Apple Tax is Dead, OpenAI Ends Vesting Cliff, Anthropic’s Massive TPU Order | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in under 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.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.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?

  Tim Sweeney was taking a victory lap. I sort of missed this. This was last Thursday. Basically, the Ninth Circuit struck down, you know, Apple trying to do something else in the Apple tax battle with Epic Games. So a quick, quick refresher on this. Tim Sweeney says the Apple tax is dead in the United States. This particular nail in the coffin comes from the Ninth Circuit. These things are never fully over, I've learned. Like, it's just, it's just, there's a class action lawsuit, then there's another lawsuit, then there's this one, then there's appeals, then they go to the Supreme Court, then they go back to the Supreme Court. It's always up and down. Like, that's just the nature of these things because the stakes are so, so high. Exposure seems a little hot on that. What's going on there? Basically, the court had, had said

• 0:45John Coogan?

  that Apple could not charge 30% if a developer routed an app customer to their own payment page. And so, Apple was like, yeah, totally. We're cool with that. How about 27% plus 3% for payments? And 27% for like IP licensing? And so, like, the end result was exactly the same. It was literally 30%. It was just like structured slightly differently. They just changed the language. You know, this was contempt. Like, like, you know, it's like, we, we told you not to do this, and you're still doing it, Apple. And so, now, they, they're not supposed to. Of course, like, the weird takeaway here is like, these big momentous things happen, and then the stock moves like, not at all. My conclusion from digging into this was that the fundamentally like consumer behavior

• 1:30John Coogan?

  has built up over almost two decades now. I mean, the App Store was launched, I believe, in 2007. This whole saga starts in 2011. This guy, Robert Pepper, he sues Apple along with three other plaintiffs.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Pepper.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Mr. Pepper alleging that he was overcharged for iOS apps. It's funny to imagine a guy just saying...

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm coming for you, Apple.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  You know what? Flappy Bird? I was charged $2 for it? Should have been $1.70. Something like that. $1.20. And, and taking it all the way to the Supreme Court.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if he's a flappy Bird whale, and he spent millions, tens of millions of dollars in the app.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, yeah, the economics are a bit, you wouldn't normally see it in somebody like that suing Apple because they're like, you overcharged me by $2,000 across the lifetime, and I'm suing you for damages. And it's like a lawsuit that will, you know...

• 2:24John Coogan?

  With the class action lawsuit, obviously, you get a couple plaintiffs who are exemplary of the problem. And then when the settlement happens, it's like billions of dollars paid to everyone who ever purchased an app. And you see these things before, like, did you use Facebook between 2016, 2017? You may be entitled to like five cents. Obviously, massive economic incentives for the lawyers who fight them. Anyway, the court ruled that Apple can't do that anymore. They can only collect fees that are in line with actual costs of facilitating links.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  The cloud costs for one link?

• 2:58John Coogan?

  I know, I know. It's crazy.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  They're like, actually, actually, we need to use AI for this.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, no, no, that's actually what's gonna happen. So basically, right now, it's like, the, like, if I'm, I'm the, I'm the App Store, I'm Apple, I have the App Store, you have your own app, and you have your own Stripe account, and you wanna pay, you wanna accept payments your way. Apple says, well, you know, even though, yes, you are checking out on your payment rails, and it's your app. Like, I created the link, and the technology that creates links within iOS, and that is helping you, so you gotta pay me an IP licensing fee. Typically, it was like 27% of whatever you make, which doesn't make any sense, because obviously, my, as Apple, my, my costs don't scale proportionally to your revenue.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  It's linear with regard to my costs. So like, yes, if, if Apple probably-

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  These are pricey links, John, these are pricey links.

• 3:56John Coogan?

  Like, you're laughing, but like, like, realistically, like, the iOS team that has been working on just, just links, like, they get paid a lot. It's probably in the millions.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  If you're a successful mobile developer, you've been paying millions of dollars to Apple forever, and you're talking about millions, like, relatively fixed OpEx for Apple, that again, doesn't-

• 4:17John Coogan?

  And they make like 30 billion a year or something like that. The idea is like, justifiable costs should be like 10 bucks, maybe like 100 bucks, for reviewing an app. And just saying, okay, we ran our software, we understand the, you know, is this, is this violating any rules? We maybe had a human pop by- Look at it for, you know, a couple of minutes, make sure that this is compliant with the App Store. And then there are obviously be other costs, but you know, should it be millions of dollars? Should it be proportional to revenue? Should be 30% of revenue? A lot of people have been arguing, no. But of course, this will go back and forth and Apple will probably try and make the fee as high as possible. Of course, because they have every incentive to. Oh, the other interesting thing is that in Pepper versus Apple, there was this question of,

• 5:00John Coogan?

  you know, like where in the chain is the monopoly pricing having an effect? Like where is it increasing the the price of the good? This Illinois Brick Company versus Illinois, the state of Illinois. This was in 1977 and the Supreme Court held that only direct purchases of, direct purchasers of illegally priced goods had standing to sue. So the Illinois Brick case, this is pretty interesting. He says, the value chain was very straightforward. Concrete block makers, including the eponymous Illinois Brick Company, great name for a company that makes concrete blocks. Illinois. They were accused of colluding, colluding to fix prices of concrete blocks,

• 5:44John Coogan?

  which were bought by masonry contractors. Masonry contractors in turn submitted bids to general contractors for construction projects, which were ultimately paid for by the state of Illinois. And so the state of Illinois sued for damages alleging that the higher prices resulting from the price fixing had been passed through to the state of Illinois. So even though the masonry contractors were like, okay, yeah, like the Illinois Brick Company is, is with all the other brick companies, they're jacking up prices. It doesn't really matter because they just passed that through. And so there's a question about like, well, you didn't actually pay the higher price directly. Yeah. State of Illinois, but it was passed through. And so that that harm gets passed through. And so, you know, he says, in this value chain is obvious who the direct purchasers were.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Masonry contractors, to the extent the state of Illinois suffered harm, it was indirect pass through harm. Thus, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Illinois did not have standing. So the state of Illinois could not sue then. If every party in the value chain were to sue, the infringing party could be the subject of. Implicative recovery for damages and parsing out the share of damages would be extremely difficult. In Apple versus Pepper, there's this question of who is harmed by Apple's alleged monopolistic practices. According to the plaintiffs, the value chain looks the same as the concrete block manufacturers. Basically, there's developers who sell their apps to Apple, who sell those apps to consumers. But Apple said, whoa, whoa, no, we're not a retail store, even though it's called the App Store.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  It's not a real store. We don't buy apps and sell them. Exactly. We're more, we're, we're, we're an agent. The developer agreement confirms that Apple acts as an agent for app providers in providing the App Store and is not a party to the sales contract or user agreement between the user and the app provider. Thus, respondents concede that the direct sale is actually between developers and consumers facilitated by Apple as an agent and conduit. And that sort of makes sense. You know, you go to a grocery store, they buy the apples from the farmer, they sell them to the customer. They take possession. A real estate agent facilitates a transaction.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  Take a fee.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Takes a fee.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  If Apple was actually going and like buying licenses and then reselling them, you know, they'd be negotiating like crazy too and be like, we'll give you a dollar and then we're going to sell it for $10. You could argue it'd be even worse for developers in that situation.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  The interesting thing about, about this, just how much the reality of the shape of the App Store and, and the business of the services, services narrative changed the entire financial story of Apple over the last, I guess, decade and a half. Look at the price to earnings ratio. Because back in 2011, it was 9.7. Let's call it 10x price to earnings. Today it's 37x. So obviously the business has grown, but the, the value of the earnings is so much higher. Why is that? It's because it's so much stickier and it's because they've developed this, this services monopoly essentially.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  It's a toll road for your life.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  It's not a toll road. That's a great, that's a great thing. It's a, there is a difference between a toll and a tax. And a toll is something that you pay that is directly linked to the, to the service that you're getting.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so you're saying it would be more like a toll road now?

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Now, yes, now it will be a toll road and we should celebrate that or developers should celebrate that. Tim Sweeney should be celebrating that because a toll road is something where it's like, it's like I'm paying for $5 to drive down this road, that money goes directly towards this road.

• 9:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tax structure applied to a toll road is like, what economic value are you creating by driving down a road?

• 9:16John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna charge you 30% of that.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Exactly. Oh, you're, oh, you're, you're transporting a shipment of televisions on this road? Those are high margin or oh, you're, you know, oh, you're a rich person driving this road?

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  You have some GPUs, you're hiding GPUs on your truck, are you not?

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, oh, you can certainly break us off more as opposed to saying, you know, every time someone drives on this road, it takes a dollar of depreciation. We need a million dollars to repave it every year. And so we need to link the, link the cost of using the service with the actual underlying cost of operating that service.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  My question with these changes is what is the, what is the consumer experience gonna be when trying to cancel subscriptions? Because the one aspect of the App Store that I've always appreciated is the ability to one-click cancel from within the App Store. And so I do wonder, as soon as you let payments live outside of the App Store, everyone has experienced any type of software retailer making it hard to figure out how to cancel a subscription. Will Apple keep that kind of one-click cancellation ability within the app? Or will they actually have to let?

• 10:27John Coogan?

  I mean, this already exists because like you can go put your credit card down in Fortnite. The thing is that I think the subscription revenue is not as much as you think. It's not as much of a driver, like the in-app payments, the, the one-off clicks, like those are much, that's a much bigger driver of overall. Economic activity, but I don't know. On the subscription side, it would be interesting if there's like some sort of re-aggregation at like the Stripe level or something like that. The interesting thing is that like, so Apple's price to earnings goes from 10 to 40, basically, like massive run-up. And this is all on the back of like the services narrative that Luca Maestri, the CFO, sort of outlined in, I think, 2016.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  He said, "Each quarter, we report for our services category, which includes revenue from iTunes, the App Store, Apple Care, iCloud, Apple Pay, licensing and some other items. Today, we would like to highlight the major drivers of growth in this category, which we have summarized on page three of our supplemental materials. The vast majority of the services that we provide to our customers, for instance, apps, movies, TV shows are tied to our install base of devices rather than to current quarter sales." And so he's saying like, "You need to stop thinking about our financial performance as driven by how many phones do we sell this quarter? You need to think about just how many users we have broadly and start valuing us more like Google, more like Facebook."

• 11:53John Coogan?

  So Luca Maestri went on to say, "For some of these services, such as content, we recognize revenue based on transaction value. For some of these services, such as App Store, we share a portion of the value of each transaction with the app developer, and we only recognize revenue on the portion that we keep. To fully comprehend the scale of the services that we are delivering to our installed base and how fast this business is growing, we look at purchases in addition to revenue. When we aggregate the purchase value of all the services tied to our install base during fiscal 2015, it adds up to more than 31 billion." Basically, what's going on is Luca Maestri is the CFO of Apple, and he's having trouble in the market because it's 2015 and what's happening? You're eight years into the iPhone. 2007, the iPhone comes out. It's expensive.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  It doesn't have 3G. It's got a lot of rough edges. Doesn't have copy and paste. But it's cool and it's interesting and there's lines out the door for them. And people at the higher end, like a cell phone back then was like 100 bucks or you'd get it for free. You'd get it as part of a, you know, every... Cellular bundle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every two years, you'd get...

• 13:00John Coogan?

  You get a new, you get a new phone and, and it was free, basically. Then the iPhone comes in, it's, it's $600, very expensive, very upmarket. Then a year or two in, they start figuring out how to bring down the price. It comes down to like 300, 400. There's these incentives for signing up for a year-long plan. There's a whole variety of things that make it, you know, the App Store comes out. There's like, there's just more functionality. You don't, you, you no longer are like, well, my BlackBerry still does this, but Apple doesn't. It's like, no, they do the enterprise stuff. They, they checked all the boxes. And so it's growing, growing, growing, but eight years in, everyone who has one, like they won the game. And so device, like actual the device install base, device sales are starting to flatline.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Then they need sort of the new, a new narrative for the stock because it's getting, sort of getting beat up. Because Apple's basically winning.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Sold everyone an iPhone.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  But it's over, like the trade's over, right? It's like, yeah, we get it. Everyone has smartphones now. iPhone revenue is basically, or, or unit sales are slowing significantly. Of course, they're able to raise prices still because people are locked in. Like it's a good business, but it's not this like incredibly high growth thing anymore. So Luca Maestri needs to come in with a new narrative and that's the services narrative. And so the services narrative is, is saying, hey, for a long time, you've been looking at this bucket of basically like other revenue. We have device sales, which you've been obsessed with as the investor, as the Wall Street. You've been obsessed with, you know, how many iPhones we're selling, how much we're selling them for, our margins on those iPhones? How, how many we can make, all of that. And then we've had this other bucket, which is like iTunes, App Store, Apple Care, iCloud, Apple Pay, licensing.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  There's a bunch of other stuff.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  They were kind of treating it like the storage feature on the iPhone where it's like, hey, you have like photos and these other things that are taking it in apps. And then like, don't worry about other.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't worry about other, don't worry about other.

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  We're just going to throw everything in there.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Don't worry about other because we don't really know how it's growing. Is it that high margin? We don't know. Then all of a sudden it became like, don't just not worry about other. Like in fact, focus entirely on it because it is the best revenue that's super high margin and it's growing really fast. And oh, by the way, if you zoom out and you look at the economic activity that is driving on top of the App Store. Yes, our take rate's 30%, but on top of it, just in 2015, it's $31 billion of economic activity in that ecosystem. But. Ben Thompson was not a fan of it. I mean, I mean, he was a he was a fan from the stock price perspective, but he he had some really, really harsh words. He said at the time, it seems incredibly worrisome to me anytime a company predict that predicates its growth story on rent seeking.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  It's not that the growth isn't real, but rather the pursuit is corrosive on whatever it was that made the company great in the first place. It's like, whoa, it's it's sort of like, OK, they're they're going like private equity mode like the beautiful art. The creativity is is gone at this point.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Tim Cook has effectively done exactly that.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Going forward, the growth story of Apple has been someone else innovate, someone else creates an app and we'll take 30%. And we don't need to do the innovate, the innovation, that doesn't need to happen here.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  And that's a big shift in the narrative, whereas before, all through 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, it was like the innovation comes from Apple.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  They're like, we're going to make the iPhone 1700. It's going to be newer, lighter, better, faster, stronger, and they're going to buy it. Then we're going to take take our cut from everything on top of it.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Megan in the Wall Street Journal has a scoop. OpenAI ended a policy earlier this week that required employees to work at the company for six months before their equity vested. A few months ago, XAI shortened their waiting period known as a vesting cliff from 12 months to six.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Change to the vesting cliff announced by Applications Chief Fiji Simo is designed to encourage new employees to take risks without fear of being let go before access accessing the first chunk of equity. Interesting. So so they had a problem where people would come in and say, OK, I gotta just do politics for the first six months because I don't want to get fired before that's like, that's a crazy culture, I feel like.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  I think this has to be more reactionary to Meta and obviously some of the other public companies.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Has shortened its vesting period for new employees to six months from the industry standard to 12 months in April. Let's see, Elon Musk's XAI and OpenAI competitor made a similar change in late summer. People familiar with the matter with the matter said. The decision to loosen or do away with restrictions meant meant to ensure new hires stick around reflects the frenzied competition for top tier technical talent within AI within the AI industry. Tech companies typically have a one year vesting cliff. That's what I'm certainly familiar with for new employees, preventing them from having to give away stock to hires who leave quickly or don't work out. But with AI companies, including meta platforms, Google, Anthropic, wooing top researchers with pay packages that can

• 17:46John Coogan?

  be worth a hundred million dollars or more, researchers and engineers have been able to hold out for the most attractive terms and in many cases have been quick to leave jobs they have found not to their liking.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  I also could see it them trying to kind of rehab their employer brand. Do you remember there was a bunch of, this was probably six, eight months ago at this point?

• 18:10John Coogan?

  OpenAI.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI had a bunch. There were there were some articles surrounding they they had some like really restrictive exit agreements.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  That's right. That's right. Yeah.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of people were pretty frustrated around that.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  I feel like that was over a year ago. That was

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  If you left and did maybe didn't sign a non disparagement agreement or NDA or something.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you didn't sign it, they could claw back all your equity.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  They could claw back your equity.

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  And then they were saying

• 18:33Speaker 02

  That was important during the whole like Ilya Elsting thing.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Because a lot of the employees left after that, but then they couldn't talk about it.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  I always thought that like the bull case for that was, well, if you're going to be whistleblowing on something that's like a true AI doom scenario, well, then money doesn't matter. So you shouldn't matter about them clawing back your equity.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Company expects to spend six billion this year on stock based comp, almost half of its projected revenue. A company that creates however many hundreds of billions of dollars in value in a year and then has six billion of a non cash expense. It doesn't seem that crazy.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  The SpaceX IPO, if they raise 30 billion, will be lower than the 40 billion that OpenAI offered. Yeah.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  In this private.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  In the private markets. And so there's been this big question about like, like, are the private markets tapped? It appears it's the David Goggins thesis of market.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  The David Goggins thesis for life.

• 19:31John Coogan?

  I mean, if you, if you went back, you know, like, I don't know, five years and you were like, yeah, like, do you think you could raise $40 billion in the private markets? Or would you have to go public for that? They're like, you know, the Saudi Aramco level funding? Like, yes, you'd have to be public. But turns out you do not have to be public.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Finn Barr says, okay, but seriously, why is everyone leaving Meta? People are speculating in the comments. Jane says vest. Finn says, but if you stay longer, you vest more. True.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Someone else says, no direction for the company. Several major unannounced RL project canceled. The 100 million boys reportedly do zero work because they know that if Zuck fires them, he'll look foolish. I don't know. I think, I think some of these 100 million dollar men and, and women just that do, they are about that life. They do want to pursue greatness. They do want to do the biggest run. So who, who knows? I'm sure there's some instances of that. Zuck, you know, overpaid for talent is to try to catch up. No PMF on their consumer AI products, even though they forced everyone on Instagram to see it. I think we got to wait a little bit for the Christmas season to come and go and see

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  how, see how these things are selling.

• 20:46John Coogan?

  It is a tough position to be in because they don't have a, like a public cloud. They don't have a cloud service, even though they are a hyperscaler. With Google, like even if they, even if Google gets completely smoked by OpenAI and ChatGPT, and ChatGPT winds up being like, truly like the, you know, the, the Facebook of, of chat apps. And it's like 99% people use, it captures 99% of like the consumer AI value. It's like having a Gemini API is still extremely valuable because like you have cloud services.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  Brett Adcock.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  He had a party over the weekend.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  With Dead Mouse. He posted earlier today that, that figure is looking quite cheap.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  In comparison to SpaceX.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  Right? Cause there's a, there's a new biggest line on the private markets chart.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Drinking on here? What is he drinking?

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  I think he's having a, I think he's cracking open some cold one.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  So my theory is that they have done billions of dollars in sales.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  And this is kind of their way of signaling.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Signaling.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  If you know, you know, because of course it would be absolutely insane to have a party like this.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  If you still hadn't shipped a product, if you still were.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  Kind of a, a sort of a, I don't know if they're pre-revenue, but, but certainly being valued on, on vibes. So.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  There's no way they would throw a party like this.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  Cause SpaceX has thirty, thirty billion in revenue, right?

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  So, and, and it's going out at one, uh, 1.5 trillion. So it's at like 50x revenue. He probably trading at like what 20x revenue, something like that.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  That was my theory at least.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  And then what's, what's the market?

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Forty, that's their.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Forty billion?

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  They're at around forty billion.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  So yeah, they could be doing like two or two to four billion in revenue potentially.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  This is very much a.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  On a price to sales ratio.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  A wink, wink moment because seriously, you know, no, no, I don't think any CEO would throw this crazy of a party if you weren't, if you weren't.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  This is wild.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Really printing. So expect an announcement soon.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  I would. Data centers in space, it might not be economically rational, but it might be physically possible. I'm trying to bring some quantitative structure to a conversation that's been mostly big number of vibes. So we have sort of dueling, dueling math equations at this point. Um, what is he, uh, this is vibe coded from public, from pu. So maybe we need to have a debate. Maybe we need to have them both on, but he says TLDR, the analysis is actually far more favorable than I thought. It's a close thing. I desperately want a Carter Shev level civilization, but we've got a lot of work ahead of us. Delian's been saying like it's impossible. It is not going to happen anytime soon. It's not gonna, it's not gonna, not gonna be a thing. But, uh, Andrew McAlp says there just might be a chance.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  God says, my dealer, I got some straight gas. This train called space data centers. You are gonna effing fry lol. Me, yeah, whatever. 20 minutes later. Dude, WTF, we just need to radiate the heat and then we can totally bypass terrestrial regulations. My friend pacing. I should buy magnet stocks to get ahead of all the railguns.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  What is?

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  They're smoking space data centers, John.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  Anthropic has ordered $21 billion worth of TPUs to train, to train large Claude. Is that really what they're calling it? Text is from yesterday's Broadcom's earnings call. The scale at which we see this happening could be significant. As you are aware, last quarter, Q3, we received a $10 billion order to sell the latest TPU Ironwood racks to Anthropic. This was our fourth custom that we mentioned. In this quarter, we received an additional $11 billion order from this same customer for delivery in late 2026. Kaiju fights are the best kind of fights. From, from October, this is from Andrew Curran. He says Anthropic is in discussions with Alphabet's Google about a deal that would provide the artificial intelligence company with additional competing power valued in

• 24:30John Coogan?

  the high tens of billions of dollars, according to people familiar with the matter.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Fermi, which is the energy company that went public at a $20 billion valuation, they talked about getting, getting their kind of facilities online, I think in the 2030s. And people were a little bit bearish about that. They've, they've traded down almost 75% since their IPO. So it seems like, yeah, we've, we've basically seen this kind of rolling correction across every single AI pure play.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  You could even say that.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  But nobody's done volcano data centers yet.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  No one has done those.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  Where are you going to, where, the chat's asking, where do you put the heat? Just shoot it up into the air. That's.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Volcano data centers is funny because immediately you're like, but don't you want the chips to be cold? You want the, you need cooling, not heating.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the heat dissipates with the lava.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  It would be great to just hard light, but the heat's free. Heat's, heat's free. Data centers are hot and in this one, we're getting the hot heat for free. What happens after a correction? You're corrected. I, I, I think we're corrected. I think it's possible that the market is correct. It's perfectly valued.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  I saw somebody saying that the BG2 interview with Sam may, they, they were claiming like it's very possibly helped us avoid a 2000, 2001 style.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  It could, yeah, things could have gotten a lot crazier.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  So maybe that was Brad's play the whole time. He was like, hey, we just need a little reset.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  He's a hero. He's a hero.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to look like, I'm going to look like, you know, I'm going to look like a, maybe a bad guy for two weeks, but now, now he looks like a hero.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  I mean, even, even in the moment, he didn't look like a bad guy.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  No, no. He asked the question, if he didn't ask that question.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  There would have been, I think, some. rightful criticism.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Everyone was wondering.

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  It was an important question to ask.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  Jim Carrey offered to return his $20 million Grinch salary and was going to quit the movie amid panic attacks over the makeup.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Then a guy who trained the military on enduring torture was hired to help him.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  Richard Marcinco was a gentleman that trained CIA officers and special ops people how to endure torture, Carrey told The Vulture. He gave me a litany of things that I could go, that I could do when I began to spiral, like punch myself in the leg as hard as I can. Have a friend that I trust and punch him in the arm. Eat everything in sight. Changing patterns in the room.

• 26:46John Coogan?

  What?

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  If there's a TV on when you start to spiral, turn it off and turn the radio on. Smoke cigarettes as much as possible.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  What?

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  There are pictures of me as the Grinch sitting in a director's chair with a long cigarette holder. I had to have the holder because the yak hair would catch on fire if I got too close. Later on, I found out that gentleman had trained me to endure the Grinch, also founded.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Founded SEAL Team Six.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  So the only, my only kind of question here is, I feel like all these things, if you're being tortured, they wouldn't exactly be like, oh, let him turn the TV off and on again. Let him turn the radio on.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that is interesting.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  So I think, I think these are probably great things to do if you're not getting tortured and you're just developing anxiety attack.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  I did, I did resonate with this because when we had the, the Halloween makeup on.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  I mean, to be fair, it could be, it could be like, like metaphorically being tortured, like in a foxhole as a member of SEAL Team Six, like, oh, you're, you're, you're staking out someplace and you're in a muddy

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  You're pinned down.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  pit and it's a hole and you're not actually being directly tortured by like an enemy, but you have to deal with a really hard situation. And so you sit there chain smoking and I don't know why you have a TV in this scenario.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  This just resonated because when we had, when we were three hours into our Halloween episode and I started to realize.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Didn't resonate for me.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  I was like, I am fully, it, it felt like very suffocating having, you know.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  I was fine with it.

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  Two centimeters surrounding everywhere. Brown says ChatGPT is the only consumer app with regular pop-ups asking if I want to downgrade my subscription.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  This was hilarious. It's testament to the.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're running this as an A B test. They're like, we tell people they can pay less and they don't. They enjoy giving us money.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Maybe the pro plan results in more permanent churn. And so this is actually LTV, a downgrade is actually LTV positive.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  No way to prove that that's true, but it'd be very funny if that was the case. The polish around the product is potentially like the way you win consumer. I really think we're in the era of like of productization more than the latest model.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  The product, the product managers are the heroes now. I want to see a product manager getting a four year, one billion dollar package.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not completely over for the AI researchers. Like the models are important, they do get better and, and there's functionality under the hood. That's, that's research driven, that's valuable. But if you, if you believe in the Ilya, we're in the age of research, then what is the AI researcher doing? Like they are doing experiments that, that you have no idea the timeline. Like you're not just doing engineering. You can't just put one foot in front of the other and get easy wins. It's actually going and doing science and discovering new, new ideas, new ways to create new capabilities. And so in the age of research, the researchers should be off doing research and the user experience designers are the heroes, basically.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  Goodbye. We love you. See you tomorrow.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Goodbye.