IPO Giga Boom, World’s Fairs of the Past | 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. 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.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Good show for you today, folks. It's Friday, Friday, May 22nd. We had our Wall Street Journal stolen from us. We only have the Financial Times today, but we're making do because we have a digital subscription as well. And we're going to take you through America's IPO boom. So, three key stories that broke since we last spoke a mere 21 hours ago, since we podcast for three hours, and then we come back 21 hours later.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  We do it again.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  We do it again. Yesterday, Politico reported that David Sacks made an 11th hour appeal to President Trump to spike an executive order that would have created a voluntary program, voluntary program, for frontier AI companies to submit their models to the government for review 90 days before new model releases. I wonder what the benefit of that is. Obviously, it's good to have red teaming going on, good to have benchmarking, good to have other eyes on the project. There's some sort of, you know, liability that happens. What's the round thing on the table? No one in the TVP and audience has ever seen this. Can you describe what this is?

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm still not exactly sure what we're looking at.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  I saw them talking about this on ESPN.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  And people are always saying, you guys are like SportsCenter for business.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  You should pick one of these up, this object.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  I had to check it out.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  This artifact.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Brown Oval object.

• 1:26Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Cool. Well, it looks fun.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I was having a little bit of fun earlier, throwing this at the gong. Drilling the gong. The production team didn't like it.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  Because there's this, you know, $70,000 massive flatscreen TV next to the gong, as well as multiple cameras and lights over there, but... No accidents.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Wow, mandate of heaven over there right there. So for his part, Trump explained the last minute cancellation by telling reporters, quote, "I didn't like certain aspects of it. I think it gets in the way of, we're leading China. We're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that." The presumed text of the EO was leaked today. You can read it through this link.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, have you checked in with less wrong?

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, how are they feeling about this?

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I assume they're not happy with this. This seems to be like anti-safety.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Do they want more review from independent nonprofits, for-profit companies that are run by people with good intentions, or the government, like democratically elected?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I assume at some level, it's gotta be the government, right? Because if you're super H I pill, these things are nuclear weapons.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  It needs to be the government. But I think on the way there, people are definitely like.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Is there anyone who says like, no, no, no, actually, like, nuclear weapons are super important, but they shouldn't be regulated by the government because I don't like the government. I would rather my favorite mega corp owns them, controls them. If you look at the approval rates for different organizations, there are plenty of companies that are polling above the US government. Like, people love Disney, Disney adults, they say, "Give Disney a nuclear weapon." They already have the rights to build a nuclear power plant, you know this?

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  I did not.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Disney World has, like, you know, legacy rights, because when they set up EPCOT, which is an acronym, which I should look up, because what does it stand for? It stands for something really cool. This also bridges into one of our future segments. Stands for, what does EPCOT stand for? Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The idea was to build an entire city. It was the praxis of the.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  Of its time.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so in 1966, Walt Disney conceived it as, in 1966, as a utopian, fully functioning city, and I believe, this might just be viral clickbait, but they have the permission to build a nuclear reactor to power the.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  The city of the future.

• 3:56John Coogan?

  Community of Tomorrow, EPCOT, yeah. And so, I don't know, maybe there's some folks out there that say, "We can't trust the government, we can't trust the Democrats, we can't trust the Republicans with the nuclear weapons, give them to Disney." I don't know.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  I trust Bob with the new.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  I would trust Bob. The new guy, we gotta meet him. We gotta get to know him.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  Bob, he can.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  I've shook his hand.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  I trust him.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  I trust his hand on the button. Second story highlighted by Brandon Grell in the TVP newsletter.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  The Grellinator.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  The Grell in the TVP newsletter and A.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  An anon account posted yesterday.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  He's sitting here with, with this noise cancelling headphones. He doesn't know that we're talking about him.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  He's gonna find this out later when he watches these clips. Anyway, an anon account posted yesterday that Microsoft had canceled its internal Claude code licenses. After token based billing made the cost untenable. This catalyzed a ton of commentary and discourse around X. Box CEO Aaron Levy, for example, used this post to argue that token price optimization is set to become a prevailing trend inside companies reliant on LLMs. Worth noting, though, that there's a proposed community note on the post right now that denies Microsoft made the move because of a cost issue. They have the money to spend billions on, on tokens if they want, but instead they are trying to shift

• 5:14John Coogan?

  the developers to use their own copilot CLI, which I imagine they're, they're gonna build their own harness, their fork of Claude code.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  I heard someone refer to it as they wanna make the engineers eat dog food.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Yes, but what's the dog food made of? It could be made of.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  They're dog fooding.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  GPT 5.5 tokens. It could be made of OPUS 47 tokens.

• 5:34Jordi Hays?

  I do, I do think it, uh.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  I guess they will be using.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think the reason that, that Codex and Claude Code and Cursor and these other tools have gotten so good is because the engineers building them are using them all day long. And it's one thing to use those tools to build your coding tool, but being forced to constantly use the product that you're shipping is a tried and true way to build a great product.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. The third story from Brandon Grell in the TVP newsletter. The American semiconductor manufacturer Micron announced that they've begun manufacturing. One Alpha DRAM, the most advanced memory ever produced in the United States at its Manassas, Virginia headquarters or manufacturing plant. This move comes in the middle of the agent boom in AI, which requires longer context windows and thus memory than back and forth LLMs, which has led to an industry-wide memory shortage. Micron has been an absolute, has been on a tear. Let's see what they're doing.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Eight hundred, almost eight hundred and fifty billion dollar market cap.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Remarkable. It's up two percent today, three percent over the last five days and two hundred and forty-six percent over the last six months. What an absolute run for Micron. It's up almost a thousand percent over the past year. Really, really incredible performance from Micron.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  Just wow.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, America's going through a mini, this was such a funny article by the Wall Street Journal, America's IPO mini boom. How is this a mini boom? You've got three of the trillion dollars.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Is this not a giga boom?

• 7:01John Coogan?

  This is a giga boom. So I don't know if we have the truth on this, but it also made it to the front page of the Wall, of the Financial Times. They said SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs set to ignite Wall Street trading frenzy. Nasdaq loosens rules. Passive investors could dump rival stocks. Trillionaire prospect for Musk. The blockbuster listings of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are set to prompt an unprecedented wave of buy as new fast entry rules thrust the tech stocks straight into Wall Street indices. The rules implemented this month by Nasdaq mean billions of dollars of passive money will automatically flow to the three companies when they go public, driving their share

• 7:43John Coogan?

  prices higher and forcing investors to sell rival stocks. Elon Musk's SpaceX initial public offering next month is expected to be the largest on record, firing the starting gun on what US bankers will hope will be a blockbuster year with OpenAI filing its IPO paperwork as soon as this week and Anthropic planning to float its shares. Two as well. The trio is set to raise tens of billions of dollars at a time of relentless investor appetite for companies linked to AI. The SpaceX listing will cement Musk's control of two of America's most valuable companies, SpaceX and Tesla. It is, it is crazy. We're going to need a new term for the Mag 7 because Tesla has been in the Mag 7. It's been north of a trillion dollars for a long time, but SpaceX is going to go out at a higher valuation almost certainly.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Where is Tesla trading at today in terms of market cap? It's at 1.34. Hard to imagine SpaceX trading below that. So you're going to have, his Mag 7 company will be lagging his non-Mag 7 company. We're going to need new terms. We're going to need a bigger boat. But why did, why did the Wall Street Journal call this a mini boom? I think it's just because it's, it's so concentrated on these three companies, but we will dig in and see where it goes. So too bad SpaceX and others didn't go public sooner. I agree. But they are a tribute to the US capitalist system, says the Wall Street Journal. Today's AI investor euphoria recalls the heady dot com days of the 1990s and it's hard to tell how these bets will shake out.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are rushing to go public to take advantage of the favorable market conditions. But amid the, the eulogies written about American capitalism, the latest mini IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of US markets that no other country can match. SpaceX fired the starting gun. They're, they're, they're using the same language as the Financial Times over there. The starting gun has been fired. It's unanimous across the mainstream media. The rocket company founded in 2002 is a global leader in space exploration. It has also spread into broadband, mobile, mobile satellite internet and data center development. Anthropic recently agreed to pay SpaceX 1.25 billion a month to use its data centers to train models.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  That shows how competitors can enjoy symbiotic relationships. SpaceX says the company as a whole reported a $4.9 billion net loss last year, some of which stemmed from its X.com social media platform. Can that be that much? I'd have to imagine that the losses were not, I mean, I don't know how much Twitter was losing before they. Before they take private, I know that the revenues cratered a bit, but there were also big layoffs and an 80% reduction in cost that the sum were there is maybe doing some of the lifting. I imagine that the losses were sort of spread over all sorts of investments.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  You're building a new Starship rocket, which is set to launch today, 5:30 Central Time, tune in.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  What a critical launch.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Is it?

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  No, just because of the timing with the S1 and the IPO.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  All eyes on.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  I think the market is valuing the launch capabilities in SpaceX and Starship in particular as like one small piece of the puzzle. You know, it's important, but you know.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  But people are going to be paying way more attention to this.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Obviously, people will be excited about it, but I think even just the, you know, endless spamming Falcon 9s can get Starlink to what $20 billion run rate or something, $10 billion run rate. You can clearly build a business off of the existing capability. Lots of excitement around Starship. There was a little bit of like spice in the timeline from, you know, Everyday Astronaut? Because he was sort of like rooting for a scrub and everyone was like, oh, he's like against SpaceX. But he was like, no, I was like, I'm such a fan that I wanted to be there in person. I couldn't be there in person, so I was like, I hope that they scrub because I want to be there for this historic moment. So a little bit of like a misconception there.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  SpaceX said in its filing that it foresees 28.5 trillion, yes, trillion in market opportunities, including data centers in space. Is anything more bullish than the future just being enterprise software? Like you paint this massive picture, we're going to Mars, how are we going to make money? Enterprise software, 22 trillion of enterprise software.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  We're going to be automating workflows for the enterprise.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  I guess forever. Mr. Musk in January was awarded $1 billion performance-based. Restricted shares that will vest if his company quote establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants. Do robots count as inhabitants?

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Do agents count?

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Isn't that, isn't that one, one of the potential?

• 12:27John Coogan?

  You gotta get a million, this is why he's worried about the-

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't there a list of like five or six things and he just has to do like four?

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't know. Uh, I, I haven't dug into that particular one. Uh, I, I, I know for Tesla, there were a whole bunch of different milestones. Uh, the humanoid robots was, was one of the stretch goals, but permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants? That's exciting. That's a good goal. Like that feels, I don't know, that like a whole lot of enterprise software and a million people living on Mars. That's a vision I can get behind. I'm into that. I like it. What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO?

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  It was sub ten billion, right?

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Was it? Uh, Tesla's, uh, Tesla-

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  One point seven.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Whoa, one point, one point seven billion?

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Are, are you sure?

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  What it said, is that an open, is that a market cap for ants?

• 13:13John Coogan?

  You got a thousand X if you just were a day one IPO believer.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's how you build a retail army.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  So SpaceX, I mean, million people on Mars, we could be looking at one point seven quad potentially. Anything's possible. I don't know. You get a thousand X from here. If we get to Mars, that's a big, big, uh, big opportunity.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  That is so crazy that you could buy an Elon company in the public markets at less than a $2 billion market cap.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  And many people did not. I owned a little bit of Tesla at some point, but there were so many moments when it was like so wildly disconnected from other car companies or other like, uh, like it was never a, uh, like a Warren Buffett buy, you know? There were always good reasons not to buy it.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Instead of going to high school, I just bought the Tesla IPO and like using the money I made from mowing lawns.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. You should have just been a lawnmower who DC eight into Tesla the whole time. Probably be pretty retired right now. I mean, there's a lot of people that did that. There's a lot of people. There's also a lot of people that put money down to buy cars and then they didn't buy the stock and they're like, ah, the car depreciated and I should have bought the stock. Anyway. Um, let's check in with the, uh, the Starship launch because SpaceX postponed the launch of the newly redesigned Starship, but hardly a headline if it's just a one day postponing because, uh, these things happen all the time. But it's completely redesigned. It's 400 feet tall. And it stood on the launch pad at the company's Starbase complex outside Brownville, Texas, but engineers had to troubleshoot problems that kept cropping up to the end of the countdown for the flight, according to a SpaceX livestream.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk later said in a social media post that a hydraulic pin on part of the launch tower didn't function correctly. The company could try the flight Friday if the problem is fixed overnight. So they worked all night and they fixed the hydraulic pin on the launch tower. Wow, talk about complex. The test mission was set to be the first flight for Starship V3. This is the third version redesigned SpaceX vehicle intended to deploy bigger satellites and one day help the company potentially settle Mars and mine asteroids. Starship is bigger and more powerful than any rocket ever built. The company has sketched out a future in which Starship flies thousands of times per year.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Of course, the Mechazilla tower that grabs it, the chopsticks, that's very key to being able to stack these quickly. You can't rebuild all the infrastructure. The reusability is key to flying regularly. The rocket has yet to fly any customer satellites after three years of intense tests that we know of. The real conspiracy theories, there's conspiracy theories that think space is fake, nothing's happening, they're not actually going, the satellites don't exist. And then there's other conspiracy theories that think, oh yeah, when they crash, they're actually deploying secret satellites and there's more stuff in space than we think. So pick your tinfoil hat theory. We'll let you be the judge of what's really going on. SpaceX's growth plans depend on Starship.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  According to its IPO prospectus, the document filed Wednesday listed Starship first among the risk factors facing the company. Interesting. Okay, so a little bit more credit for you because I was like, ah, it's not that big a deal. I care more about the data centers.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just being the optic, the, I think about like the optics and some investors are super, you know.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is interesting. Like clearly if SpaceX is listing Starship as the first risk factor, it means like, oh yeah, like. Colossus like we're gonna be able to do that like that's not hard like we can we can build a big data center they have

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  Impossible.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  And and and there's less of a risk factor of like we're not gonna be able to monetize that or we're not gonna you know Because there is there are a group of investors out there that are saying like oh token prices will collapse GPU depreciation It'll get blocked there'll be a data center ban like they won't be able to ramp up their terrestrial efforts in the meantime.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  Like a you know catastrophic you know explosion.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Be dramatic.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  There would that would be you know potentially an omen that certain people would be looking into but

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  I have full faith.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Uh they estimated in its IPO filing Wednesday that it has spent fifteen billion dollars developing Starship. Well, that makes a lot of sense why there's losses if you've been investing this.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  EJ DeSaul.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on with David Solomon?

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Slid into Elon's DM.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  In the bid to land lead left the IPO with banks jockeying to get their name first on the deal for SpaceX's IPO. Solomon worked with staffers to message must directly he's like alright guys help me out here. How do I send a message on X according to people familiar with the matter so he's putting in the work.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  He also had his.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  Says wow this is how you work for the bag at Goldman Sachs.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  David Solomon also had a piece in the New York Times saying that the AI apocalypse uh NYT was overrated. AI is a job creator David Solomon says he says I'm the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The AI job apocalypse is overblown we'll see what he's saying in a couple of months. Ken Griffin sort of flipped although Ken Griffin hasn't gone as far to say that there's a job apocalypse. He was just saying that the models went from like slop to usable but he hasn't actually opined on Whether or not that will change Citadel's hiring plans or his view of the American economy.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  Specifically said he was very excited that all of his software engineers were more efficient because he said there's no like cap on how much software.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  I was there I was writing Visual Basic it was brutal I would have loved Codex and Cloud Code I would have been

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  You would be if if you could have had.

• 18:52John Coogan?

  Been working for one minute a day instead of an hour a day.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  You could have had Codex back then just like a private private instance of it.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  You would be currently.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Time traveling back in time just to become the most productive intern of all time is elite.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  That's something you would actually do.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  It would be so, so much fun. Maybe that's what the, the future will hold. Intern simulator. You get to, you get to go into VR and simulate being the most elite intern with, with time travel technology. Anyway.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  We talk about the World's Fair?

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, we need to talk about the World's Fair. Tyler, you gave this a read. World's Fairs. Has someone tried to bring these back? This feels like a tech new media. We need a World's Fair thing. Like, I could see this being something that someone tries to revive, although it'd probably be a lot of screens these days. But at the World's Fair of old, there were a lot of cool technologies, a lot of hardware, a lot of interesting exhibits, and we'll go through. Uh, I don't know how much you've studied the World's Fair in the past, but uh, the Wall Street Journal has been reflecting on the United States of America at 250 years with a whole bunch of articles that look back and contextualize American history. And we'll go through this one on the World's Fair right now. So, among the groundbreaking

• 20:09John Coogan?

  innovations unveiled at US hosted exhibitions were the telephone, the Ferris wheel, and the electric, and electric lighting. Ferris really crushed it on the naming thing. You know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, uh, Thomas Edison invented lighting mostly. Those guys did not bake their name into the product nearly as well as Ferris, because it's capital F, and I believe Ferris is the one who invented the Ferris wheel. Anyway, before splashy Silicon Valley product launches and the annual Consumer Electronics Show, the World's showcased the, its latest in innovations at high profiled World's Fairs. These exhibits, held every few years, beginning in London in 1851, gave countries a public

• 20:51John Coogan?

  platform to showcase new technologies, products, and ideas that were going to reshape daily life. For host countries and cities, the World's Fairs or Expositions were an opportunity to own the World's Fair and project.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  Tyler is sharing, the person that invented the Ferris wheels, full name was George Washington Gale Ferris Jr.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  That's pretty elite.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  That's an elite name.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing stopping you from naming your child George Washington and then just slapping your, your own last name at the end.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  I, I mean, my name's actually.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  George Washington Cosgrove.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  My, John Tyler was the 10th president.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Oh, true. Yeah, there you go.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Okay, so, many of the big expos were commemorative, says Paul Greenhall, a British historian and author of two books on World's Fairs and Expositions, but all of them ended up doing something else. They changed the shape of cities. Much like the Olympics today, World's Fairs were large-scale planning efforts and economic investments as much as cultural events. Cities competed for the right to host them. Chicago was able to redefine its image from a gritty second city to a cultural and architectural hub after defeating New York in the bid for the 1893 exposition. Here's a look at the US-hosted World's Fairs that left the deepest marks. So, Philadelphia.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  Starting in Philly.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Philly.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  1876, you're not going to believe what was, what was shown, what was celebrated.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  We had two key technologies: telephones and ketchup.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  One was disrupted much faster than the other.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  I would say that the telephone has basically disappeared. Smartphone, text messaging, telephone's not doing well. It's on its last leg.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  The iPhone might, the iPhone might beg to differ.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  But barbecue sauce has not really gained ground.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  Real inroads.

• 22:33John Coogan?

  No. Ketchup is still on the table.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Even ranch kind of went on a run.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  Really came up short.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Mustard, ultimately, it's a compliment, not a substitute. There are very few people that say, "Oh, I don't need the ketchup at all."

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  Just the mustard.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Just the mustard, please. Most people, they'll do both.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I do think mustard is, is better than ketchup.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  Better than ketchup. Interesting.

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can believe that.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  America's first officially sanctioned World's Fair, the Centennial International Exhibition, arrived when the country was still defining its place among industrial nations. Unlike earlier European fairs built around single monumental halls, the Philadelphia event spread across a vast park with hundreds of structures. It was sort of like the Coachella of its time. Among the most notable exhibits were the telephone. It was initially greeted with skepticism, but the potential of the cool contraption quickly drew attention. Once people realized what had been invented, it became clear how important it was. The fair also showcased Thomas Edison's automatic telegraph as well as machinery such as the typewriter. Imagine you just create the automatic telegraph, and then you go to launch it and

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  demo it, and somebody invents the telephone. It's like... Really, really dude? And consumer packaged goods such as Heinz tomato ketchup. It normalized the idea that private companies, innovators, and even governments could present their work side by side, a model that amplified the country's entrepreneurial culture. I love that. Chicago, 1893. You're not gonna believe it. You're not gonna believe the two technologies that emerged.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  We gotta call balls and strikes here. A little bit more underwhelming.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I don't know. I think some people.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  Tell people what was.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Two key inventions. Last time, remember, we created telephones and ketchup, right? And so, fast following this with the next fair, we create the Ferris.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  No, it's not fast following. 1876, the telephone.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  Almost 20 years later.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Almost 20 years later, they're like, fast takeoff. We're so early, telephone's cooking. What do we got?

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  The Ferris wheel and popcorn.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Popcorn is pretty good. Ketchup before popcorn. Pretty good, pretty good. But yeah, Ferris wheel, Ferris wheel.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  Imagine the hundreds of people that came there to demo their inventions.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  If you're in telephones, pivot to Ferris wheels. There's a whole, there's a whole industry. Oh yeah, Ferris wheel, that'll destroy the telephone. You gotta get on the Ferris wheel, it's the new thing, like.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, it is, it is sort of funny. It is sort of funny that like in, like if you were to look back, if we had a world's fair, you'd have like creatine gummies. And like AGI. So in 1893, they had the Ferris wheel and popcorn. And then you fast forward to today. It's like, we found a way to put one of the micronutrients in steak.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Into a candy shaped supplement. And we need you to eat four or five of these a day forever.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  2020, world's fair. We have rockets that land. And we also have.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  All birds.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  What else came out that was very silly? Uh, bored apes. We have, we've invented bored apes.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  Skims, shapewear.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Shapewear and GLP ones. Uh, somewhat related. I don't know.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Buffalo, New York, 1901.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  An electric city.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  This seems pretty elite. This is pretty huge. 1901.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  Though remembered mostly as the location where President William McKinley was shot. He died a week later. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was meant to showcase.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  He was shot?

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  He was shot at the World's Fair.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Fact check that. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was meant to showcase America's dominance and innovation in electrical power and infrastructure. The fair featured electric lighting and electric streetcars powered by hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Reflecting a moment when electricity was beginning to move from novelty towards widespread utility.

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so this is 1901.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  1901.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  And remember, in 1876, we created the telephone. And you fast forward to the next event in St. Louis in 1904. You're not going to believe what we remember the 1904 World's Fair.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Three years. We created electricity. And they're like, we got something better. What do we got?

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  We now know this, this World's Fair as a snack food extravaganza.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  It's really just AGI and crazy and gummy.

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was a sort of a Cambrian explosion of snacking.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this is the nature of our show. It's like Cerebras and Groons. Like, this is, this is like, this is actually what, what happens in America.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was among the largest ever stage and nearly obliterated the city's finances.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Still, its pop culture influence endures. The exposition popularized a host of snack foods that would become staples of American life, including ice cream cones, peanut butter. Oh my, they went on an insane run right here. Ice cream cones, peanut butter, hot dogs, hamburgers, and cotton candy. Elite. While the foods weren't all invented for the fair, their widespread availability there, like, it's so funny. So, so people are coming there again to share their, their, their, their actual innovations. And then like snacks had just come online. And so you can imagine like, it just turns into a snack conference.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  Where everyone's just snacking like crazy. They're like, wait, we have hot, you can go to a hot dog stand and then you can go get cotton candy in one place?

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be kidding me. Uh, fast forward, 1962, Seattle.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Space race.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  It's a space race.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  That's exciting.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  The World's Fair, by the mid 20th century, the World's Fairs had become games of one upsmanship, I like that, and geopolitical rivalry feels like where we're at today. Seattle's Century 21 exposition took place in the shadow of the Cold War, following the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in the world's first artificial earth satellite. The Soviets turned down an invitation, they turned it down.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Turned it down.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  Turned it down. Now, the federal government became deeply involved, there was a sense that America needed to demonstrate technological leadership. The Space Needle was constructed for the fair.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  I recently saw the inside of the Space Needle, because, wait, no, that's not the Space Needle, it's the Toronto version of the Space Needle, because didn't Drake film a music video inside of it?

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  He iced it out.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Oh, he did?

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  He made it ice blue.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Because he's Iceman or something?

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  That's the name of the album. And inside, you can see all of the broadcasting equipment, and there's these huge radio dishes inside, it's very cool. Anyway.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  Fast forward just a few years, couple of years.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  This one blew.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  You're not gonna believe what, you're not gonna believe what they created, what they announced at this World's Fair.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  64.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  They invent, 1964, more than, just under 100 years since the telephone was invented, we invented punch cards.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Punch cards.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  Which, which feel like a kind of early version of enterprise software in some way.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  True.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, New York City.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  System records.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  Yes, system records. Visitors were dazzled by color television demonstration and the picture phone, an early video calling system.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  They had FaceTime.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is actually, this is sick.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  When I told Jordy, 64, they invented FaceTime, he was like, did it use mirrors? And he thought it was just a periscope.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  Just a mirror that you look at.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  No, no, no. It's like, it's like a series of mirrors that bounce my image across like, so you can be in the other room and you can see me and talk. No. Uh, no, they had full video calling, I guess. AT&T's picture phone, which added video to telephone calls.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it cost $16 for a three-minute call.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  That's $121 today's, in today's money.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  That's expensive.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, $40.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Token maxing. I wonder if, I wonder if there were CEOs at the time who were like, we need, we need to be, if you're not, if you're making $10 a year and you're not spending $20 a year on your picture phone, you're not gonna have a job.

• 30:38Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if they were talking about Jevon's paradox.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Yes, probably. I don't know.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  The last officially sanctioned World's Fair in the US was hosted in New Orleans in 1984, and it produced no truly defining technological debut.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Wow, stagnation theory undefeated. Brutal.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  By that point, the function of World's Fairs had largely migrated elsewhere to museums, television, theme parks, and technology conference. As a result, the World's Fair concept gradually faded. Putting on an expo is a lost art, the author says, but when America needed it, no one did it better.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's hard to, you could bring something like this back, but I feel like it would end up being like a tech conference, you know?

• 31:19John Coogan?

  I wanted to talk about the robotic legs, the exoskeletons. Would you rock these or would you be sitting it out? The Hypershell X Ultra S is an exoskeleton that the Wall Street Journal demoed.

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  Thousand watt hips.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Thousand watt hips. You wear these and they help you hike and run up hills. I listened to too many shows with Paul Merlaki where he talks about the, the capability of an Iron Man suit potentially just ripping you apart. And so I would be a little afraid, uh, but I might give it a try.

• 31:55Jordi Hays?

  Also imagine, you know, Bad Actor, remember all the DJI drones had like a back door?

• 32:01John Coogan?

  Ooh, yeah.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Bad Actor takes over your, your, your suit.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  Start dancing.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  And then it makes you do Michael Jackson. Badly in front of your peers.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  Could be wildly embarrassing.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Also, CATL, C A T L, the Chinese EV battery giant is investing in DeepSeek. Some big rounds going on. Also BYD.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  Waking up, remember?

• 32:22John Coogan?

  Remember? Oh, yeah. This is what AI 2020, they predicted that BYD would get an F1 team.

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 32:27John Coogan?

  Which is what's happening, which is what's happening. At least they're in talks. BYD is in talks with Christian Horner over entering F1. That would be pretty crazy. Does BYD have any gas-powered ice engines? I don't know.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  They're about to.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  They're about to. Who knows?

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Go have fun. We'll see you Tuesday. Have a good rest of your day. Have a great weekend. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  And we will see you.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  Today.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Tomorrow. Slash Tuesday.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Weekend, we love you.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Goodbye.