Becoming Unsloppable, Anthropic’s Series G, 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.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  The big news, Anthropic has raised $30 billion at 380 billion post-money valuation. We've all seen the revenue chart, 10x growth, four years in a row, 100 million, a billion, now 14 billion. Will they do 100? That's the question. Will they be at $100 billion revenue run rate by the end of the year? They're growing on track to hit that, which is crazy and completely unprecedented. But again, they're going after all of SaaS, they're going after all of software, they're going after all of labor, all of white collar work.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  All in your job specifically?

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not looking good for you.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  Never doom.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Never doom, there's plenty of opportunity. There are plenty of good potential outcomes. Dario has been on Dwarash Patel today, and he did something else with Ross Douthat. And so there's a number of places where you can go to hear his latest takes on the good ending and what he's guiding towards. The question is, what happens to the companies that are currently under pressure with the Anthropic narrative? They have to answer this question of, is Anthropic just going to steamroll you? What is your real source of strength?

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not just Anthropic, but the labs, every YC company that is building an AI native, any company that is slapping AI native on their website. Everyone's going after the opportunity.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  We coined a phrase.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  We decided to coin something. What is a phrase that you can generally apply to businesses that can survive and then hopefully thrive during this moment in time?

• 1:40John Coogan?

  An error when intelligence is too cheap to meter.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the question, earnings cycle, last couple of weeks, every CEO has gone on. Basically, if you had to answer the question, like, talk about the threat of AI. If you just had to answer the question, like, basically, the companies that were just, the entire earnings call was just about, generally about AI, if you're like a core weave or something like that, that's a little bit more straightforward. But if you have to answer the question, do you have a durable moat right now with AI progress? Your stock is probably going to sell off either way, kind of however you answer it. But there's a second question, which is like, are you a true beneficiary? So like, do you have a durable moat? And then are you a true beneficiary? So we Decided to coin the phrase, "Unslopable."

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  So these are companies that we'll get into that have some type of mote in an era where it feels like more code could be written in the next 12 months than in all of human history.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  I was kind of running the numbers. It seems possible.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  The mote is specifically not, okay, you're a company that has just spent 10 years writing a bunch of lines of code and it would take a startup a lot of time and money and they would have to hire a lot of engineers and write a lot of code to create a copy of what you have.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  So like to rebuild Salesforce as a platform.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  You would have to spend billions of, historically, you would have had to spend billions of dollars.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Hiring thousands of software engineers.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  To, you know, piece by piece, build out all of the functionality. At Salesforce, of course, you could build vertical solutions and get some amount of traction, but in general, the idea was like there was some, effectively, just a, an engineering mote and that there was a lot of code that you'd have to write to effectively compete. So, software has undergone the largest non-recessionary 12-month drawdown in over 30 years. It's minus 34%, wiping out $2 trillion of market cap from the peak. This is JP Morgan as of a couple of days ago. AI Threat Sparks Historic Software Stock Crash. Goldman Sachs warns of "newspaper-like decline."

• 3:41John Coogan?

  I love the newspaper. What's wrong with newspapers?

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Still got it.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  Still got it. And then as of yesterday, over the prior eight trading sessions, more than 20% of the S&P 500 had a drawdown of 7% or more in a single session, according to the compound. I wrote, "Everything was great when we were disrupting manual workflows, but as we enter the software singularity, we are having the uncomfortable experience of disrupting ourselves. Assume the marginal cost of software development goes to zero. If you are a software company where the, where your mote was that a competitor would have to spend a billion dollars to hire a bunch of software engineers to write millions of lines of code to create a product, and you have no other motes, it's going to be rough. Thankfully, there are motes that are unaffected by coding agents and effectively zero-cost software development." Peter Thiel, PT, outlined four key sources of monopoly power in 0 to 1 back in 2014. These are proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale,

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  And brand. Most of these still hold, but proprietary technology by itself is no longer sufficient as a moat.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  In some cases, if you have a patent to a GLP-1 drug, that is a proprietary technology that will give you pricing power probably for as long as the patent holds. And there are patents on certain pieces of technology that even if they can be cloned or re-derived from first principles with your million geniuses in the data center, the first person to patent it gets to reap that value. And that's just the way our.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  And the issue with software, how many, a bunch of designer friends of mine have like a design patent on a specific kind of.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Can they enforce it?

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  Workflow.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  And it's cool to say that you have a patent, but it's not.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, proprietary technology can just be, okay, we have a big software system. But oftentimes it's more like we have proprietary, like something that's regulated, something that's a cornered resource, something that's scarce and will remain scarce. But yes, if your proprietary technology is just, you're the only person with this particular Python script.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  That's probably going away, but network effects aren't. And some of the economies of scale, some of the liquidity on these platforms is going to be durable. You can vibe code, I was talking to Dara Khosrowshahi at Uber about this. You can vibe code a pickup app that, you know, looks like Uber, has a map, lets you click the button, accepts payment. But if there's no one on the other side of that network to actually come and pick you up, your Uber clone is dead in the water. Now.

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or if a customer, if somebody does pick it up and the customer has a terrible experience, do you have the, do you have the resources to actually make it right?

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but Uber works because they spent a bunch of money getting to scale. Cloning that scale is difficult. There are a set of businesses that will have to contend with the clankification of the economy. But that's, that's.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so becoming Unsloppable means two things. First, your business actually has to drive its economic power from a moat that is Unsloppable. And second, you need to clearly communicate that to shareholders. Right now, if the market thinks you're just a bunch of lines of code. You're cooked. Tech companies we think of as unslopable. You have hardware, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Cisco, Broadcom, SK Hynix, Western Digital, data centers, so NeoClouds, things like CoreWeave, Lambda. Social networks, YouTube, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, even thinking Roblox, right? Not just, you know, they have the network and they can be a beneficiary of AI because if it's easier to make games, a lot more people will make games. Maybe you'll get more usage. Marketplaces, Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash. IP holders, Disney, Netflix,

• 7:07Jordi Hays?

  Warner Brothers. I think if you have a lot of IP right now and the cost to produce, great content drops dramatically, you're going to benefit from that. And then platforms, things like YouTube and Spotify as well. I said it's been an incredibly rough couple of weeks for public market CEOs. Really disheartening on the show, CEOs been putting up some great quarters and then, you know, they're trading down between 7 and 20%. There are two main question everyone wants to know, even if they already sold your stock to buy Adams. One, do you have a durable moat in the software singularity? Two, are you a true beneficiary of AI? Many CEOs are still struggling to answer number one because it doesn't really matter what you say. Just having to answer the question equals a sell-off. And two, this one can really only be answered in the numbers. You aren't an immediate AI

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  beneficiary if revenue is not accelerating. It's possible to be unslopable but not an obvious beneficiary, but you'll still likely sell off as the market digests and interrogates the actual real-world impacts of coding agents. Some industries will be more resistant to change. Other industries will be revealed to have a secret source of market power that was underappreciated in the before times.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  What I was thinking was Nielsen, this company, it was, you know, in one way Nielsen Ratings, Nielsen Data, a lot of consumer packaged goods companies use this. I'm sure Matina is looking at how is this Yorba Mate selling in this store? You go to Nielsen, you pay them and they give you data. And it just feels like an interface to sales data, but they have this whole network and you just have to pay for it. And it's not really something that you can just spin up.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  Capping off the newsletter, I said a lot of the software market feels like the office equipment and imaging sector in the 90s. So companies like Sharp, Canon, Panasonic. Revenue was still up and to the right, but widespread adoption of the internet emails and PDFs was on the horizon. Even today, you'll still find a fax machine in every doctor's office and many of the giants of that era are still around. But if you stayed in those names, you would have missed out on generational gains by simply being long PDF. Had to go long PDF. If you look at these companies, Panasonic's still a massive company and they've obviously adapted over time.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  It's a shift from growth stock to value stock. Investors are less willing to pay for earnings that might come 10 years out because they're worried about those or 20 years out. Instead, they're asking, what will my return on invested capital be this year? What will the dividend be this year? How much cash will you give me back if I invest for a one-year time horizon or shorter or longer? I think that there will be a reckoning around who is able to reveal a true moat and help people, help the market understand what their source of strength is, whether it's liquidity on their platform, the network effect, the IP, if they have a real IP that's defensible. But just having a big bag of code right now is a little bit of a weight

• 9:58John Coogan?

  since you're seeing so many companies that are saying, well, I haven't, our software engineers aren't even writing the code anymore. Yes, we're advancing our products, but so many companies are going all in.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  It's also, it's pretty wild how long it's taken for the public markets to react to this kind of one-shotting concept or this zero marginal cost code, coding concept where we were having these same conversations in Q1 of last year, being like, what are the implications when you can just put in the prompt box, build me XYZ tool, right? And it took a while for the models to make progress, but even a year ago, it was pretty obvious that you would get to some point where you could one-shot a big platform. Of course, reliability is still a concern, right? Security is still a concern. There's a lot of businesses where... The the potential risks of using like a vibe-coded product like far outweigh the

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  the cost of just paying for the product and having something that's reliable, trustworthy, battle-tested.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's still a ton of questions about how quickly disruption happens, how quickly market structures change. Some things go from monopolies to oligopolies. Some oligopolies are going to go to perfectly competitive. Certainly a bull market for YC companies who can vibe-code something that's as good as a public company SaaS product and then go to those customers and say.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Maybe not as good, but as feature-complete.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  As feature-complete, or at least can compete a little bit faster and say, hey, I'll come in with an offer that's 10x cheaper. And that's just going to create some pricing pressure. The question is, what's the rate-limiting factor? Is diffusion a real factor? Is adoption a real factor? Or do you do you need forward-deployed engineers to go help companies transform with with agent-to-coding? Or will this happen inside companies and they'll be building their own platforms? Or will they want just a a cheaper product from a new third-party that has a different business model that's maybe more consumption-based? And something where if it goes down on a Saturday, they don't need to even fire off a prompt? How long until these these vibe-coded systems are like self-healing in the way an enterprise

• 12:05John Coogan?

  platform is and has like a proper SLA?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  If the market is just catching up now to to like coding models being very good and vibe-coding all this stuff, and they're basically like a year late, in one year, what do you think like is going to be the thing that they're like? Like, do you think they'll still be late? Is it going to be like, okay, actual like white-collar work is, you actually can't automate a lot of this stuff? And only in in a year that they're actually going to like catch up to this?

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, if I knew the answer, we'd be on Wall Street.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  I think we'll I think we'll be talking about it over the next couple of months. We'll need to see like glimmers of demos.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  The one thing is, is like coding never felt. So here's the thing. So coding is a white-collar job, but has always felt a lot less fake than most white-collar jobs. Like, there's a lot of jobs, like email jobs, laptop jobs, where there's like six people on a call for an hour, and like one person is doing, like really doing the work, and the rest of them are just saying like. Nothing from my end, thanks, right? And that's like their entire day. Whereas coding, like the best engineers were actually just grinding all day long, putting in the hours, just shipping. As some of these like more broad knowledge work tasks get more easy to automate, do those people just like they're still going to be doing meetings?

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, to date, the AI job loss has just been primarily from companies, I would say, still processing the Twitter acquisition.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  And saying,

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we just, we need 50% fewer people here.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  My answer is the unclankable company. So think about mining. Like I have a piece of land, there is gold in the dirt. There's another company that comes and their specialization is finding where the gold deposits are on my land. There's a third company that shows up with tractors and people that dig the gold out. Then there's a fourth company that takes the raw ore and refines it into gold. There's a fifth company that is a platform for selling that gold onto the market, right? So you have, you have like five different layers of the supply chain to get the gold into the market from the ground. Let's just use that. It could be oil, it could be any, any mineral.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Does robotic labor, too cheap to meter, change the value of the land? Probably not. But if you have a robotic digging machine that can show up and dig the ore out of the ground, dig the gold out of the ground at a lower cost. Well, the company that's been set up where their moat was they employed all the best miners and they had systems to know who's good, train them, make sure that they're doing it safely, train them on the tools, make sure that they have the right equipment to dig the ore reliably, work in shifts, all of that becomes attackable. If you're like, well, all I have to do to start a company that competes in the gold mining business

• 15:00John Coogan?

  is place an order with a bunch of humanoid robots and go to the guy who has the land and say, I want to dig the land and I will give you a little bit more. So I would say that that's probably the next thing that the market would be processing. And the Ride hailing platforms dealing with the advent of the self-driving car is probably one of these like clankorification narratives, but that will come to a whole host of industries. The question is just on a five-year timeline, on a 10-year timeline, when will it be real? And then when will the market price it accordingly? Because a lot of the pressure that you're seeing in the market is not showing up in the financials. The companies are still growing, they're still producing cash.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  The business hasn't changed, but the perception of the future of the business has changed. And the perception of the future of the market structure has changed.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  Clavicular has also been in the news. Streamer Braden Peters to host boxing match build as test of physical dominance. The Valentine's Day livestream pits two figures from the male self-improvement internet against each other. Braden Peters, the live streamer known as Clavicular, announced Thursday that he will host a boxing match on his kick.com channel this Saturday evening, February 14th. The bout will feature two personalities from the online male aesthetics community, a figure known as ASU Frat Leader, an Arizona State University fraternity member who gained attention for his broad-shouldered build, and a creator who goes by Androgenic, a fitness influencer focused on hormone optimization and physical appearance.

• 16:33Jordi Hays?

  The matchup represents the latest example of niche internet subcultures, in this case, communities organized around male physical self-improvement and body image optimization, crossing over into live entertainment.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  So if you haven't been following these, we've been taking these viral kick clip posts and turning them into professionally-written articles. It just says joke, but Clavicular actually has a profile in the New York Times and it's written like that. And so I think our joke is like over because it's hit the mainstream.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  Really, really wild time on the internet.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Let's go back to the Anthropic round. Matt Slotnick says LOL at the jockeying behind the scenes to land on this wording. Quote, "We have raised $30 billion in Series G funding led by GIC and Co2, valuing Anthropic."

• 17:20John Coogan?

  At 380 billion post-money, the round was co-led by D E Shaw Ventures, Dragonear, Founders Fund, Iconic, and MGX. A huge part of this raise is Claude Code, says Boris Cherny, who is the creator of Claude Code over at Anthropic. Weekly active users doubled since January. People who've never written a line of code are building with it, humbled to work on this every day with our team.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Still less annual revenue than AirPods. AirPods, last I checked, were a $20 billion revenue business.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  22 billion in 2024. I'm glad this chart is now public because it is bananas. It is ridiculous. It should not exist, says Bruno F. $5 billion in tokens managed. Interesting.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  Salesforce invests in Anthropic colorized. I think when Mark was on, he said they have about a point of Anthropic going into this round, if I remember correctly. What is this?

• 18:12John Coogan?

  It's a horse giving money to a car. The car goes and buys a rocket launcher. The car blows up the barn and the horse is sad.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  And that does feel like an apt analogy. From this extraordinary piece in The New Yorker, last summer, while Mark Zuckerberg was conducting hiring raids on other labs, Sholto Douglas, the Anthropic engineer and TVPN guest, told me, this journalist, Gideon Lewis Kraus, that a number of his colleagues, quote, "could have taken a $50 million paycheck, but the vast majority of them hadn't even bothered to respond."

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  Conviction.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  They are early at a $350 billion company and are clearly very optimistic.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  Daniel says, so wait, Claude has seat-based pricing? Does this mean they're disrupting themselves too? Of course, a lot of the concern has been around the seat-based model.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Team play.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  But it even feels like that is less of a factor than just the overall threat of zero marginal cost software.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, why, why does Claude have seat-based pricing? It's, it's, it's essentially a consumption-based product, but psychologically, if I'm rolling out Claude to a company and I set up seats for a team, I know that there's individual rate limits. So no one, no one individual is going to like blow me up, basically. That's the idea. Let's play this timeless clip of George Hots and...

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Nah, we don't believe in stealth. I'm a really open guy. You are pretty open. I tell you everything I'm doing. Come on, here's what I say. Here's what I say. I'm going to tell you what I'm doing. And you can try to compete, but I'll still crush you. Nah, we don't believe in stuff.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  It's so funny. Also, I don't know why that person cut that to be so widescreen. It looks very cinematic, but I like the quote here. You think the eggs I lay are valuable? I am the golden goose.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, there's still a lot of secrets to every business.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  And CEOs can, you can, CEOs can do 100 hours of podcasts and tell you a lot about what they're doing without telling you the one or two things that are actually important. And it's very easy for somebody to come in and try to fast follow.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  And ultimately, just like, kind of get it entirely wrong, even though it, it looks like

• 20:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  the right.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  And I think there was a huge incentive, I mean, going back to the SaaS apocalypse, there was incentive for a long time for companies that where their moat was not software to say, we're a software company, we need to hire the best software engineers, look at our open source projects, focus on all the cool tech that we're building, when really, it was a marketplace, or really, it was a liquidity provider, or really, it was a network effect. If you're a network effects business, it can be sort of boring and honestly anti-competitive to just be like, look, we can do nothing and win. No one wants to say, no one wants to hear a CEO say that. But we're going to find out who can do nothing and win.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Over on LinkedIn, George Hots is posting.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  And Reid says, George Hots is the only thing keeping my LinkedIn feed good. He says, hello, corporate participant. You are building the machine that will eat you. You think your fake money will keep you safe? It won't. You think your social climbing friendships will keep you safe? They won't. The only choice is to stop. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors. If you keep feeding this machine, it will eat you. The proposed revolutions will not be enough. A global scale, nuclear conflict might, but even then, I'm not sure. The problem was never AI itself. It's the collapse of trust in society. Apps and phones have snuck between every crevice of people, and they are run by psychopaths. The AI will be a further wedge, just another lever to manipulate you. You will not be able to stand up to it, and you will be discarded the second you don't serve it.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  Like layoffs, you will die atomized and alone, and you won't understand that you did this to yourself. Brutal. Nice little white pill. Little Friday white pill.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  He's such a white pillar. Well, here's a white pill. We're gonna get into bunkers. There's a whole piece in the journal about how to secure a mega mansion. I know you've been asking. We have the answers. The mega rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses. And we're gonna tell you how to do it for yourself. Anxiety over high profile violence has the wealthy spending big on armed security bunkers, a bunkie. And even moats, they're building moats. I haven't heard of an alligator in the moat or shark in the moat. But people are in fact building moats.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  That's being an alligator salesman, I feel like is unslopable. I think it could be clankable.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Yes, maybe.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  Still, at the moment, unslopable.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  But you gotta build the humanoid robot that can go in the water to wrestle the alligator. And that might be, we'll ask Brad Adcock, is it waterproof? British music producer Alex Grant was living in an under construction mega mansion in Los Angeles. One morning, shortly after 9:00 AM, an intruder armed burst into the home. Grant said, "He came in and we had a tussle." Grant managed to call his manager, who phoned the police. Soon, officers and helicopters were on the scene. He briefly considered abandoning the project after the 2017 break in, but ultimately finished the 24,000 square foot home, which has eight pools, a car elevator, and a nightclub. Wow. But he doubled down on security features, installing a guardhouse, tall gates, and a security system with retina scanners

• 23:26John Coogan?

  that alert the homeowner to movement in the home. "Later, I found out he had these knives on him," Grant said, who recently listed the mansion and a neighboring house for 85 million after moving to New York. In an era of high profile violence, including the suspected abduction of Savannah Guthrie's mother from her Arizona home just over a week ago, the wealthy are investing heavily in their personal security, particularly when it comes to their homes. Security measures once reserved for presidents and royalty, safe rooms, biometric access controls, laser powered perimeter defenses, these are now mainstream items in luxury homes. Executive protection teams and armed guards patrol gated enclaves and suburban estates, while tech startups are rolling out predictive threat detection systems.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Built for the ultra wealthy, the shift reflects a hardening view among the affluent. Traditional policing and communal safety are no longer enough, no security. So, security is being privatized and customized. The new emphasis is reflected in sales data. Roughly forty-five percent of luxury homes in 2025 included a reference to privacy or security, up from thirty-eight percent the year earlier. So, break-ins at the homes of celebrities and professional athletes have been putting the wealthy on edge. A group of Chilean nationals was indicted last year for stealing items worth more than $2 million from sports stars, including Kansas City Chief Players Travis Kelsey and Patrick Mahomes.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  This had something to do with the visa process with Chile, where you could very easily get a tourist visa.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  So, there was these like, allegedly, there were teams that would be permanently based in the US.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  And then they would be running kind of the operations.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  They'd be in the kind of war room and then basically tourists would come for two weeks, hit a bunch of houses and then bounce.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  And bounce, wow.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  And those were the only people that were actually exposed to, or exposed, meaning they were like carrying out the different ops.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Uh, the homes of celebrities like Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman have also been broken into. Miami real estate agent Danny Hertzberg of Cold War Banker said he began noticing an increase in emphasis on security in 2020 when high-profile executives were migrating from New York to Miami during the early days of the COVID pandemic. Corporations are taking note. Companies offering personal security benefits for CEOs increased by 10%. Uh, one entrepreneur capitalizing on this growth is David Widderhorn, who got into real estate after selling a tech company in 2017. He recently built a heavily secured home in Scottsdale, Arizona. In early December, Widderhorn walked through the 8,600-square-foot property, pointing out thirty-two casino-grade AI-powered facial and vehicle recognition cameras.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  There's also a laser intrusion detection system around the perimeter.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Pausing at a steel double gate in front of the house, he warned that the security system kicks in even before visitors reach the front door, which is fast, which is fashioned out of three-inch solid, three-inch-thick solid steel and has thirteen deadbolts. He said even the landscape was designed as a deterrent.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Cacti?

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Sour orange trees. There are sour orange trees with four inch spikes in concrete planters on the edge of the property. And just beyond those trees, separating the house and the street, a moat.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Gators.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  A moat.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  Gators.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  If you try and run through that bush, it will be a bad day for you, he said.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  New York Post says, have an AI girlfriend or boyfriend. Now there's a bar for you. There's a Hell's Kitchen establishment that has been redesigned for those who have AI partners so they can bring along their phone for romantic evening. Very, very dystopian her moment, but not entirely unsurprising that that this bar is pivoting to AI. I mean, it's a good day to launch, right? Because 4O is, uh,

• 27:07John Coogan?

  4O's deprecated today.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, it is Valentine's Day weekend, but before we go, Tyler, we did have a recommendation for you.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Weekend. We, uh, you mentioned that you've been seeing a lovely lady and we thought.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  This was supposed to be abstract.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  We thought.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  This was supposed to be a, a recommendation for the audience.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, you.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Now it's directed for Tyler.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  There's a girl that, that, uh, maybe.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  I can't believe you're doing this.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Tyler likes, and we were just saying, go, uh, surprise, tell her, hey, tomorrow, just have a bag ready.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  This is so out of pocket.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  Have a bag ready. Uh, we're gonna go do an overnight trip.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  Find a nice hotel.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Nice hotel.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  Check in.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Staycation, basically. You're not getting on a flight. You're just going somewhere local, but somewhere nice.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, somewhere nice.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, the beach.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Easy, easy to set up. Check into the hotel.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  Maybe get her kind of a spa day.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  She goes to the spa, you sit down, and she doesn't know this, but you actually booked her an eight hour spa, like a full day thing. You sit down.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  Time to lock in.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  Time to lock in on some cheeky pint. I have cheeky pint, I have dwarf cash, Dario. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  You've got a lot of stuff to watch.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  And then just start getting Guinness on room service.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  321 now.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  Pint for pint.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  And go, go every time, every time.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Every time AI is mentioned, you take each.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or every time John takes a sip, take a sip.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Take a, drink a whole beer.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you basically are gonna have 24 hours.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  She comes back eight hours later from her eight hour spa treatment and is like, what were you doing?

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  And you can just catch her up to speed on, on everything you watch. And I think, I think they really appreciate that.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  What did you say? You haven't, you haven't listened to dwarf cashier, Elliot?

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  But we hope you all have a wonderful weekend. We love you.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for hanging out with us this week.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  We will be back Tuesday.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, market's closed.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  I did not know that.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm learning this for the first time.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Learning this for the first time.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Yes. We experimented with streaming on holidays and there was not a lot of news. So we'll be back Tuesday, 11 a.m. Pacific. We'll see you then.