahead and it'll be fun to follow along.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  And I'm glad he's back in the game in a big way.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Not just doing random, you know, side projects.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Bottle service.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  Or bottle service.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  He's gotta be spending more time and energy securing America's future.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  Securing bottle service.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  Well, you know, I mean, the guy can take a weekend off, but one photo from his weekend flies a lot further than, you know, he could be completely locked in and just grinding 80 hours and then he goes gets bottle service just one time.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  Jensen.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  And let's go over to Jensen on the All In Podcast.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  At $500,000 engineer, at the end of the year, I'm gonna ask him, how many tokens, how much did you spend in tokens? And that person said $5,000, I will go ape something else.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Right. If that, if that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed. Okay? And this is no different than one of our chip designers who says, guess what? I'm just gonna use paper and pencil. I don't think I'm gonna need any CAD tools.

• 16:20Speaker 05

  Right, right. This is a real paradigm shift to start thinking about these all-star employees. It almost reminds me of what we learned in the NBA when LeBron James started spending a million dollars a year just on his health of his body, like maintaining it.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  Here he is at age 41, still playing. It really is, hey, if these are incredible knowledge workers, why wouldn't we give them superhuman abilities?

• 16:42Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  Where does that go? If we, if we extrapolate out two or three years from now, what is the efficiency of that all-star at Nvidia and what they're able to accomplish? What do they look like?

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, things that, that, wow, this is too hard. That thought is gone. This is gonna take a long time. That thought is gone. We're gonna need a lot of people. That thought is gone. This is no different than in this, in the last industrial revolution, somebody goes, boy, that building really looks heavy. Nobody says that. Nobody, wow, that mountain looks too big. Nobody says that.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  Everything that's too big, too heavy, takes too long. Those thoughts, those ideas are all gone. You're reduced to creativity. That's right. What can you come up with? Exactly. Which means, now the question is, how do you, how do you work with these agents? Well, it's just a new way of doing computer programming. In the future, in the past, we code. In the future, we're gonna, we're gonna write ideas, architectures, specifications. We're gonna organize teams. We're gonna help them define how to evaluate the definition of good versus bad. What does it look like when something is a great outcome? How to iterate with you, how to brainstorm?

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  You know, says, guy that sells shovels says you should spend 50% of your salary on shovels. Uh, but of course, uh, Jensen's point is generally correct, which is that you should give your best people a lot of leverage.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do wonder what the like leverage ratio is in other industries? If you're a crane operator and you're making, I don't know.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  If you should give him the best possible crane.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, is it possible that, that if you're operating a $10 million crane or something, I don't know how much a crane costs, or like, or a cargo ship that's ferrying oil across the world? How much does that crew cost? And then how much does the ship cost? And then what's the depreciation on that ship? Because it might be like a $100 million ship that will last 20 years. So you're looking at $5 million a year. And if the crew, total cost of the crew is like 1 million, well then, you're actually spending more on the capital asset than the underlying talent and you're getting like leverage on top of that. And for a long time, software engineering has not been that. It's been, you know, $100 worth of internet and a couple thousand dollars on a MacBook

• 18:59John Coogan?

  and a lot of open source software because you're using Python and Linux and these things. And, I mean, I guess you could maybe burden like your cloud budget once you actually deploy the app. Like, if you think about, if you're a Facebook engineer or Instagram engineer, you could push a feature that consumes a ton of compute. But this is also going back to like the AI talent war where you get back into if you're a, you know, elite software engineer and you're like, look, I'm going to be, I'm going to be, I'm going to be in charge, I'm going to be managing half a million dollars worth of token budget over the next year. Well, I'm want comp that's higher than that or something like that. It'll be very interesting to see how the, the, the value works there.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  A reasonable ballpark for the annual cost of a fully loaded cargo ship is around four to 18 million dollars. So, including the cash operating cost plus the depreciation. So, I don't know.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  In other news, the US Department of Justice announced yesterday three charged with conspiring to unlawfully divert cutting-edge US AI technology to China. The indictment unsealed today details alleged efforts to evade US export laws through false documents, staged dummy servers to mislead inspectors, and convoluted transshipment schemes in order to obfuscate the true destination of restricted AI technology. China, said John Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. These ships are the product of American ingenuity and NSD will continue to enforce our export control laws to protect that advantage. So, the company, SMIC, Super Micro Computer, Inc.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  They got a co-founder.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  They caught him, they caught him red handed.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Zhenzhuang Wali, he's arrested today or yesterday. He personally holds half a billion dollars of Super Micro stock, still risked it all, and now he's facing 30 years in federal prison. That is crazy. He was charged with smuggling billions in Nvidia servers to China, used Southeast and Southeast Asian shell company to funnel two and a half billion in servers to Chinese buyers, 500 million worth shipped in just three weeks in spring of 2025. That's a lot.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Two and a half billion in servers feels like enough for like a frontier training run. Like, that's a big, big, that's a big push. Built thousands of fake dummy servers to fool US compliance auditors caught on surveillance camera using a hairdryer to swap serial number stickers. And so, OX Gigi says, "This man is a billionaire and was removing labels with a hairdryer personally. You're simply not grinding hard enough."

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  There's always, there's always a grindset lesson in any story like this.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Let's take this over to LinkedIn.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  It's also notable because there's the export tax or tip that, you know, that you're trying to bring chips out of the country, the US government kind of flips over the square terminal and they say, "Tip, please."

• 21:58John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  25%, so you're looking at, at hundreds of millions of dollars if these were, even if these were chips that were able to be exported.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  We were debating the, the flipping the iPad around, asking for a tip earlier today. And I think our, our joint stance was if the iPad is turned around, you got a tip.

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  It's just the etiquette is that you got a tip. But is there any, is there anywhere where that line crosses and you say, "I can't, I can't possibly push something."

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  Funny thing is, Air One asks for tips.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Really?

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  On online orders.

• 22:33John Coogan?

  Online orders? Wait, but there will be a human delivering it or?

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  No, there's two separate tips.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's the, the person in the store who puts the things in the bag and then there's the delivery person.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  And they're at, they, they, they flip it over twice.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. The game theory of this stuff is always hard because I feel like, I don't know, there's regulations on like taxes on tips, but it's very unclear if companies actually funnel, how they distribute the tips. Like, are you tipping the person or the tips grouped together? Were your tips pooled when you were a valet?

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  They were pooled?

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  So even if you did a great job.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  I had two jobs at the hotel, the valets, they pool.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  Bell staff, the people that like take you down to your room do not

• 23:18John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Pool.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  And that was just the rules.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  Oh, it's because I might be the one who parks the car, you might be the one who gets.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, in a, in a dynamic where you have a bunch of valets that are waiting for cars.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  It would be a bad experience for the guest if the valets are like, they see a nice car pull in and they're like fighting over themselves.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  To deliver a service, right? It should just be like whoever's available should deliver the best possible service. Whereas Bell work is much more one-on-one.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  It's like, I'm kind of your guide on the property. I'm gonna like, you know, you, you might have the person's cellphone, they might be texting you, etc.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  And so it makes more sense to not pool.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Uh, when a, when a broker who had bought Nvidia-powered servers from the Southeast Asian company sent Sonny a text message containing a link to an announcement about Chinese nationals being arrested for smuggling AI chips into China, Sonny allegedly responded with sobbing emotions.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  Scroll up, scroll up so people can see.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Morning Brew says, "Hey, man, you're probably going to jail." Super Micro co-founder cry, cry, cry emoji. And scroll down and you'll see Nick Carter, literally this, "Your son has passed away." It's the Warthog explosion. "I'm sorry, but the Super Micro thing is awful, but parts of it are genuinely hilarious." They literally used a hairdryer to move serial numbers from real servers to dummy servers to throw in a warehouse and got caught on camera. And the pictures have actually leaked.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  Literally caught red-handed.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Yes, it's a red, it's a red hairdryer. That is, that is remarkable. Trung Fan says, "Do things that don't scale." Classic founder energy. And January 27.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Wait, it's literally, you can see, watch this, watch this. Look at that. Rewind for a second. You can see a Super Micro logo.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  No way.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Oh my God. That's like the biggest logo for Super Micro ever.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, Bone is absolutely correct.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  And this is from January. No, I'm telling you, like, a lot of, I mean, I'm sure the folks in the Justice Department were working on this, like, earlier than this, but a lot of times, like, legal action will happen, like, downstream of, like, YouTube drama videos.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  So, almost a year and a quarter ago, somebody responded to Bone and says, "It's SMIC packaged." And Bone says, "Do you think SMIC is smuggling chips?"

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  And the coach says, "It's possible. It's a family-owned business in Taiwan. I won't be surprised if there are some family members who want to make this money by setting up fake shell entities and smuggling chips for business partners in China."

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  It's good money.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Wow. Kevin Kwak has a good meme that everyone enjoyed. "They expect one of us in the wreckage, brother." And it's not Jensen. The Bane meme. It's very, very funny.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, the SMIC founder, I believe, was at GTC just a few days ago.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  Hanging out.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  No way.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  I saw a picture of him with Jensen.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Until the music stops playing, I suppose. We will be watching Bruce Lee fight Chuck Norris in The Way of the Dragon, because this is the way that we pay our respects to Chuck Norris, who, of course, passed away at the age of, I think, 86. And this is one of the most iconic fight scenes in movie history. Have you seen The Way of the Dragon?

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  This scene was unique. It was set inside Rome's Colosseum, and it was often cited as a turning point for how martial arts were portrayed on screen, particularly because they didn't use actors. So both Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris were legitimately high-level fighters. Norris was world karate champion at the time. They cast him, in part because of that. And it has a much more, like, grounded, credible feel, as opposed to, like, previously more stylized kung fu films. And you can see this with the, Bruce Lee actually directed and choreographed this himself. So Lee had full control, so the director didn't say anything. And they do these cool, like, punch-in shots. Look at this. So you're seeing

• 27:36John Coogan?

  nice, wide. You can see exactly where he is. There's no body double. And then we're gonna zoom in. And then what are we gonna do again? We're gonna zoom in again. And so we see his face, and he's just sitting there, waiting. Brilliant shot. So, so much time to breathe and understand and feel what he's feeling. The music, footsteps, breathing, clothing movement, the cat, of course.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  Any snakes?

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. No snakes, I don't think. I haven't watched anything. The camera often stays wide. This stays in contrast to something like The Bourne Identity. Very like, fast cuts, close-ups. Much easier to get something that feels intense when you're cutting and chopping. It's much harder to make something like this where you see the full body, you see, now we're in slow-mo. They're, they're, they're shotting back and forth. The empty arena gives a gladiatorial vibe. A sense of ritual combat visually frames the fight as mythic, not just physical. Increases his mobility, switches his rhythm. We gotta talk over it or else we get demonetized and banned.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Let's move over to Montana. One and only Moonlight Basin. There's a property that made it into the timeline. Ooh, indoor pool!

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  New, uh, this is a new hotel.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  Got to visit the property a few weekends ago with-

• 28:49John Coogan?

  I saw some promotional material for this.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is absolutely stunning.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  I, I wanna have, uh, Sam, the founder of Cross Harbor-

• 28:59John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Who's the developer on the show because he is, uh, he's basically, in my view, it felt like he was the mayor of Big Sky. He's developed-

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  And all these incredible properties. Donated a hospital-

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  To Big Sky, too. Just said, here's the hospital-

• 29:14John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  For the local community, which is amazing.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Does it have zebras?

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Not, no zebras.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Does it have tortoises?

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  For 5.1 million, this safari-like estate comes with zebras.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  Oh, you got a solution to my problem. I need zebras.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Animals roam free at California's 137 Oak Hill Preserve, which has a five-bedroom lodge and a helipad.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  I feel like anything that has zebras and tortoises should be up in the double digits.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  Each zebra, I don't know how much it costs to get a zebra, but you should get like a 10x multiplier on it.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. So-

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  It's like having an AI researcher.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Visited Africa for the first time in the eighties, he said, but his heart never left. He proposed to his now wife Bernadette Kraft in a hot air balloon. That's elite. Above the Serengeti National Park. Couple got married in Nairobi, Kenya in 1988. And two decades after, they're taking their three sons to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Brian started wondering how he could bring some of the African experience closer to home. Can I recreate a mini Africa that's a short distance away from our house? Thus began a years-long process of developing a roughly 137-acre safari-like sanctuary in Ione, California. So now approaching the age of 70, Kraft, who is a commercial real estate broker, entrepreneur, and aspiring screenwriter, is listing the vacation property for $5.1 million.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Approximately 15 animals are included in the offering. That's only less than a 10x multiple per animal.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Flat two hours right now from San Francisco. But get this, if by train, it'll only take you six hours.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Wait, did you guys miss this line? It says one of his friends discovered what he believed to be a century-old gold mine.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay, he's just pranking everyone right now.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  He just, I think he wanted to just show off his, I think he just wanted to show off his ranch. So he's like, yeah, I'm selling.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  I'm selling. He's not selling this thing.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  There's no way.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  Zero.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  He just wanted the journal feature.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  We do, we do need to get this guy on the show, though. He seems like he's just had a great life and a great time. There is a call sheet here. Which companies will officially announce an IPO this year? Jersey Mike's is running away with it at 73%. OpenAI is at 48%. Anthropic's at 42%. SpaceX is at 88%.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  Jersey Mike's.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Cerebrus is at 91%.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  We gotta do the Jersey Mike's IPO.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Jersey Mike's IPO. If they don't get on the New York Stock Exchange, we're not doing our job. We gotta have the founder on the show. Skims at 31%. Deal at 23%.

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  Skims IPO is interesting.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Databricks 22%. Shein 21%. Beast Industries at 14%. Andorol at 13%. This is interesting. I'm really into this. Thank you for watching. Big weekend. I will see you all on Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Is there anything we gotta do? No.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Sign up for the newsletter.