Tesla’s Roadster, Car Week Takes, Unwell Beverages Shuts Down | Diet TBPN

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

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

• 0:01John Coogan?

  We gotta play the see you again, goodbye, like he passed away. This is the, this is the saying goodbye to our intern Ben Macklin.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  I want, yeah, we need an AI video of me and him in sports cars driving along the Pacific Coast Highway. And then we reach a fork in the road and he goes off to Canada and Jordy goes to Malibu or something. But every time this song, this song hits, it's a good one. It's a good one. Anyway. We're very, very sad to good, say goodbye.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  End of an era, but the story's not over.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Man, Ben Macklin, one of the greatest to ever do it. Uh, yeah, the story's not over. Um, anyway, there are a ton of stories that are not over. We're going to take you through a bunch of them. I want the production team to tell me if this video, which is not AI slop, slaps because it is an adaptation of obsession. Uh, from Jerry Zhang over at Lemma, Y C F 25. What does F stand for?

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Fall.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Fall 25. Oh, cause they do quarterly now. Anyway, let's play this.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  Hit that F.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, F.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Can we not talk about that right now?

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  Sorry. It's the second time they texted me that. I'll be right back. What is it, dude? I'm busy.

• 1:20Speaker 04

  Okay, so.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  What is it?

• 1:22Speaker 04

  I looked into your out of office emails and she sent out replies to all 30,000 emails here in months.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Now you haven't seen obsession.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  I told her to only reply to emails when I'm out of office.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  But the production team has?

• 1:32Speaker 04

  Look, you know it's my job to surface these kinds of failures for you. And it may suck here, but.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  I think that's in the same restaurant too.

• 1:38Speaker 04

  She sent 30,000 emails.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Looks very similar.

• 1:41Speaker 04

  It's either a lack of guardrails or.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, same location.

• 1:43Speaker 04

  Or, I don't know, man. I'm gonna pull the traces and look into it for you.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  They nailed the production, like the lighting, cinematography, identical.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  I don't think I could function without your prompts.

• 2:14Speaker 05

  Calling tools on my behalf.

• 2:18Speaker 05

  Without any human oversight?

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Yes, without any human oversight.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  Nika?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Yeah?

• 2:29John Coogan?

  This is a little slow, so I'm going to tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes scale, scaling, monitoring and security. Uh, it definitely has the pacing of a Hollywood film. Uh, maybe we need to go back to the live real era.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  What's the product? It's, uh, it basically monitors agents made by other companies.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Jerry says agents are taking on real economic work as runs get longer, mistakes become expensive at best, catastrophic at worst. Today, teams find out from user complaints or never. Monitoring tools only catch what you told them to watch for. So you set up the judges, you trace the issues yourself, but agents will always fail in ways you didn't predict. That's why we built Lemma. Lemma understands what your agent is supposed to do. So it surfaces failures you never defined automatically. So Lemma sits there, watches everything that goes on. Oh, there's something that seems really odd because it's basically taking the whole context of everything that's happening in the organization and saying, okay. Well, you just sent out a hundred thousand emails. Like, was that the right thing? You should probably flag this. This seems like an uptake in, like you would see.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  If you start seeing an insane amount of traffic on a specific product detail page on your, your e-commerce site, it might be that.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Or a coupon code.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Or coupon code. It might be that something's going viral on this particular SKU. Maybe you need to buy more inventory. If in the best case, maybe you're being spammed or, or, or scammed in some way. Uh, or maybe you accidentally priced your product at one cent instead of one dollar and so, or a hundred dollars. So people are buying it and you need to fix that. Uh, this will do that across the entire organization in there. Production team, what do you think about the obsession knockoff as startup launch video?

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was pretty good.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Rave review.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  Looks like the movie, Mike disagreed.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Oh, Mike disagreed. Shot fired. Wrong lens. What we got?

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Take some shot.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  He said colors off.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  Oh, the colors off. Okay, okay. Well, the experts have waited. So anyway.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I can see a new meta of startups just recreating, uh, iconic movie scenes to promote their products.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but. I don't know.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Like if you're growing, like if you're growing human tissue, you recreate Michael Bay as the island to show. The, just recreate the dystopian scenario that you're creating. No.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  And then be like, it's exactly like that.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  No, there is something to that where obsession is a horror film. It's very scary. And so the enemy of the product is shown, like the Lemma is the guy on the phone. In obsession, basically there's this curse and the woman becomes obsessed with the man. And the guy's friend calls him and says like, hey, your girlfriend is acting very, very weird. Something's going on. You need to break up with her. You need to rethink this. And so Lemma is the friend in this scenario, but it is a horror shot after all, so it does leave.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  And the woman is the agent.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  The woman is the agent. Yeah, the agent that has gone off the rails. And so there is a, there is a little bit of like, you leave with the feeling of a horror film, which is, so just on a generic brand experience side, I'm like, ugh. But that's kind of the emotion that they wanted to deliver, right? Was like imagine.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  The agent sending.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Something really bad in your organization. So not, not an unreasonable, not an unreasonable scenario. Anyway, there is an article in the journal, the, uh, the information has been reporting on, uh, even Claude is in the dark about Dario Amade's wife and her influence at Anthropic. Kami Clark, who started what she called a revolutionary porn company where she sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein, keeps a low profile, but is a key advisor to the AI chief. It's, it's coming IPO could top trillions. And so the actual lineage here was, uh, Dario mentioned that he was married. Uh, I believe to, uh, to, on a Bloomberg podcast, I believe.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  And that was recently?

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Circuit, I think. That was recently. Um, but there was, there was never public who this person was. And then, uh, I believe Corey Weinberg over at the information included Kami Clark's name in a Dario profile that he published last week. And people were sort of like, oh, this is new information. We haven't seen this. And of course there's all the debates over, is this necessary? Is this like in the public interest? At what level of power does it make sense to report on someone's life? Uh, obviously a lot of people are like, yeah, keep my name out of your mouth. Like, don't, just don't report on, don't report on my personal life. We can talk about my business, but, uh, my personal life is just annoying because now you need more security.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Now you need more, all sorts of different things that can come up from these things. But, um, lots of people are debating this on the timeline, like, is, is Anthropic systemically important at this point? Is it, is it such an important company that, uh, it does merit this? And certainly it met the editorial criteria for the Wall Street Journal and the information who take this stuff, uh, pretty seriously. So, uh, Clark doesn't work at Anthropic, but she is often seen sitting front row while Dario Amade talks at events such as Davos. Or can be found chatting up investors at gatherings like, uh, Allen and Company Conference in Silicon, in Sun Valley. Uh, she acts as a sounding board and strategic advisor for Amade.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  According to people close to the company, she also brought Anthropic a key early investor, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whom she had dated as it was getting off the ground in early 2021. Some of the people said, despite her influence, there are scant details about Clark online. There's one YouTube video of her pitching an earlier startup that's still up. She's on stage for about five or 10 minutes and sort of gives a, it's like a health company that she pitches, uh, and it's a pretty good, pretty good pitch. She has a couple of note cards and goes through it, but that's the only thing that's really online anymore. Uh, the pair married in 2022, apparently in Italy, uh, but Amade's Wikipedia page didn't say he was married until this summer and doesn't say to whom.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Searches for Dario Amade's wife on Google often turn up a photograph of his sister Daniela Amade, who helps run the company. Uh, even Claude, Anthropic's AI chatbot responds to queries by saying Dario Amade's marital status doesn't seem to be clearly confirmed. That is extremely good because there's always this fear that when you're using an AI chatbot, whatever you say will be baked into the next training run. And that the personal details will get leaked into the, into the model. And so like, if I'm saying something about Jordy, like you could look up something about you and, and it would just show up and leak in the model. So good, like I think that this is like, there, there's the whole like, you, should you be more transparent question?

• 9:00John Coogan?

  But, uh, just in terms of actual, like removing personally identifiable information from data that goes into training runs. Obviously, if you work for the company as CEO, you probably have fully private, don't train on anything I say ever. But just, uh, just good that it didn't leak through the actual model. So the Wall Street Journal writes, as Anthropic hurdles towards an IPO that could top two trillion as soon as this fall. Clark is one of the most influential voices shaping the decisions of the CEO at the forefront of the AI industry. A revolution remaking all aspects of work and life that simultaneously thrills and terrifies most of the public. Yes, that is 100% accurate. Uh, it's a remarkable rise for a woman who didn't graduate from college, had a previous brief marriage at age 20 to a man more than 40 years older.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  And once declared bankruptcy, her career included co-founding a women focused, quote, free luxury porn company. That she unsuccessfully tried to persuade convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest in. And started a, a social, a women's social dieting app that morphed into a women's healthcare AI company. That was the video that I saw on YouTube. She made connections with powerful people, including Schmidt, whom she brought into Amade's orbit. The billionaire left his roles at Google and parent alphabet in 2020. Oh, I didn't realize he was out in 2020. Um, and transitioned into investing in tech startups, among other things. She also tried to persuade Schmidt to back a venture fund she would run with him to invest in Anthropic and other AI companies.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  Although that didn't move forward. Claude, the company's chatbot is now the chief.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  Interesting, interesting, uh, differentiated name for a fund. I think it was the mother of AGI.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Mother of AGI. Extremely AGI-pilled name for raising a fund in 2020. Not many people were taking that term seriously. It is a good name, "Mother of AGI Fund." The goal was, quote, "to be an elegant solution to formalize Kami's involvement in Anthropic, Dario's company, and manage Eric's investment and invest in the AGI ecosystem." But I don't think it ever went through. Others at Anthropic, including Daniela Almedé and other co-founders, didn't support the plan, according to people familiar with the matter, and it didn't move forward. By the end of the year, associates said they recall seeing what looked like an engagement ring on Clark's hand, and not long after, the couple wed in Italy. Clark, known for being social and outgoing, has interacted with politicians

• 11:20John Coogan?

  and investors on behalf of Almedé, chatting with them and bringing them over to meet her bookish husband at conferences and events. There's also some interesting details in here about her relationship with Ivanka Trump at the Sun Valley Conference in July, where she spent much of the week by her husband's side. She had lunch with Ivanka Trump, a friend, and chatted with Jared Kushner, whom Almedé had approached earlier in the year to invest. People familiar with the matter said. So, a little bit of more nuance around the relationship between Anthropic and the administration. Obviously, the Department of War dust-up was a big drama cycle earlier this year. There's already communication between the two entities to sort of maybe smooth things over.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  The interesting post that this made me think of, this whole conversation, was from Patrick Collison, back in March, March 11th. And I don't remember what was going on on March 11th, but I imagine it was some OpenAI drama. But he said, "There's a lot of unevenness in how much attention, internal drama, and palace intrigue gets across different organizations." And we were joking, there was like, "Why is no one writing hit pieces about Stripe?" Because he's like, because it's just like, "Me and my brother, running a really clean ship, and no one really complains. And there's never been a coup, and we just refused to take the company public and just grow the business."

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  Payment rails.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, we put the payment rails in the bag, sir.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, if Stripe is as successful in the fullness of time as I think it will be, there will be probably insane online conspiracies about the Collisons.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  Who are these two brothers?

• 12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, sort of a Hibernian conspiracy. They're Irish. Barack Obama, part Irish, right? Goes pretty deep.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  Wow, deeper than I thought.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's when the company got started. Is that a coincidence? Who knows? Dig in. Patrick Collison went on to say, "As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency. We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations, but not at others. And this creates self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture?" I would love to read about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture. We need a banned PDF or a tell-all book. We'll have to dig into it. "There is even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within

• 13:49John Coogan?

  sectors." And so, I took this at the time and sort of wrote a piece about this, calling it like Tall Poppy Syndrome coming to America. Just this idea that the intention of the public is intensely focused on like the hottest company at the time, and then all the arrows get directed at that. I think that's something that's happening at this point. I said at the time, "Years ago, I was talking to an American venture capitalist about New Zealand and asked him about the startup community there. The country is beautiful, highly developed, democratic. It consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy, well-governed societies. But could New Zealand produce a power law company one day? Like,

• 14:30John Coogan?

  are we gonna hear like we've seen with Spotify?" And there's been a number of other companies, certainly in China, they have a number of Decacorns and Centacorns over there, huge companies. "Will we ever see one out of New Zealand? It seems to have the recipe." And he said, his assessment distilled down to something along the lines of, "They are suffering from a bad case of Tall Poppy Syndrome. Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked, or socially cut down because they stand above the others." The metaphor should be obvious, but when you cut the tallest flowers in a field, the surface appears even. Anthropologists even call this leveling behavior in hunter-gatherer societies. Good hunters might be mocked, discouraged from bragging. Sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration. There's nothing all that bad about a preference

• 15:15John Coogan?

  for humility. America has long been suspicious of Lamborghini-driving self-promotional Instagram course hustlers, and for good reason. They're usually selling overpriced junk food. But the strong form of Tall Poppy Syndrome leads to slower startup formation, fewer truly scaled companies, and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain. America has never had this problem, and I don't think we're particularly close to developing a crippling case of Tall Poppy Syndrome anytime soon. But it's worth understanding how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative in tech. And I think that's a little bit of what's happening right now. Will this affect the IPO? Will this affect the stock price? Like, probably not. But John Stokes was sort of laying out why he thinks this piece was worth, you know,

• 15:57John Coogan?

  writing. He says, "Counterpoint, it's vital and overdue. Anthropic itself laid out the stakes very publicly as follows, quote, 'Our product is a..." And this is not an actual quote, but I guess this is like the vibe that he in particular picked up on.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  A pretty effective summary.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  He says, "Our product," talking about Anthropic, "is a godlike intelligence that will rule over you. See how our staff endows it with morality. We even deigned to consult the Pope. Okay, so let's look at your morals," he says. "This crowd can screech around." The object level, like, is the company making money? What are the margins? The more important details about risk, as opposed to the morals. But John Stokes says, "By their own terms, they made morals and virtuous behavior the object level in the AI debate. That's literally Anthropic's whole frame. So why are the morals of the people who are giving AI its morals not fair game?"

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If anything, it feels like it disrupts some of the brand positioning around morality, makes that maybe less effective. It is fascinating, in my view, that this kind of coverage didn't happen like a long time ago.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's normal for the mainstream media. Anthropic was not an interesting company to write about at the Wall Street Journal or The Information, even like last year. It was like a, I mean, it was a great company.

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but even like the images that are in the Wall Street Journal piece are from February, right? Where they're together. And you would think that somebody would have asked, "Who's this person that Dario is holding hands with?" And then tried to get a little information. And the internet was mostly scrubbed, but you could just look up her name in the Epstein files, public, federal database.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  It actually did hit the timeline. Someone was just digging through the Epstein files in February and posted it, but didn't make the actual connection, which is very, very, very interesting. They were just like, "Here are all the crazy interactions that I found while digging through the files." And this was one of them, the actual interaction. But they didn't piece it together fully. Obviously, the context of being in the Journal is a very, very different thing. Anyway.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, probably overall, mostly just bad for the AI industry overall.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, Nick Carter sort of summed it up here. He said, "Remember, if Anthropic wins and Close Source wins, these are the people that will get to write the morality rules for the entire planet." And so, it maybe is worth interrogating the morality, seeing if you agree with this stuff or not. You know, this is the beauty of America. You get to read the information, the freedom of the press, and then decide where you sit on all of this. In terms of how bad this is for the AI industry, it still feels like it ranks below data centers and below like ripping up old books. I don't think this will get that much traction online, but I don't know. Like, there is a whole class of like political commentators that are hyper-fixated on like the Epstein class. And so, like, this

• 19:01John Coogan?

  could grow, but it feels like it's arms' distance enough. It's not Dario, it's his wife, and it's not her, you know, going to the island. It's her emailing him for fundraising that they didn't actually do a deal together. And so, there's like a number of steps removed, as opposed to with the other stories. It's much more like, "This data center came to town and is dirty, and I don't like it." And so, you post a video of that, and that's like much more direct. So, of the pushback, this feels like it will rank lower, but I don't know. Anyway.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  Tesla nears unveiling of radical new flying Roadster. So, if you remember, probably around six months ago, whenever Elon did his last appearance on Joe Rogan, he was alluding to the idea that the Roadster might be able to get a little bit of airtime.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  Anybody that is done driving in the backcountry knows that all cars can get airtime. But I don't think that's what he was alluding to. I don't think that's what he's alluding to. I think, I think he was alluding to some set of features that allow it to

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Fly.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Fly. And what I don't know what we're gonna, I don't know what flying is.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  Right. Is flying an inch off the ground? If you're, if you're moving it at 100 miles an hour, maybe.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Maybe. So there is a Chinese car that can jump over a pothole. Extremely relevant for Los Angeles. We gotta get this car here to change all the tariff rules. Uh, but some sort of, I think it's a BYD can, can actually change the suspension so aggressively that it can jump while traveling. Uh, and, and we said like, okay, the gauntlet has thrown down. Jumping is not enough to go viral. Jumping will not satisfy the criteria of, you know, flying. So it has to be able to, you know, probably go more than six inches off the ground, maybe a full foot off the ground. It has to be able to stay off the ground for, I don't know, a few seconds,

• 20:55John Coogan?

  10 seconds. Uh, my speculation was that, uh, it would be able to, uh, use the, use the thrusters to lift off the ground and parallel park directly in. That was my prediction for something that would satisfy flying without actually being just, oh, you can just fly it from Malibu to LA.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Like I, I, I think that that's probably not in the cards, but I think that it has to have a crazy demo. It has to look crazy. It has to have crazy stats, uh, but it also has to have a crazy viral video demo where you show it and you're like, wow, no other car can do that. Not even close. But

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Information has the

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  The crazy thing is that even as far back as eight years ago, there were patents that Tesla filed related to using effectively rocket

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  style thrusters in a vehicle. And people were already kind of chattering around then. Is Tesla gonna make some type of car?

• 21:50John Coogan?

  The collab, the SpaceX collab. They have the rockets.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The, the SpaceX, if, if Tesla comes out with a Roadster that has a SpaceX, it's like basically

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Merlin engine on it.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  Some type of SpaceX engine. There's probably 10,000 buyers for that car. Like you'd imagine a lot of people.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  It's 20 times the Audi new Velary. You know, the other thing that they could do is they could go out to the salt flats and they could set the, the world speed record, the high speed record. Because, uh, a rocket engine on the back of a Tesla going in a straight line, they could probably break the speed of sound. And that would be amazing. It wouldn't necessarily fit the flying criteria, but it'd be flying across the salt flats. So I'd, I'd give it credit. Uh, but it needs a crazy twist, I think.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Between Elon's promises of super nimble robots and interstellar colonization, the billionaire spent plenty of time over the last decade hyping up another ambitious effort, the next version of the Roadster, the sporty electric vehicle that first put Tesla on the map. At first, he said he wanted the vehicle to be the fastest production car in the world. Then he said he wanted it to be crazier than every fictional James Bond car combined. And he wanted the car to be able to fly.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Don't the James Bond cars have guns and missiles on them?

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Yes, they do.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Like in order to buy the Tesla, you have to have an FFL. You have to have a firearms

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, a dealer license.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Dealer license.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So it's basically a gun store on wheels.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Exactly. Because

• 23:16Jordi Hays?

  That would be very American. That would be very Texas.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  You can't get automatic weapons. You can't get silencers. All these things are heavily restricted. But if you go through the process to become a gun store, you can get a lot more crazy stuff. So maybe, maybe that's just the

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  So Musk's directive sent Tesla designers down a rabbit hole that lasted years to laying the car's release. The company first showed a prototype design of the vehicle and began accepting reservations for it in 2017. Since then, it has chucked that design completely and come up with a new one.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Which hasn't been publicly revealed. That could change soon. Tesla is currently planning an unveiling of the new design, which could happen as early as this month. I was trying to figure out, is there any world that they do something at, at Car Week happening right now?

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Where are we on Tesla?

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  Feels very, very unlikely. It feels like much more like Elon to do his own event and not compete for attention. Um, that event will include an elaborate stunt showing off the flying capabilities of a limited edition version of the Roadster, the result of a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX. The demonstration is expected to take place at SpaceX's testing site in McGregor, Texas. As recently as a few months ago, Tesla's plans for the demonstration were like something out of a science fiction movie. They involved showing the vehicle racing onto a magnetized roller coaster like ramp and driving upside down before riding itself and hovering in the air, three people said. Previously, Musk has said the vehicle's ability to fly would come from cold gas thrusters developed with

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX. Still, there's uncertainty about what Tesla will actually show at the event. Did you hear that, John? I'm gonna read it back.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Tell me.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  A magnetized roller coaster like ramp, driving upside down before riding itself and hovering in the air.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Sorry. I, I need you to read that for a third.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're, they're making a Hot Wheels style

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  roller coaster loop.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  And this is what leaked? This is crazy. I love it though.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  No, I absolutely love it. I love it.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  This is awesome. This is amazing. Okay.

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  Musk told some Tesla staffers in recent weeks that the demonstration will be difficult to pull off and could go awry, but it will be entertaining regardless.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Such a

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  It couldn't be learned whether Tesla will show the event live or share recorded footage. All spectators at the event will be stationed several hundred yards away from the vehicle because of potential damage

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Demolition derby.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  to their eardrums. Cold gas thrusters generate high pressure gas that can create significant noise and vibrations, according to Jay Kim, a professor of air dynamics. As a result, the car will be remotely operated without anyone inside the vehicle.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay. This feels like we're getting farther and farther away from a production car.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  It's just a rocket. It's just a rocket.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds of yards away, remotely operated, might go terribly.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Can you imagine?

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  He's just reinventing rockets.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Honey, would you mind running out and grabbing a gallon of milk? Let me start the cold gas thrusters. Boom. All the windows break in your neighborhood. Let me pull out the car. Oh, that'd be very, very funny. Is that the end of that story?

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  That's all, folks.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Did you know, Jordy, it's now cheaper to buy, it's now cheaper to buy a private island than a house in Palo Alto?

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  Been waiting for these lines to cross.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, it's actually cheaper to buy a private island than a house in Palo Alto. Earlier this week, Chris Backy, uh, highlighted a real estate listing for a five bedroom, five bathroom, 5,000 square foot home in Palo Alto, asking $16.5 million. We gotta pull a picture of this thing because it doesn't look like a $16 million house. And I think that's why this image from Chris Backy went so viral, because it specifically looks just like a normal house that might be a million dollars or $3 million. And so, I mean, 5,500 square feet, that's a lot. And Palo Alto is obviously on an absolute tear on the back of the AI boom, but $16.5 million is a lot of money and, uh, you can get a private island.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  Lot for this shape.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. It just looks like one normal house, please, to me, right?

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  One starter home, please.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Even though it's very clear that there's a lot of stuff going on in the back, obviously from the front, the silhouette doesn't look like a 5,000 square foot house. Um, but clearly that extends and there's probably lots of land back there and all sorts of things. But, uh, when you're, when you're bidding against Mark Zuckerberg, uh, you gotta pay a pretty penny. Bay area real estate has been expensive for a long

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  It's like a quarter acre too.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Bay real estate has been expensive for a long time, but prices at the very top of the market have become especially eye popping. One factor is the enormous amount of new wealth being created by the AI boom as employees of, at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic turn startup equity into fortunes and pour some of that money into local real estate. The result is an absurd new benchmark for Silicon Valley houses.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  Ben is on his hair today. He says, wow, there's a patio. No pool.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  There's no pool? For $16 million? No pool?

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  On a quarter acre?

• 28:26John Coogan?

  That is, that's crazy. I wonder where this one will land. Uh,

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  No garage either.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Wait, no garage?

• 28:34John Coogan?

  At this, at this price, it's like, like, like you could actually be driving like a hypercar for like 10% of the house price, you know? Like if you live in a, if you live in a, if you live in a $1.6 million house and you drove a $50,000 car, no one would be like, oh wow, that's so crazy, right? But if you live in a $16 million house and you drive a $500,000 car, people would be like, okay, that kind of matches, except you pull up to this thing in a, in a Revuelto or something, SF90, and people are like, what? You don't even have a garage to park it in. Anyway, the result is an absurd new benchmark for Silicon Valley housing prices. There are actual private islands around the world that cost less than a house in Palo Alto.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  In June, a 4.5 acre private island on North Carolina's Lake Norman sold for $12.5 million. You can pull this one up.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  The agent on the listing says it has a unique feature, a glass encased staircase.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  You don't see that much in a, in a modern McMansion.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  That's true golden handcuffs. Uh, so, uh, this, so this 4.5 acre private island in North Carolina sold for $12.5 million and it includes a roughly 13,000 square foot mansion on it. It was originally purchased in the nineties for 1.5 million. The Financial Times also reported in March on a 600 acre private island in Fiji listed for $12 million. That island comes with a six bedroom residence built near its highest point with panoramic ocean views, along with a library, barbecue area and swimming pool. There are also five beaches, staff quarters and a deep water jetty. If 600 acres for your private island is a little excessive, there's another option in Fiji.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Mansion Global reported in March that the founder of a cannabis company and his wife were selling Vawa, 75 acre private island. That is so many acres, even 75 acres is so much for 15 million, still 1.5 million less than the Palo Alto house. So if, if you, if you are in Palo Alto, you really got to negotiate for remote work because you could be working from Fiji. The good folks over at the Acquired FM, Acquired Podcast, uh, revealed a very interesting fact that we wanted to share here. The highest grossing piece of entertainment ever is an Avatar Avengers. It's not Titanic, it's not Seinfeld, it's not even Grand Theft Auto. It's the Lion King Musical.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Perfect cue. It's the Lion King Musical. The Lion King Musical is the highest grossing piece of media entertainment ever. Absolutely insane. Since debuting on Broadway in November of 1997, Disney's stage adaptation has grossed more than $11 billion worldwide, maybe more than 10 billion. It's a ton. Uh, it's the highest grossing stage production ever and by box office revenue, it's the highest grossing entertainment title in history. Uh, for comparison, Avatar is the highest grossing movie ever, has made only $3 billion at the, at the global box office. The Lion King passed the previous record holder, The Phantom of the Opera, all the

• 31:42John Coogan?

  way back in 2014, when its cumulative gross was already $6.2 billion. I had no idea there was so much money in Broadway. So the question everyone's asking, how is this even possible? Like, yeah, the Lion King Musical, it's popular, but Avatar was like a cultural moment, everyone saw it, but it's because the Lion King Musical is not just one show, it's much more complicated than that. Uh, it's this entertainment machine. So since 1997, there have been-

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  It's not just a show, it's a machine?

• 32:09John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  It's, it's 30 different productions around the world, spanning more than 100 cities-

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  It's like you spoke slop.

• 32:17John Coogan?

  And 24 countries. So it's, so the show runs on Broadway, but also London's West End, Japan, Germany, Australia, alongside North America, international touring productions. So you can see it in multiple places at the same time. More than 127 million people have actually seen it. Um, and unlike a movie, the same piece of entertainment can keep selling thousands of expensive tickets every night for decades. So the broad, the Broadway production alone, uh, performs eight times a week. Uh, in one week this June, it sold 12,670 tickets, grossed 1.94 million from a single theater. And then you scale that model across multiple productions simultaneously.

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  And, and are all these productions paying royalties back to Disney?

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  So you're thinking what I'm thinking?

• 33:05John Coogan?

  What are you thinking?

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  Thrive Eternal comes in, they spin out, the Lion King IP, Bob Iger-

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Seems like a good IP.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  Gets a piece back.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Alex Cooper raising a ton of money, podcast is doing well, media company's doing well, her beverage brand is doing unwell. Uh, the brand Unwell ceased operations, uh, announced this winding down a day after Unwell's media business took investment at a $500 million valuation. Should not be a surprise, clearly new money coming in, new strategy, focus-

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  Should have made it pickle flavored.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Content, maybe, maybe. But Andrea took a victory lap two years ago. She posted Unwell by Alex Cooper, prime, but for the hotties. How much time do we give this brand before it inevitably flops and goes on the chopping block? Two years it seems is what wound up happening. Um, it was, uh, maybe they just didn't get the right team in there. Uh, it does seem like it's hard because you only have so much ad inventory and if you're running the Call Her Daddy podcast and you're getting a lot of impressions, if, if there is someone, like you could promote your product, but every time you do, you're not promoting another product that might pay you a higher CPM, might be able to monetize those listeners better. And so, uh, you have this tension between, okay, well, there might be a VPN company

• 34:20John Coogan?

  or a credit card company or all sorts of different companies that might want to come in and pay, you know, a million dollars for a sponsorship with, uh, with Call Her Daddy. And are you going to be able to move a million dollars, not just a million dollars of profit, of product, but a million dollars worth of product to justify the profits? So will the LTV that you generate from, uh, running those ads that you're taking off the, off the inventory stack actually math out? I think a lot of influencers wind up with that. They think they have unlimited distribution, they don't.

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting branding challenge to have Unwell-

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, as the brand of the drink, not, not, not the best association.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think you're right. There's something like subliminal, like what I was picking up on with the obsession remix video where I just come away a little bit unsettled, uh, seeing a brand name Unwell in my face, it's just going to stick in my brain a little bit, but oh well. Have a great rest of your Friday. Have a great two weeks. We're taking a vacation. We will be back in September, everyone, in September.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  New season.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  We have a whole bunch of crazy stuff lined up for the new season. We're very excited for that. We will be back in September, so.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know, it, it's, um-

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Very Euro coded of us.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's, we don't enjoy, we don't enjoy taking time off around here. Uh, we rarely do, but we think it's important to give, uh, the whole team a, a proper, uh, break. Uh, this work is relentless.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you cannot, you cannot rest on any laurels, even if you have a bunch of laurels at the office, you start resting on them, there's no show. Uh, and so we figured it'd be good to let, uh, let the whole team, uh, take, take some time away and, uh, I can't wait to be back already. We love, we absolutely love what we do.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, it's a blessing and counting down the days.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Counting down the days.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  Just, just, just like, how many more sleeps is it?

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Like 16, 17.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  Something like that.

• 36:27Jordi Hays?

  So we'll be reminding the team every day, just 16 more sleeps, everybody.

• 36:31John Coogan?

  Have a good week, have a good next-

• 36:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, enjoy the, enjoy the last couple of weeks of like proper summer. I feel like September comes around, it's over.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  It's time to get back in the mines.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  We will be back.

• 36:42Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you soon. We love you guys. Cheers.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  September 1st.