The AI chip squeeze, Dirty Soda mania, OCC approves Palmer Luckey’s Erebor | 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.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ 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 https://graphite.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/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  It's white suit day.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  The market's up.

• 0:02Jordi Hays?

  For the rally.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Don't check what the market did yesterday. Check what it's doing today.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  You never doubted, did you?

• 0:08John Coogan?

  You never doubted.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  You never doubted when the fear and greed index was

• 0:12John Coogan?

  You levered up.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  Was on full.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  And now you're post economic.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  Scared for its life.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  It's happened.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Big week.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Bottlenecks, bottlenecks. I mean, we're, we're going to talk about the Claude Code moment, the Claude Code psychosis, sort of the software singularity. There's clearly signs of a takeoff. It feels like a slow takeoff, but there, there's, there's a whole bunch of sort of recursive compounding elements that are starting to form.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  A recursive, you say?

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, recursive, literally recursive, like the models feed back into themselves, give them more tasks. We saw this with Gastown. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on in orchestration that's interesting. And so I wanted to sort of reflect on like, if there's going to be a break, if there's going to be a damper on the party, if someone's going to pull away the punchbowl, who's it going to be? The semiconductor industry or the energy industry? At the start of this year, I said it was going to be the year of energy. I still think it's important to think about energy because that it will be a bottleneck. But this year it's about chips.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  And not even just because of AI, just for overall human flourishing.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah. And yeah, so we, we had some great conversations this week. Sam Altman, we talked to Dylan Patel, we talked to Sholto, we talked to, you know, we reviewed what Ben Thompson was saying, Dorkesh interviewed Elon. So there's a lot of new data points about how people are thinking about the trade offs between semiconductor fabrication capacity and energy production capacity. So I wanted to sort of like crystallize like where I think the debate and consensus is right now. There's been this like tick tock going back and forth in the AI supply chain. What's the key bottleneck to growth? It does feel like only if you, you have to work at an AI lab to really feel the bottleneck. For most people, they're just like, I open the chat app, probably chat GPT. I ask it a question. It gets back to me in a reasonable amount of time.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  I'm not really hitting rate, rate limits. The rate limits come when there's big moments, the studio give a moment.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  I think people have always felt the rate limiting is very real.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  With using anthropic products.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Yes, if you're, if you're actively.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Which is why I asked Sholto yesterday.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  What are what are free limits going to look like?

• 2:11John Coogan?

  That's why I asked him that.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  They've consistently been compute constrained. At least they've talked about it more than more than most and users have talked about it quite a lot. So I'm just quite curious, what is the free experience going to be like Sunday? If somebody downloads the app, sees the ads, they're like, I want I want L L Ms without ads.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  Even though no other popular L L M actually has ads yet.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  They're pretty upfront with you about the fact that if you're on the OPUS model, like you'll hit your rate limits faster. And even just a couple prompts deep, it will take a second and kind of compact the conversation so it can keep talking to you like. They I know they're increasing the the the token context window, but it feels like it's it works fine, but it is a lower a smaller user base. Although I'm very interested to see where it goes in the App Store. Chat G P T is still at number one. Grok is oddly doing incredible in the App Store, way higher than X, the social networking app.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for no obvious reason.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  I mean, like, there's just not a lot of hype about Grok, like they're doing OK on benchmarks. Obviously, Elon has a very solid playbook for like scaling and.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but to me, to me, I don't I don't care as much about hype.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18Jordi Hays?

  When it comes to the App Store, there's plenty of apps on the App Store.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  Charts that have no hype. One of the top is it's called Free Cash.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Free Cash.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  It's number two.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  But that one makes sense.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Above Gemini.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  I understand why that would stop.

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  Is is free cash, get paid real money.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  Hot on Chat G P T's heels. You know, we have the Open A I Elon lawsuit.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  Part of that, what if part of the settlement agreement is Open A I has to give four O to to Grok?

• 3:43John Coogan?

  I I mean, they might just wind up.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday was seriously.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  It was crazy.

• 3:47Jordi Hays?

  One of the craziest experiences, if you weren't watching our Sam interview live and honestly, the entire show.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  There was thousands of messages from people from four O soldiers saying, keep.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  Keep four O.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Keep four O hashed, throwing hashtags. You don't see hashtags.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  No.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  That much anymore, but they were throwing hashtags around keep four O. So I think maybe if Elon can negotiate for that.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  So thank you to the TVP and Army, the day ones. We will never switch up on you. We'll never let the money change us. We'll never forget where we came from.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bobby was going to.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  You guys in the chat were doing overtime work, keeping things somewhat sane. There's not much you can do in that situation. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see 40s fully going offline. It's already very hard to reach. You have to go into turn on legacy models in the.

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  It's going offline right around Valentine's Day.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  I think February 13th. It's just a fascinating weird time that I don't think we've ever seen. Because people were upset when Facebook launched the feed and they were like, we want to go back and they made these groups and the groups got a lot of implication ironically.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  And some people were upset when Microsoft stopped investing as heavily into Clippy.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. But I was never logging on to a Twitch stream and saying, I got, bring back Clippy.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  The notable thing is they didn't seem to be able to process that it wasn't just a show about Sam.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  Even after Sam had left, they just kept going.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  Which was very, very strange.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  Anyway, back to the bottleneck. Right now it feels like chips are the more important piece of the bottleneck to talk about. Sam Altman put it this way. I asked him like, chips versus energy, what's the bigger bottleneck right now? He says it goes back and forth, but right now it's chips. It's different at different times. It may get solved on its own. Normal capitalism may solve it, but I think somehow deciding is this society that we are going to increase the wafer capacity of the world? And we're going to fund that and we're going to get the whole supply chain and the talented people who make that happen would be a very good thing to do. And so why do we have a chip bottleneck to begin with? Semiconductors have been doubling and you know, we've been on this Moore's law curve. What's interesting is that the semiconductor industry should be better equipped to avoid a bottleneck because it's already been on an exponential.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Whereas energy production has just been like flat, sort of like a malaise for a long time. Getting that unstuck is hard, but I think that's a problem for 2027 potentially. So the chip bottleneck comes down to consolidation. Power plants, data centers, cooling technology. There's a bunch of suppliers in each of these industries. And you can parallelize them and you can steer resources from adjacent areas to focus on AI projects specifically. Even a company like Boom Supersonic can turn into a turbine manufacturer. And there's a lot of other industries that are able to move over. The semiconductor industry is used to doubling the amount of transistors made every year or two. Part of that is more advanced nodes, part of that's more capacity, whereas the energy industry in America wasn't built for that kind of growth.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  So initially, people weren't creative. They were like, let's build these combined cycle gas plants. But now we've realized, yes, there are three main manufacturers of turbines. And for dual combined cycle, you've got IGTs, but you've also got medium speed reciprocating engines. Turns out Cummins can make about a million diesel engines a year, and those can generate electricity. If I don't care about aesthetics and I put them in West Texas, easy. Back to the leading edge fabs, it's a completely different beast. These fabs cost tens of billions, 30, 50, 75, 80 billion I've seen to build, and it takes three, four, sometimes five years to go from breaking ground to actually getting up to producing volume. And we have like the perfect example of this because TSMC announced a plant in Arizona

• 7:25John Coogan?

  in 2020, and in 2025, it's still not producing at volume. It's doing really well, it's great, but that's five years and it's not just like, oh yeah, it's as effective as what's in Taiwan. There's this bottleneck within the chip bottleneck, which is the TSMC supplier ASML, and they ship around 50 EUV machines per year, maybe 50, 60. Each one costs $350 million, and leading edge fabs need dozens. So if you want to build a bunch more fabs, you need a bunch more toolmakers, and ASML has its own supply chain for different lenses and glass and all sorts of stuff. They work with Zeiss, Trump, a whole bunch of different companies. And that supply chain is not very diversified. So you have another bottleneck even deeper in the supply chain. And then even after you get the fab built, there's still at least a year of processing, engineering, maybe 12 to 18 months where you actually work to get to high yield production.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  We're seeing that in TSMC Arizona. And TSMC just has decades of intellectual capital locked in the heads of engineers that they can't easily transfer or parallelize. And so this has made TSMC the real bottleneck. Hyperscalers are pushing CapEx numbers into hundreds of billions of dollars. So TSMC controls 90% of the advanced node market with Samsung and Intel far behind. And this is why Ben Thompson, aside from the geopolitical concerns about TSMC, is really urging tech companies to wake up. And so he says, the reality that hyperscalers and fabulous chip companies need to wake up to, however, is that a voice Avoiding the risk of working with someone other than TSMC incurs new risks that are both harder to see and also more substantial. So there's a huge risk if you say, you know what, I'm going to go and place a huge order with Samsung or Intel,

• 8:55John Coogan?

  or I'm going to, I'm going to take a huge risk and be the, be the anchor customer of their new cutting edge, leading edge fab. But Ben Thompson saying there's a risk to not doing that. And he says, except again, we can see the harms already foregone revenue today as demand outstrips supply. Today's shortages, however, may prove to be peanuts. If AI has the potential, these companies claim it does. Future foregone revenue at the end of the decade is going to cost exponentially more, surely a lot more than whatever is necessary expense wise to make Samsung or Intel into viable competitors for TSMC.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  You really got to wonder what conversations are like between Jensen and TSMC right now, given that TSMC is not, they're certainly not going out and making kind of going risk on, right? They're staying relatively, probably more conservative than some of their downstream customers would like.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to the hyperscalers. Compound 248 says, poor Jassy, Andy Jassy, he's going to learn something about Amazon today. When Google announces a crazy number, it's because it's playing offense. But when Amazon announces a crazy number, it's because it's playing defense, ipso facto. So Amazon said it will spend $200 billion this year on AI build out. But this is worrying investors that the company's colossal bet on artificial intelligence will pinch profits while it waits for the investments to pay off. The company reported spending 130 billion, $130 billion on property and equipment in 2025. Analysts expect those expenses would reach 150 billion this year, but Amazon is saying we're going to 200.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  We're going, we're going all in.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of frustration from Amazon shareholders. Obviously, they had the fastest growth in 13 quarters and the stock is still down 10%. Looking back over the last five years to early 2021, only up 23% over five years.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, just not as, not as sexy as a narrative as the rest of the hyperscalers. Zuck, obviously, is a huge beneficiary of advancements in AI. We see that with the accelerating ads market. Microsoft, even though, yeah, it's getting beat up a little bit now. They have like that massive position in OpenAI that feels like fully in solid place. They got the IP, they got, you know, a real hold on the AI question. Google's obviously in a fantastic place. Nvidia, clearly.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday was just such a strange day. Reform Trader says, "Software stocks are cooked for not investing in AI. Mag7 stocks are cooked for investing heavily in AI." Hope that helps.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  It is, it is crazy. Oh, this is the image. I love this image. What's this from? Matt Damon in, uh, which one?

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, in Rounders.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  Oh, that's Rounders.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Last night, we were just talking about this.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  That's Rounders. I thought Good Will Hunting for some reason, but this is a summary of the 2026 CapEx numbers from the hyperscalers. Google is going to do 175, 185 billion versus 120 estimated. Meta is doing 115 to 135 relative against 110 estimated. Tesla's going to 20 billion from 11 billion estimated. And Amazon, they were estimating 145, but they're going to do 200. And so they're going all in.

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  One of the top comments here is very funny. It says, "What exactly is Meta buying? They don't do anything with AI."

• 12:19John Coogan?

  That's not true.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Open up reels, it's AI.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Even in the cheeky pint Elon episode, you know, Dorkesh and John are pushing Elon on the data centers and spacing. And I thought that Elon could have done more to really get people, basically the same thing. The TAM is an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is contemplating. And we are investing for that future, right? It was a lot of like trying to just justify putting it up there.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  In the short term, yeah.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when, when they were saying like, hey, there's a lot of land in the US, we can blanket. The US with solar panels, we do a lot here. And so, again, I think people are getting kind of caught up in the details. If you're going to spend, you know, you would hope AWS making this kind of investment, that they have more conviction than Tyler does on the opportunity, right? I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's possible.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Tyler's in the white suit, he's looking good.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Looking, looking good, Tyler.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Round of applause for Tyler.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  This is a classic Elon thing where, you know, he will lay out a vision that takes 10, 20, 30 years, but he says it's going to take 10, 20, 30 months. And so you have to sort of grapple with the short term and, but still, you can't lose sight of like the long term because like we did get rockets that land and we did get space, internet and whatnot.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he said like 36 months is his estimate for like when we start getting computing space, like probably 30 months, I think. But then, so there's like kind of the, that's like the further term thing, but then he did talk about like terawatts in space, right? So like US is currently like half a terawatt, but we're going to be putting terawatts in space of compute.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  He's sort of like falling back to first principles and just talking about.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, he keeps repeating like, oh, if you just look at like physics.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  But it's kind of the catch all term he uses when he doesn't really know what to say, it seems like.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, yeah, it just seems like it all checks out from the physics calculations, but when you map that to the economic realities, the human capital and financial capital realities, you're just looking at a very long timeline and he doesn't like talking about thinking in decades.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  It seems like the short term, like bull case for, for space data centers is basically just like, you know, regulatory, right? It's just going to be way too hard to find this, to find like the actual land.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  You see India already saying, hey, we'll just take a slice in 20 years. That's how AGI pill they are. They're like, come build a data center here, you can be tax free for 20 years, but then we're going to be making money in, what, 2046? They're ready to rock.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  None of you nerds know physics, they were feeding him drinks, chill out. It is actually crazy. I mean, we've never seen a Cheeky Pine episode where they actually drank.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  They did drink on this one.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  They, that was the main feedback from last year.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is funny. Yeah, it feels like Elon took down three pints or four pints or something. You did the math, right?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  So we'll talk about this later. There's some posts, but um, you know, they seemed a bit smaller than normal pints, maybe. So is it really?

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  But I counted, I counted three, like, full glasses. I mean, I, I think Elon Dorkesh asked a question about this, which is like, oh, it's so crazy that like SpaceX, they have this super ambitious mission, but they, they keep seeming to find these like good businesses on the way, right? So you, first it's like Starlink with, with Falcon, and then with Starship, it's like, do we really need that many Starlinks? But if you can get space data centers.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yep, that makes sense.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  If you're, if you're putting up terawatts of compute, then like, yeah, you need like massive, you know.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  OTP in the chat says, dude just turned 21 and he can already eye a pine.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  He's been studying the last week.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Six hundred and sixty billion dollars of CapEx this year on AI data centers. To put a number like that in perspective, this is more than what we spent on the US interstate highway system, 630 billion. More than what we spent on the Apollo moon program, 257 billion, more than what we spent on the International Space Station, 150 billion. It's more money than Walmart's revenue last year, 650 billion. It's the equivalent of spending 1.8 billion dollars a day, 750 million dollars an hour, or 1.2 million dollars a minute. This year alone is without a doubt the biggest project in the history of capitalism, and we are spending it all, we're spending all of it in one year.

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  France announced an initiative earlier this week. They want to lead in AI research. So through their France 2030 program, they have invested more than 30 million euros in this, in this initiative. Macron says, science has found its home. And Sean Frank says, France is investing 30 million in this new AI initiative. That's how much Google will spend in 90 minutes. No joke. Every 90 minutes, Google will spend 30 million on CapEx this year. One company.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  Wow, one company.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they can hire Ilya for like, an hour.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  An hour, one hour consulting call. Take him, he's breaking down the Nvidia news. The stock is up 6.22%. Nvidia shares barely moved in after hours trading last night.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what I said. I was like, Amazon just announced that, hey, we're gonna spend, you know, 200 billion dollars.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  I mean, they will buy, uh, Tranium and Inferential, but they're gonna buy a lot of Nvidia.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, let's move on to

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Dirty soda?

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  Dirty soda. We gotta talk about the Utah mom who got the world poked on dirty soda.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  I'd never heard of dirty soda before. Have you heard of this?

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. This is big in Utah.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  This is big in Utah?

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Have you been to Utah?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Uh, no.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  How do you know that it's big in Utah then?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  It's like, my friends like sent it to me on Instagram. They're like, look at this.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  All right, what is dirty soda?

• 17:40John Coogan?

  You have friends who live in Utah?

• 17:41Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like soda and they put like cream in it and stuff, right?

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, well, we'll, we'll dig in. I think, I think we'll let the, we'll let the Wall Street Journal get the facts straight.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  A mom with five children, ages six to 16, in St. George, Utah. Nicole Tanner didn't realize she was on to something with dirty soda. That's what the creator of the chain Swig calls spiking Coke, Mountain Dew, or Dr. Pepper with fruit purees and flavored cream, served in plastic cups stuffed with Pebble Ice, uh, microplastic, uh...

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Nightmare?

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Nightmare.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Really? I didn't know Pebble Ice was at risk.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I'm talking about, I'm just saying, plastic cup.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  Oh, the plastic cup.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, her business took off a few years ago when pop star Olivia Rodrigo was in Utah filming the TV series High School Musical and posted an Instagram photo holding a cup from Swig. Now, hashtag dirty soda is the hashtag. Big chains want in. McDonald's recently tested Sprite with lemon, vanilla syrup, dragon fruit, Taco Bell squirrels. It's teal colored Baja Dream freezes with vanilla cream and calls it a Mountain Dew Baja Blast Dirty Freeze.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  We forgot to ask Sam Altman if he's gonna issue a Baja Blast now. Cause he did the Code Red.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  It's time for a Baja Blast.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  It's time to Baja Blast. He's back to the top of the charts.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that's what the Super Bowl ad, Codex.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Oh, that would be good.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  The Baja Blast Codex collab campaign for the builders. And drive-in chain Sonic has encouraged customers to make it dirty by ordering creamer and mix-ins with their sodas.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  While the heart of dirty sodas may still be Utah and the Mountain West states, Swig has expanded to around 140 locations across 16 states.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  That's big. That's fast.

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  This is insane. To me, to me, this feels like a really tough business to be in long-term because if, if the product becomes popular...

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Everyone has it.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Everyone has it immediately. You have no real IP.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  Right? Cause you're just using sodas off the shelf.

• 19:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  Tanner's main investor, family investment office Larry H. Miller Co., brought in a professional chief executive who has taken other companies public.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  All right.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  And he is talking of an eventual, initial public offering for the chain, which had around a hundred million in sales last year. Tanner, I mean, these must be incredibly simple to run. It's literally a box. You have soda and creamer.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  We're doing what Starbucks did for coffee, but for soda, said Swig CEO Alex Dunn. So Alex Dunn says, pull up here, 6 a.m., on the way to the gym, grab a big soda.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  I feel like you'd need more caffeine if you really wanted to displace Starbucks.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Well, I was just gonna say, on the caffeine thing, isn't the whole point that it doesn't have, it's like not caffeinated, right? Cause you're Mormon.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. So it's a Utah thing.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  I did something recently that felt, it felt really wrong, but the result was good. I mixed a yerba with a Mexican Coke.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Ooh, okay.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  And it was, it was fantastic.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  A mateina?

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  And Mexican Coke?

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  That's fun. They said a few years ago, Olivia Rodrigo promoted it and it went viral. I thought this business was only a few years old. I guess.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  No, it's an overnight success. They started in 2010.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Overnight success. That's pretty remarkable. Yeah.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  After customers started referring to Swig's Dr. Pepper and cream combination as dirty soda, Tanner latched onto the phrase encouraging customers. They gotta, they gotta pay Future royalty here. I won't, I won't stand by this.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  They should get Future as an influencer. That'd be good.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. He's like, when I said dirty soda, I meant Swig.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  By 2017, Swig had grown to more than a dozen stores. The staff was spread thin and Tanner realized she lacks, lacked the expertise to grow further. She and her husband separated in 2020. R.I.P. and is no longer involved in Swig. And I hate when I'm just like, reading this incredible story of entrepreneurship and then, and then they kind of interrupt the, the flow there. The White House has posted biggest, period, bowl, period, run, period, ever, period, starting, period, now, period.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Did they post this? Should you scroll down?

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No. So, so they're sharing a fake screenshot.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  From Truth Social. Where Donald Trump says, let the gains begin. I mean, he really did call the, the bottom.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  At least the local bottom.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Of veracity and truth?

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just saying like if you bought Nvidia when he bought Nvidia when he when this fake post was

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Yes, shared by the real account.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Joe Weisenthal shared yesterday silver down 19% anthropic must have launched a silver extension.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Yes, it's just chaos in the markets. It's just absolute chaos everywhere.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  One of the, one of the most chaotic weeks of my, uh, my adult life.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's been, uh, I mean, lots of green shoots, lots of interesting projects, lots of interesting applications and progress all over the place. Derek Thompson said, for me, the odds that AI is a bubble declined significantly in the last three weeks and the odds that we are actually quite underbuilt for the necessary levels of inference usage went up significantly in that period.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Derek Thompson is AGI pilled.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  I think AI is going to become the home screen of a ludicrously high percentage of white collar workers in the next two years and parallel agents will be deployed in the battlefield of knowledge work at downright Soviet levels. And Kevin Roos over at the New York Times, host of the Hard Fork Podcast, uh, says, this is why everyone was freaking out about Claude Code over win a break. Once you see an agent autonomously doing stuff for you, it's so instantly clear that all computer-based work will be done this way. This is why my serious AI policy proposal is to sit every member of Congress down in a room with laptops for 30 minutes and have them all build websites.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  Get them vibe coding.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  So we were joking about this yesterday with Sholto, like we maybe need more long weekends for AI adoption, but I wouldn't be surprised for a big company to like actually do something like this, which is like, hey, we're going to have the next Thursday, Friday off.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Hackathon.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Congressional hackathon.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Congress is a whole other thing.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  You gotta go to Congress, sit all the Congress, all the Congress people down and get them, get them vibe coding. What would they build? I feel like they don't use a lot of software, so there's not that much to build. Like they're so abstracted away from it. It's all lunches and phone calls and dinners and meetings. Like there's not that much that actually, this is the thing with like open Claw, there's some people asking like, what are you actually using it for? And people are realizing, a lot of my, a lot of my day is not.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  You know the thing that I wish I could automate?

• 24:04John Coogan?

  What?

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  My mail at home.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Okay, you can do that. Have you seen earth class mail? There are a few of these virtual.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Okay, it sends it, it sends it.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  So basically you forget your home address. You don't share it anywhere on the internet. You never put it anywhere. You only use this other address. Mine was like eight thirty Market Street in San Francisco. All of the, all of the mail would go there. If it's addressed to me, it gets opened by a robot scanned. And then you have a web dashboard, but also it just goes to your email. And then you can actually say.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  So they've been AGI pilled for decades.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Decades. No, it was really important when you set up a business, you use a fake address or one of these virtual mailboxes. And then you can actually click a button, send this to me physically. And then you have a virtual, you know, representation of it forever. And you could run an agent over it. So maybe that's the next thing you pick up is a virtual mailbox. That would be good.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, I never want to open up a physical piece of mail again.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Optimus opens it for you, takes a picture.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Does a money spread?

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Does a money spread, walks to the, walks to the post office, mails the next letter, mails the check. This is the future. Jensen is pushing back on the AI will kill all software.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's play the video.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Software is a tool. There's this notion that the tool in the software industry is in decline. And we'll be replaced by AI. You could tell because there's a whole bunch of software companies whose stock prices are under a lot of pressure. Because somehow AI is going to replace them. It is the most illogical thing in the world and time will prove itself. Let's just give it, let's give ourselves the ultimate thought experiment. Suppose we are the ultimate AI, artificial general robotics, the ultimate AI. The physical version of us. You could, of course, solve any problem because, you know, you're humanoid. You could do things.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  If you were a human or robot, would you use, use a screwdriver or invent a new screwdriver? I'd just use one. Would you use a hammer or invent a new hammer? Would you use a chainsaw or invent a new chainsaw? Ideally, they don't use it at all.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  A lot of disagreement in the timeline.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  But do you understand what I'm saying? If you were a human or robot, artificial general robotics, would you use tools or reinvent tools?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  The answer, obviously, is to use tools.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Tyler.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Okay, I'd like completely disagree. So like if you're, yeah, if you're a robot,

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Hit it with the axe.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  You'll use the calculator, right? Like, you'll just build the calculator if it costs you a lot of money to use the calculator.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  So like, I think, like, you know, digital... Damn it. Agents will like use Salesforce, right? But if Salesforce becomes like very expensive, or if it's already fairly expensive,

• 26:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  It's, at some point, it becomes cheaper to just build it themselves and then you run it.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, especially when they're like, "I can work the equivalent of 2,000 lifetimes today."

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Let's go over to the Guinness tally. Tyler has it. He counted it up. He sat down, he studied the Dorkesh Patel cheeky pint crossover episode with Elon Musk. And he counted three pints for Elon, four pints for John, and 3/4 of a pint for Dorkesh, but there's a suspicious refill.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  So if you're tracking Dorkesh's, you know, volume, right, throughout the episode, it kind of goes down and he's at maybe like, you know, 80% full.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  And then it goes back up. There's like an ad read and then it goes back up.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  So the question is like, whatever happened during the ad read, right? Did he just like slam it?

• 27:31John Coogan?

  True.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  And then he filled back up all the way?

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Or is it just kind of a, you know, partial fill?

• 27:35John Coogan?

  I think you gotta give him 1.75.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay, can we, can we pull up the screenshot?

• 27:40John Coogan?

  They look like full size, full pint glasses.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  So, so, yeah, if you go to...

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Those look like full sized pint glasses.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  There's another, another photo of Elon holding the pint.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Looks pretty small in his hand.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's small. And then, and then let's click over to Timothy Chalamet. Timothy Chalamet, I mean, he's a smaller person, but it looks the same size to me. I think these are fair pint glasses.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  So Timothy Chalamet is 5'10", Elon is 6'2".

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  So slight height difference, but I mean, I don't, I feel like Elon is really mauling that.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think they're just potentially wider.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  I think they have different...

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  And this is the kind of hard-hitting analysis that you can really only get on this show.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  No other technology media is really breaking down pint analysis.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  I'm going, I'm going normal-sized pints on this, but it is, it is, it is an interesting, like, optical illusion.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this one looks incredibly...

• 28:30John Coogan?

  It's a little bit of an optical illusion.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  It's close, it's close. I mean, either way,

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  I know, but we don't know.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Even if it's a half pint, John drank four, so that's two full pints, even if it's a half pint, you know?

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  You know who else is going full pint, John?

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Who?

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  The founder of Crypto.com.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  Who just bought AI.com for 70 million.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, big, big, big.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  He is running an ad for AI.com. We don't know what AI.com is yet. He actually brought it last year in April. Highest price ever disclosed for a domain sale to launch a new entrant into the AI race. The site will offer a personal AI agent that consumers can use to send messages, use apps, and trade stocks. That's very, very American. Send message, send memes, order DoorDash, and trade stocks with your new AI agent.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Breaking news, supposed to show out with.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news, Hobbit-inspired startup becomes first new bank green-lighted by Trump. You point out one of the most insane headlines.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  That one is for Trevor Palmer and the whole team.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Erebor founder Palmer Lucky was one of the tech industry's early Trump supporters, and he's known for pension for Hawaiian shirts. They're really focusing on Palmer's like non-banking relationships here.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Palmer is a banker now, everyone.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  Uh, Erebor will cater to startups and high net worth individuals on Friday.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  You can think of us like a farmer's bank for tech, said Lucky. I think most farmer's banks won't claim they're the best bankers in the world, but they do understand farmers.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Is a local bank going to lend against you? No, he said, if you have less than $10 million in revenue and you're struggling to secure a loan from a traditional bank, investor expectations are high. Erebor was valued at about $2 billion in a funding round last year, over seven times its book value, according to investor Pitch Deck. A subsequent round valued Erebor at $4 billion, so. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbn.com. Goodbye.