Trump-Xi Summit, Space Data Center Debate, Inflation Up | 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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  The big news this week, and I'm sure what everyone will be focused on is of course on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. That's the Trump-Sijinping summit that's happening in Beijing. Trump and Sijinping vie for wins at summit. They're duking it out. And Trump brought, they both brought a big crew with them.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  A team.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Trump brought.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Geopolitics.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  A couple, a couple.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Team sport.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Couple of political people that we won't even care about, but the business leaders are what is particularly interesting. So we got Elon Musk from Tesla, Tim Cook from Apple, Jensen from Nvidia, Kelly Ortberg from Boeing. A little flex there because Boeing has been able to maintain the lead in manufacturing large planes for a very long time. DJI has not been able to scale up and make a 747. What's going on over there? David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, Stephen Schwarzman from Blackstone, Larry Fink from BlackRock, Jane Fraser from Citi, and Dina Palma Cormac from Meta. So we should read through the stakes of the Trump-Sijinping summit in the Wall Street Journal from the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  Before we get into that, let's get into the more important stuff, which is, do you think Jensen was always coming on the trip? Right? There's been some speculation. He got on, he got on the plane in Alaska.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  Was that just the most convenient place for him to get on? Or was he a late addition?

• 1:26John Coogan?

  I don't know. Why would he have been a late addition? I don't know. It seems like a logical person to bring.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, because there was, there was reporting earlier this week.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  He runs the largest company in America.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  I know, but, but there have been statements made from what I saw that he wasn't going.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Yes, well, so Trump had a Truth social post that said CNBC incorrectly reported that the great Jensen Huang of Nvidia was not invited, but then he corrected it. He said he didn't invite him personally.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  I don't know. These schedules move around. It's got to be really, really difficult if you're the leader of the biggest company in the world to move things around and commit to this. I don't know.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  I know, but what's more important for Jensen? And his objectives.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  No, of course, it's critical importance, but at the same time, there might have just been other moving pieces of like, okay, when can he go? Where will he arrive from? Where will he get picked up from? I don't know. These things always like shift. I don't have a good thesis. I mean, other than the fact that like, that is the company that has maybe the most tension between the trade deals with China. Like, Apple obviously does a ton of business in China, but has been much less of a focus in the chip sanctions. And so having Jensen there is a little bit more of a discussion point. What do you think?

• 2:31Speaker 02

  I mean, I think on China, like, the Nvidia stuff seems like pretty fine now.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Stable.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  But yeah, but Meta, I think, has like some conflict, right?

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Because I mean, Manus, yeah, maybe it's like not that big of an acquisition.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  On like market cap wise, but.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  They're blocking it.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  A lot of these things, you know, always in the in the context of Silicon Valley, it's like a $2 billion deal, or a company that's doing 40 billion in revenue. And then you get over there and the stakes are like, you know, a trillion dollar oil market, or like all the rare earths in the world. And it's your, you know, geopolitical conflict, which is obviously a much bigger deal. And so there might be more reporting that comes out about Jensen's goals there, what actually happened, how he found his way on to Air Force One. But that was confirmed by Elon Musk, right? He said that Elon, Jensen, and Trump were all on Air Force One together, flying over. I certainly wouldn't want to get there. I would want to arrive on the cool plane. Can we play the video? Trump arrives in Beijing

• 3:26John Coogan?

  with Elon Musk and Jensen in tow. I guess the rest of the business leaders came separately. Their arrival with, are those?

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  Can we get sound?

• 3:35John Coogan?

  Chair leaders or something? I don't know what. They seem to be waving, oh, flags. They're waving flags. That makes sense. Well, there they go, walking down the red carpet. Air Force One is truly stately. There's, it's so disappointing that the economics of the airline industry didn't just get bigger and bigger. And so you find yourself very rarely on 747s unless you're flying across the world, because they do have such a presence. And they're spacious inside. But we have been, you know.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Cramped down into the 737.

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  Are there videos where they give a proper tour of Air Force One? Or is it kind of locked down?

• 4:14John Coogan?

  I think they've done tours. I mean, there are several Air Force Ones, I believe, that are on display at presidential libraries. And so you can go and tour them. There might be one at the Smithsonian. I'm not exactly sure, but I'm pretty sure you can go walk around. Old ones.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  Take note.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  I wouldn't be surprised if they keep the current spec, like somewhat secretive. There we go. This is very grainy footage. It looks like, oh, maybe it's just the middle.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  And it reminds me of Dune.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Dune on Arrakis. That's Taiwan though. Anyway, let's go through Jensen's pack list. He was having trouble thinking of what was he going to bring. Of course, he landed on just a ton of leather jackets. The back.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  And even the sneakers, I feel like are pretty iconic.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Like, the uniform is really starting to compound where it used to just be the jacket. Soon, we will know the exact brand and specs of the pants, as well as the shoes. And the whole Jensen uniform will be out in full force.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the clothing industry doesn't want you to know this, but wearing, just getting a few pieces of clothes that you like and then wearing them until they fall apart is incredibly underrated. Not saying that's what Jensen's doing, but it's pretty funny. I tend to wear almost the exact same thing every day. And so sometimes people on the team will come in and be like, oh, we're matching today. Like, every day you dress like this, you will match with me.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. There's obviously a personal brand benefit to adopting a uniform. We've seen it with Jensen, Steve Jobs with the black turtleneck, Palmer Lucky with the Hawaiian shirt. Big news from Anduril today. New round series. Are they running out of letters? Series H?

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  H.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  Series H. Fifty one, sixty one billion, something like that. Fantastic progress. You adopt the uniform, you become more iconic, you become more recognizable outside of your face, and that builds your personal brand, your lore, and it helps you sort of differentiate and stand out, right? The flip side, the thing you gotta watch out for is that if you are always dressed exactly the same and you never switch your wardrobe, clips of you saying something a decade ago can go viral. And if you're not, if you're aging gracefully, it will look like you said them just yesterday. And that can be a big problem if, say, you're an AI CEO who a decade ago was reading some sci fi and thinking like, man, there's something to this Terminator thing. And then maybe in the past decade, you've done a lot of work, you've investigated the systems,

• 6:38John Coogan?

  you have a more informed position and opinion. Well, the old video of you still looks like you today. And so there might be something to leveling up the wardrobe and changing the wardrobe over time that actually creates more distance between, oh, well, clearly that was...

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  This is an indirect way of saying you want Jensen to be in a leather, sort of like, you know, sort of trench coat eventually, like flowing robes?

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Well, the easiest thing to do is go bald. That's what Jeff Bezos did. If he was saying some crazy stuff back when he was building Amazon in the 90s and he's changed his opinion, it will be very evident from new clips that, oh, that's an old one because it's very, it's very iconic, his older look. Now, his new look, he looks transformed, he looks very different.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  I don't think Jensen has to go bald, but he can do the Bezos playbook, which would just get like, get really jacked.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Get really jacked.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  So as he gets more jacked, you'll just see, oh, yeah, there's, I mean, he's looking like 320 lean right there.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Like, that must be pretty decent.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  Jensen at 320 would be electric. Well, he's...

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  We have a video of the Air Force One Golden Palace.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  What is the Golden Palace?

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  That's the...

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Is that what they call the interior these days?

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  The Air Force One that was gifted by Qatar.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Okay. And that one is never going to be in use but gonna go straight to the library, I think? Is that the idea or is it gonna get flown around? Well, let's, let's watch the...

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  Presumably, it's gonna be used.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Golden Palace, really?

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Particular aesthetics here. It looks like a normal 747 on the outside.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Looks like a yacht.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  I feel like, isn't there a big, uh, there's a big swing in, in, uh, fuel efficiency based on the color of the plane? If you paint your plane black because you think it looks cool, it will attract more heat and you will burn a lot more fuel. And so, most companies go with white. Spirit Airlines went yellow. I don't know if that had anything to do with their downfall, but, uh, you would think, is there a chance, is there some weird economic logic where if you painted gold, the gold will reflect the sunlight and increase fuel efficiency?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, the exterior is not. Well, so you should wrap your plane in like a mirror-like.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe. But, yeah, I don't know if that actually.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  That would reflect the most.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  That would probably reflect the most, right? Mirrored plane. There are some silver, there are some silver bombers and, and jets that are in service across the United States Air Force. I can't call upon it right now.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  This really is a sky yacht.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  Chessboard. You think anybody's played chess on there?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  4D chess.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, the whole plane is actually used for 4D chess, John.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  4D chess. Uh, AI is being put to good use visualizing Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Tim Cook having a beer and I guess a cigarette as well in, uh, in China somewhere. And then look who pulled up if you scroll down, Jensen coming in from the back. Looking pretty good. Looking pretty good. Maybe not 320 lean, but he's certainly up there. Let's go through the Wall Street Journal's report and the, what the editorial board had to say about the stakes of this summit. What, what's actually at stake? So, "The United States wants stability, uh, but Chinese Communist leader has larger ambitions", says the Wall Street Journal, Journal's editorial board. "President Trump visits, visits Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday,

• 9:57John Coogan?

  and the pre-meeting US spin is a 'search for stability' in quotes. Uh, it's a nice idea as long as Mr. Trump doesn't think personal rapport can overcome Mr. Xi Jinping's anti-American purposes", says the Wall Street Journal. "The agenda ranges from trade to technology to Iran." On trade, the best outcome may be ratifying the status quo, a truce on tariffs with a promise from Beijing not to hold the world's rare earth supply hostage again. The markets, business leaders, no one wants chaos. Everyone can sort of work around a tariff plan if it's going to stay in place for a long time.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  It is really funny for Trump to be coming in being like, look, guys, all I'm asking for is a little stability.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  I just want stability.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  I want calmness.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't want any conflict.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Yes. Didn't he famously call himself a stable genius? That he, stability has been part of his brand for a long time. At least the one that he projects. Mr. Xi Jinping, on the others, on the other hand, China's weak economy is an incentive for him to cooperate and he'll hope to placate Mr. Trump with promises of buying more farm goods. We talked about this previously, more aircraft and other things. But Mr. Xi Jinping has made that promise before and US farmers have never regained their lost market share in China. Rare earths ransom offer, the rare earths ransom offer may be more US advanced chip exports to China.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Xi Jinping views artificial intelligence as a decisive theater in Beijing's competition with the United States and he is trailing, though not by much, maybe six months by most people's estimates. The administration wants to talk with Beijing about AI guardrails and by all means, keep the phone lines open. But don't expect much from AI arms control and the best deterrent is US dominance on models and computing power. Beijing will be happy to make pronouncements about responsible stewardship and then pursue its own interests with little regard for norms or laws. Beijing is, is engaging in, quote, "industrial scale theft of American AI models." The Trump administration warned this year, and don't forget the Justice Department's indictment this year of a technology executive and associates allegedly running a sophisticated

• 12:15John Coogan?

  operation to divert high-end chips to China. That was.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  Super micro.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  Super micro. Yeah, they were doing the, the heater, what was it, the hair dryer?

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're putting the fake shipping labels on there.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Fake shipping labels. Noticeably absent from this trip are the key leaders of the top AI labs. I mean Elon Musk is there, yes, and Jensen is there, obviously deeply involved in AI, as are many of the other folks. Dina Powell McCormick at Meta, but you don't have Demis from Google, you don't have Sundar from Google, DeepMind. You don't have Dario from Anthropic or Sam Altman from OpenAI. And each one of those leaders has their own complicated relationships with the federal government and the Trump administration. So it's not shocking that they aren't there, but it does feel like there's a little bit of a disconnect between the conversation that's happening in Silicon Valley and the conversation that's happening on the global geopolitical stage at the highest levels.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  And so if you were looking for answers to some of the biggest questions posed about how superintelligence will play out in the global stage, the AI 2027 scenario, the China wakes up scenario, you're gonna have to keep waiting because that's not really what this is about. It's about maybe a little bit of semiconductor supply chain details and export restrictions, but not answering the big questions about what a US-China relationship looks like in a post AGI world, a post ASI world, a post, you know, a fast takeoff scenario.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  OTP says, why is Meta there at all? Good question. All Meta platform products have been banned for quite a long time. I don't think that will change, but they have this Manus thing. I think it might just be to show some friendliness, some presence there. Again, I'd be shocked if there's any time between Xi and Trump that gets dedicated to Manus because like $2 billion is really a rounding error when you look at all of these other issues. But.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  But it is a big question for both economies. Not only can American companies acquire. Chinese companies that have relocated to Singapore and have sort of moved out like how how strict will China be around maintaining talent and restricting exports of whole companies and technologies there even like a single sentence on it from this talk will clearly resound throughout the industry and so the Venus flytrap that Xi Jinping is setting for Mr. Trump is on Taiwan Xi Jinping wants veto power over arms sales from the United States to Taiwan and he is pressing for the United States to formally oppose Taiwanese

• 15:01John Coogan?

  independence as opposed to the current posture of not supporting it Xi Jinping will argue the tweak is of no great consequence to Americans and stoke and stroke Mr. Trump's ego that he can bring peace to one more troubled region yet that change would disrupt decades of US policy that for all its delicate diplomatic wording has held the peace Taiwan is not the aggressor in the Taiwan Strait Xi Jinping fiction that opposing independence would indulge Mr. Trump might may not care about Taiwan's freedom or its example that a prosperous Chinese democracy is possible but the president doesn't want a crisis on his watch which would be

• 15:44John Coogan?

  an economic and geopolitical catastrophe that's 100% accurate.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  He would never want an economic geopolitical catastrophe.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  No.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  On his watch.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Xi Jinping will be looking to see if Mr. Trump suggests he won't defend Taiwan in the clutch Trump's diplomacy is above all personal and no one can predict what he'll do in the room Japan and others in the region are watching with anxiety a reminder that US support for Taipei is an interest that informs America's alliances around the world one mistake would be not stop not stopping in Tokyo to advance Beijing in advance of Beijing as a signal of solidarity with Japan Trump has said he'll bring up the case of political prisoner Jimmy Lai but Xi Jinping won't move to release the 78 year old publisher who is convicted of bogus charges in Hong Kong. Unless he believes Trump's request is more than a token gesture.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  The US wants China's help on Iran, and it would be an improvement if China at least stopped actively helping the enemy. Retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery suggested last week that Mr. Trump should ask Xi Jinping directly if he's helping Iran with intelligence. And the Wall Street Journal goes on to say, "The larger context for this summit is that the CCP continues to be the main financier and industrial base for the world's bad actors, from Russia to Iran to North Korea. The first Trump administration understood China as a strategic adversary, military, economic, and ideological. The second Trump admin is searching for to tent the..." And Mr. Trump is the chief dove. This has some merit if America spends the interlude diversifying its rare earth supply

• 17:19John Coogan?

  chain and passing a $1.5 trillion defense budget to rearm, says the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and a lot of people are speculating that there's already been significant deals that have been made and that this whole thing is ceremonial. Because if you bring, if you make this, you know, huge trip and you bring all these leaders of industry and then you don't come away with some significant progress, like it just feels like an even bigger out.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  In somewhat related news, Anthropic has granted Mythos access to three major Japanese banks. Japan's three mega banks are set to gain access to Claude Mythos, the powerful artificial intelligence model developed by US startup Anthropic as soon as the end of May. The banks MUFG Bank, Sumitomo, Mitsui Banking Corp., and Mizuho Bank were likely informed of the move by the US Treasury Secretary Scott Besson in a meeting in Japan on Tuesday. This will mark the first time that a company from the East Asian nation has been granted access to Mythos. The AI model which can discover and exploit software security laws far faster than earlier tech had been restricted to just... Fifty or so corporates and organizations worldwide, including US firms, US banks,

• 18:32John Coogan?

  and UK government organizations. So this isn't the first international expansion since the UK did have access, but now Japan does. Japanese Prime Minister Sanai Takayichi had instructed cabinet members to ramp up efforts to find cybersecurity weaknesses in Japan's infrastructure and minimize risks posed by cutting-edge AI models like Mythos. Access to Mythos was likely mentioned in her meeting with Besen on Tuesday. And so, Chris McGuire says tonight, the Secretary of the Treasury is personally vetting and approving each company that gets access to the most advanced US AI model because the risks of the model being misused to hurt US national security are so high. Also tonight, Jensen Wong is flying on Air Force One with President Trump to Beijing to sell China

• 19:15John Coogan?

  the AI chips it will use to develop its own Mythos-level AI model as soon as possible. The administration's AI policy remains inconsistent and incoherent. It is impossible to justify these two approaches simultaneously. And yeah, I'm still sympathetic to the export control take. At the same time, I feel like there's a larger negotiation that's going on, so I can sort of see both sides. But the interesting question that I've been noodling on, and I haven't fully gotten to the bottom of, is, you know, Dario has said that, you know, the open-source community, China, is maybe six months behind Mythos, and that seems to fall in line with the progress that we're seeing from all the American labs.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  And so, the interesting question is, what would the Mythos moment look like in China? Because in America, there was a showdown with the Department of War and Dario going back and forth, and Emile Michael, and there was threat of a supply chain designation, which it doesn't feel like ever really went anywhere, because the business is still cooking, and it's available on all the hyperscaler clouds, and the model's being granted to Japan. And so, it feels like the administration has backed off of that. But it was a really tense moment, and it did call into question all these debates around what rules and what authority should rest with the private sector versus the government. And America handled

• 20:40John Coogan?

  it in sort of a democratic way, loosely, sort of evaluating the technology, having the option to sort of nationalize, and there's this bigger discussion around that. But in China... We've seen many times where tech companies have gotten really big and it feels like the CCP is applying pressure to the CEOs and HiFlyer is the company behind DeepSeek is in a very unique position where the founder has an immense amount of control and you know, no matter what

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  He's investing 2 billion of his own money into a really low dilution round.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I'm pretty sure he's a solo founder who like owns probably like majority control, at least majority voting control, if not majority economic control. And that's wildly different than Anthropic where Dario had like 15 co-founders, tons of dilution from different funding rounds. And you know, we had talked about the SPV thing yesterday, like there are lots of people on the cap table, like Anthropic is going the way of like a typical American company where there are lots of different stakeholders, they might be a public company soon, which means the government has more oversight as the SEC controls a lot of what they will do. And so you're in this odd scenario where you could have a similar level of technology

• 21:57John Coogan?

  deployed in China from a very closely held private company that is up against a much more aggressive government. If DeepSeek is able to catch up, you know, there's some evidence that like China's on a slightly shallower growth trajectory, but still, you know, if you take Dario's claim of six months, even if you extend that to a year, like something is going to happen there where China is going to have their own Mythos moment and what that looks like and what we learn about it, I think is going to be dramatic and interesting. And also, it's just odd that like, there's this backdrop of all this stuff that's happening

• 22:38John Coogan?

  in AI in America, and then there's going to be, you know, talks over like, you guys want to buy more apples. Tyler, do you have any thoughts on this? Am I directionally correct on the timeline or, you know?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's the graph that shows that OpenTorch is increasingly getting like further and further away from frontier models. But yeah, I don't know, it's just like so hard to tell like what's actually going on in China, like what happens when the CCP starts to have, you know, more control over a company, like what does it actually look like in instantiation?

• 23:07John Coogan?

  Can they continue to be pro-competition if they need to consolidate all of the black wells that are coming into the country into one data center, this network together that can actually train a Mythos-level model? Right. That's a big question.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX and Google are in talks to launch data centers in orbit. A deal between the two tech titans would give a boost to SpaceX's business ahead of a historic public listing. Google is in talks for a rocket launch deal as the search giant expands its own efforts to put orbital data centers in space. Launch deal would put the two companies in partnership as they gear up to compete on orbital data centers. An unproven technology that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said is the next frontier for his rocket company. Google is also in discussions about a potential deal with other rocket launch companies. They gotta at least have a stalking horse.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  How are we not talking about blimp data centers yet? Sergey Brin has a blimp company. You know, Bezos has a rocket launch company. So there's a very logical line from AWS to space data centers through Blue Origin. But we gotta put some GPUs on the blimps. We gotta start mass manufacturing the blimps. This could be the thing. I mean, there's no nimbyism in the middle of the Pacific Ocean if there's just a bunch of blimp data centers floating around in a circle.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think if you're already in the ocean, you should go down as well. You know, Atlantis, Max.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Cooling.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like none of the ocean guys that are working on ocean robotics are thinking about like putting data centers at the bottom of the ocean.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels easier than space data center. And the space is free, the land is free, you don't run into the regulatory stuff. Energy, little bit tricky down there.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Geothermal?

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Geothermal maybe? I don't know.

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  No, there's oil and natural gas reserves on the sea.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Oxygen there? Because how do you burn the oil and the natural gas and water?

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Big.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Diving bell, tube, yeah, scuba, scuba tanks or something. Anyway.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Speculative technology has been at the center of SpaceX's pitch to investors ahead of its planned IPO this summer, which is anticipated to be the largest IPO of all time. Last year, Google announced its own plans to launch prototype satellites by 2027 as part of a moonshot initiative called Project Suncatcher. It's working with another company, Planet Labs, to build those satellites, tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there, says Sundar. There's no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we'll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers. A little bit of an interesting timeline there.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  He was like, I thought we were saying 10 days.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  There's no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we'll be viewing it as a more normal way.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  A decade or so away.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  He's being a little cautious in his language on these timelines, but.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Google was an early investor in SpaceX, and owns 6.1% of the company. Not bad. The other funny dynamic from SpaceX's deal making recently is, given that the OpenAI startup fund was an early investor in, I believe, Cursor's seed round, the $8 million round. OpenAI, at least the startup fund, will have some meaningful exposure to SpaceX.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  SpaceX, an OpenAI-backed company. That's the way people will introduce it. OpenAI-backed SpaceX IPOs.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I thought it was quite interesting, having that happen while the whole trial was going on.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Everyone owns everything. Everyone has diversified into every company at this point, basically. We can flip over to the other financial news that's making headlines on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. Inflation accelerated 3.8% last month. Not good news. Joe Weisenthal has a couple posts, but one is just man. And he says the headline, US April producer prices rose 6% year-over-year. The estimate was 4.8%. So obviously, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is having an effect. We were talking about Diet Cokes. You would think that the caffeine doesn't come from the Middle East, the delicious caramel flavor, whatever else they put in this, it does not come from the Middle East.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  But aluminum, actually, there are smelters in the Middle East. Aluminum is in shorter supply because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and so Diet Coke is rapidly going out of stock, and so you need to load up if you're prepared.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  How many, you got four or five pallets?

• 27:39John Coogan?

  I have not actually gotten any, I'm not stockpiling dicke yet, but who knows, maybe prices go up, that's what inflation represents and Wall Street is getting more anxious about it. So we can read through this. Surging energy prices have pushed investors inflation expectations to multi-year highs. Tuesday's hot readout on consumer prices is intensifying Wall Street's anxiety about inflation. Even before the latest release of the Consumer Price Index, inflation expectations had been climbing, a potential trouble spot in the market where stocks have largely shrugged off the US-Iran conflict and the resulting energy shock. And so investors bet on inflation by buying and selling both ordinary US Treasuries and those that hedge

• 28:21John Coogan?

  the risk of inflation called TIPS, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. The gaps between the yields of those two types of bonds, known as the break even rate, recently hit the highest level since October of 2022, according to Federal Reserve data suggesting that investors expect annual inflation to average around 2.7% over the next five years. Now, that's not entirely doom and gloom, but the risk here is that the AI boom, the GDP numbers are sort of concentrated in AI, CapEx and data centers. It's not evenly distributed. The real economy is only growing at 0.1%, while the real economy is suffering

• 29:02John Coogan?

  from 2.7% inflation over the next five years. That's a recipe for stagflation, stagnation plus inflation, a very rough thing for any economy to go through and something that the market and the economy and the politicians should be focused on.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  In some ways, you know, who knows how history will view Powell, but like he landed, he landed the plane.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  He did.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  And then, you know, we get war in the Middle East and, and now Kevin Warsh, in some ways, looks like he'll have just as tough of a job.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tbfn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11:00 AM Pacific sharp.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Goodbye.