Marc Benioff vs. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman on AI, Blue Origin’s Latest Flight | 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Absolutely incredible edition of the Wall Street Journal. Over the weekend, I saw these hit the app, but they're in print today, Monday, April 20. There's two articles from two tech CEOs that run companies that are almost identically valued. Salesforce is, I think, 150 billion, Verizon's 190 billion. They're right in that sweet spot.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  And I'm assuming they have like the exact same point of view, same market outlook.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  They have exactly opposite points of view. And I thought it was, I thought it was interesting seeing what, what is a victim of the SaaS apocalypse have to say about AI? And then what does someone who is the most resilient to the SaaS apocalypse have to say? And potentially is like, "Levien, I want some of the drama, I want the smoke." And so Marc Benioff is who I'm talking about at Salesforce. So he says, "The software bears are all wrong about Salesforce." We had a bear hat, but it was, it was too terrifying.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was too scary.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  So, so we skip it. But he says, "People think we have our back against the wall, but customers aren't replacing offerings with AI. They aren't replacing Salesforce with AI, they aren't ripping it out." Of course, everyone will say, "Well, yet." But let's dig into Marc Benioff's argument and how he's processing the SaaS apocalypse and what he's going to do about it.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Crazy opening. Marc Benioff has some problems. His enterprise software company Salesforce is the biggest name in a category that Wall Street thinks may get decimated by artificial intelligence. Its business model is centered on selling software to large companies on a per employee basis, but many of those firms are expected to downsize as AI agents become increasingly proficient at performing real world tasks. It's a daunting double bind, and it isn't even the worst case scenario. Salesforce stock is down a mere 28% year to date. The hardest hit software as a service companies are down about twice that much on similar fears. But Benioff thinks the bears have it wrong about the SaaS apocalypse thesis generally and especially about Salesforce. AI, he says, is making Salesforce more valuable to its customers than ever. Leading AI labs couldn't replace what Salesforce offers even if they wanted to.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  And they would rather partner with them for now, anyway, nor could.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I dare you.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  I dare.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  I, I dare you.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  He's, he's staring bare in the mouth.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  I, I wish, I wish we had Benioff on right now.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, it's a joy to, to speak with him. But continuing, nor could customers easily vibe code their own sales management, management software that could compete with Salesforce on security, compliance and other vital features. People think we have our back against the wall when in fact, the opportunity has never been greater, Benioff said in an interview. An early investor in Anthropic, Salesforce has been developing and pushing its own AI tools for years. By the end of this year, it plans to unveil a new AI platform that automatically studies its users and takes actions on their behalf. Codename Agent Albert.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of cool to put agent in the name instead of just Albert. Agent Albert.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Well, they had, they had Einstein, right? So Albert Einstein is their whole shtick here.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  Agent Albert is the culmination of an effort that began three years ago when Benioff, galvanized by the debut of ChatGPT, instituted a standing Saturday meeting to accelerate Salesforce's AI efforts.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:10Jordi Hays?

  Saturday stand up, everyone.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  An earlier flagship product of that push, Agent Force, has been somewhat slow to gain traction. Launched in 2024, it is used by 23,000 customers of a total base of 150,000. So what is that? A little, little under 20% of the customer base is using agents. They're building.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  Remember, Jason Lemkin came on the show and he was like, I use Agent Force. It's solid.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  Like, he's like, it won us back a customer that like, we weren't reaching out to.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  And it like, it made me money.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  So he, he was an Agent Force enthusiast.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  And so Salesforce's yearly revenue growth at 10% is down somewhat from recent years, but interestingly, the, the deceleration in, in Salesforce's revenue growth started back in 2022, maybe even a little bit earlier. If we scroll down on this, on this image, you can see back in 2012, they were growing 36%. Then as recently as 2020, they were growing 28.7%. There was acceleration in 2022 to 24%, but then 2023, 18%, 2024, 11%, 2025, 8%. And then we're actually seeing some re-acceleration this year from 8.7% to 9.6% to 10.8%.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  And so it feels like definitely too soon for the SaaS apocalypse narrative to show up in the actual revenue. Growth rates of these SaaS companies. I pulled together the recent earnings from a variety of public cloud software names and they're all still growing, which you would expect. I mean, of course, like, you know, you want to be growing fast and there's a lot of things and there's like the long-term durability of the value that of the stock that actually informs enterprise value today. But we're certainly not seeing like, okay, there's so much churn at GitLab, for example, because people are forking it because it's open source and vibe coding on top of it and they don't need to pay GitLab that you

• 5:09John Coogan?

  would expect GitLab's revenue to actually be shrinking. It's not. GitLab is growing at 23%. Adobe's at 12%. PagerDuty, 2.7%, little low, but UiPath at 14%. Box is at 9%. Asana is at 9%. Asana feels like, you know, textbook, like you could just vibe code this. It's a, you know, it's a Kanban board, a task list, but it's still growing. Zoom at 5.3%. Snowflake's growing 30%. Workday's at 14.5%. HubSpot's at 20%. Datadog's at 29%. Cloudflare, 34%. Monday.com, 25%. Like, there is really, really strong revenue growth across the SaaS category. Of course, the expectations have been very high, so when

• 5:51John Coogan?

  there's a readjustment in expectations, you see a sell-off in the market. But this idea that the companies aren't growing anymore because they're being replaced so rapidly, that certainly hasn't taken hold just yet. Partner at Salesforce, investor Chicago Capital, has been impressed with some of its recent moves. But what Salesforce really needs, he says, is positive word of mouth from clients talking up the value they derive from its AI products, like Jason Lemkin. They need to show revolutionary jumps. Benioff has said Salesforce was destined to be an AI-first company as far back as 2014 when it's launched its AI research unit. I didn't realize that AI research unit all the way back then, but it makes sense just for like tagging and classifying different records inside the CRM. Still, it was caught flat-footed by the arrival of high-functioning chatbots in the form of ChatGPT.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Customer superintelligence.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Customer superintelligence. I mean, this is, it is, it is funny because a lot of this, the agentic enterprise, it is a little like boring and it's not as like sexy as some of the more like crazy sci-fi scenarios. But in terms of just incrementally improving the value that is delivered to the customers, it seems like things are doing okay. Early reviews were tepid, though. Customers complained of having to spend half their time preparing data so the AI could understand it, limiting the platform's effectiveness. To help fix the problems, Salesforce built a layer into its tech stack that automatically pulls in customer data from external sources and purchased a string of companies that include firms specializing in data management and AI-powered sales. At education company Pearson, agents now autonomously handle queries about order statuses,

• 7:20John Coogan?

  refunds, and lost access codes for its customers. This has increased the percentage of customer questions that don't involve human interaction by 40%. Where Agent Force has been lacking in its addressing complex customer problems and those require human touch, David Wembley, Chief Digital Officer at Pandora Jewelry, said Agent Force hadn't been able to reliably recommend products on its own based on the vague context the customers share through its website, like, "My wife likes dogs, what should I buy her?" That's such a funny, funny question, but I mean, I guess the natural text, natural language interface should be able to find you jewelry based on a love of dogs, although I think that a lot of people who are dog lovers might have different tastes that appeal to their jewelry.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  Why not just get her a dog or multiple dogs?

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  So how does this, how does, how does Salesforce's view compare to the Verizon CEO?

• 8:12John Coogan?

  So, so Verizon has a new CEO. His name is Dan Schulman. I don't think he's related to John Schulman, but he is stepping into the AI debate. He says for, the Wall Street Journal says, "For a big company CEO with big AI ambitions, Verizon Communications, Dan Schulman doesn't pull punches about the pain the technology could unleash on America's workforce. Just months into the job, he has predicted 20 to 30% unemployment within the next two to five years," which is staggering, staggering. I can put that into some context. He says, "He warns that advancements in humanoid robots could upend the manual labor jobs still seen as safe today, and he has pushed for more education and reskilling

• 8:54John Coogan?

  to help workers adapt to intensifying tech disruption."

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay, put this into context for me.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  He's, so this is an insane.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  And, and yeah, and so this is like potentially the most aggressive stance.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  I mean, there are.

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  Of anyone, because even, even, even Dario, so Dario had the clip going viral this weekend. It was a clip from last year, talking about risks to entry-level white-collar job.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  And Dario, which is like, you know, I would say like on the frontier around being concerned around AI job loss, was not calling for 30% unemployment.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Well, no, so the headline number, he says 50%, but he's 50% of entry level white collar work. And that sounds really bad until you actually dig in and you realize that America only has five to seven million entry level white collar workers. And the US labor force is 170 million people. And so if the Dario prediction came true, the overall unemployment or unemployment rate would sit somewhere between 6 and 9%, which is not great and it's and it's obviously deserving of intervention. But it's far from the 20 to 30% outlined by Dan Schulman. And it's it wouldn't even be, even if the Dario scenario, 50% of early stage white collar work unemployment that happens, you're still below COVID, below the Great Depression.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  And I think that there's a whole bunch of government interventions that could that could offset that pretty quickly. Like 20 to 30% is truly like the do nothing, the government never engages. There's never any sort of, you know, incentive to to keep hiring people. And there's this like fast takeoff in in AGI and also humanoids, which I think people are, you know, worried about. But if you look at the deployment rate of self-driving cars, people have been saying that all the truck drivers were going to go out of a job. And, you know, this is a very, very slow takeoff. The number of self-driving cars on the road is well below 1% of overall cars on the road still. And this is just the case across the board. I was listening to a podcast with

• 10:57John Coogan?

  someone who was very worried about unemployment internationally. And he was saying that that AI could upend the Philippines because the Philippines does a lot of customer service.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  Which we haven't seen at all yet.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  No, we no, none of this is showing up in the unemployment data. It's not showing up in US unemployment data yet. I mean, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be aware of this stuff, but but it's certainly not sure. Just like the SaaS apocalypse is not showing up in revenue yet. You know, AI unemployment is not showing up in any of the employment statistics yet. But this individual was on a podcast that was saying that something along the lines of AI could be devastating to the Philippines economy because the Philippines is very dependent on customer service. And the stat he quoted was that 90% of the Philippines economy is based around customer service and customer support and and handling people on the phone. And I was like 90% that seems really, really high like they have to do other things in the Philippines because sure you go to work at your at your customer service job, but then

• 11:53John Coogan?

  you go home and you buy food and you live in an apartment. There must be real estate agents. There must be home builders. There must be people who work on roads. There must be doctors. There must be lawyers like like the economy requires more than just like a single 90% feels like incredibly concentrated. So I looked it up and I was like, how how big of an issue is how big of a of a of a of an industry is customer service in the Philippines? Like, is it 90% that feels high? Maybe it's 50, maybe it's 40. It was like 6%, 7%. It's really, really small. Now, it's like huge in terms of like

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  You don't want it to go away.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  You don't want it to go away, of course. And you do want, you know, you want a number of industries that are flourishing. And that is probably more concentrated than many other countries. There's probably many, it might be, it might be the country with the highest percentage of customer service intensivity in the economy, but it's not 90% of their economy. And so there's a little bit of this, like, people don't seem to go back to the raw numbers. Because if you go back and you try and understand, like, okay, what would 30% unemployment really look like? Well, that's like, you know, Great Depression level with no intervention, no, no action from the Fed, no action from the government. And it seems a little bit, a little bit crazy. So I can't tell if this is just like saying the biggest number. There's a little bit of that going on here where if you want to

• 13:12John Coogan?

  grab headlines and you go out and you say, okay, well, someone predicted, you know, 5% unemployment, I'm going to predict 10%. And then I'll jump to the front forefront of the discussion. That seems to be a way to get earned media. I mean, let's unpack a little bit more of his discussion because we will see if there's a way to steel man his take around 20 to 30% unemployment. Said, coached in the blunt AI talk is a warning for other CEOs. Be candid about the coming disruption or risk a public backlash. It's a very difficult time and everyone knows this. Schulman said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't even agree with that stance. Everyone that's being candid or even talking about it is immediately getting backlash anyway.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  So I think being authentic, being realistic, telling the truth as best you can is key. That belief, he said, is why Verizon created a $20 million career transition retraining fund for the age of AI.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  He's like, look, we are gonna have greater unemployment than in the Great Depression. And I'm gonna, you know, he's taking the piece of duct tape, you know, there's water pouring out.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, to be clear, this is not our view. Like, this is not our view at all.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  No, but I mean, at the same time, like, they did layoffs. They probably hired a lot during COVID and beyond. And they, and a $20 million career transition retraining fund is great.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  It's a good start.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  That is good. Like, this is a good thing. But he says, the warning, this is from the Journal, "The warnings are a departure from the messaging of other public company CEOs, many of whom have been bullish about AI's potential to unlock new levels of growth, but demure on or even reject the idea of job losses. A lot of people are saying, AI is coming, we're gonna run out of jobs. It's exactly the opposite, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month, pointing out that every other technological advancement has brought more productivity and more prosperity. And there is some new data showing that productivity might be climbing, which is very exciting. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is similarly sanguine about potential job losses to AI, though some roles will be replaced, there will be other jobs created.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  In the short term, though, a cavalcade of companies from Snap to Amazon have invoked AI or a desire to find deficiencies as they slash large portions of their workforces. Block, which cut nearly half of its, half of its staff, predicted other companies would soon follow suit. A new Boston Consulting Group report predicts that AI will shape roughly half of US jobs in two to three years, and that up to 15% of jobs could eventually be eliminated outright. Again, that's, you know, reshaped and eliminated does, you know, would be offset by the creation of new jobs. So even in this BCG report, you're probably looking at like, maybe a transition of like, six, seven, eight, nine, 10% unemployment while there's an adjustment period.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Many, many Americans fear... That will happen too in a Quinnipiac University survey of 1,400 adults. Fifty-five percent said they felt AI would bring more harm than good, up from 44% in a poll last year. And so the average American is dooming for sure. CEOs are not thinking about this the right way, said Bill George of the former CEO of Medtronic, who is now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Too many, he said, are focusing on productivity instead of laying out a strategy for how companies can find new business models to grow or on how workers can best use AI. They should be very candid with them and paint a big picture. Showman's Big Picture also included sweeping job cuts, the 13,000 layoffs. He announced shortly after his appointment as CEO in October were Verizon's largest ever,

• 16:47John Coogan?

  but necessary to make Verizon more efficient, he said. Altogether, he's seeking to cut nine billion of costs. Verizon said its layoffs were not related to AI. The carrier was too hierarchical, too bureaucratic, way too process oriented as opposed to outcomes oriented.

• 17:04Jordi Hays?

  And the CEO saying, this is already happening in a big way. But the layoffs we're doing are just that we're bloated.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, so Verizon has 90,000 employees and they laid off 13,000, so maybe like a little over 10%. Riff, Verizon's a weird one because the stock is basically completely flat over the last, it's actually up 15% year to date and it is incredibly stable stock. And it's also just like, should not be a victim of the SaaS apocalypse because they own spectrum allocation.

• 17:37Jordi Hays?

  Cell towers.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  They own cell towers, exactly. And that's just.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  Or they have like very, very long-term lease agreements.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean, there is, there is the case that like, you know, if Starlink direct to cell gets really good, I mean, even Elon saying like, it's not going to be that good inside buildings. Like, it's pretty difficult to get to a point where all of a sudden there's a new technology that's just wildly disruptive. Like, maybe if you're like. Somehow transitioning from Starlink when you're outside to Wi-Fi when you're inside, like you could cut the cord with Verizon, but that just feels so, so far away for something that is a pretty key utility in most people's lives, like their water bill or electricity bill. Like, now, they might move to Sprint or AT&T and there's going to be some competitive dynamic. It is an oligopoly after all, but it doesn't seem like there's going to be some massive disruption moment where people are vibe coding their own cell carriers necessarily.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  So, in meetings, he has repeatedly told Verizon staff they must embrace AI, describing it as core to the company's future. He used it himself to comb through some 8,000 responses after-

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  This is the future. Trust me, I used it once.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Schulman's embrace of AI goes deeper than cost cutting. He envisions a company wholly reshaped by the technology, from improved customer service to more personalized options for consumers. And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table. In one All Hands, Schulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary so to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives. Just dig your own grave.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  He's literally, the title of this article-

• 19:15John Coogan?

  He's so doom-pilled.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  He's saying, "AI is coming for your job and everyone knows it."

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Start writing your obituary.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  In tech, in tech, we're starting to, every company's adopting this technology at a rapid rate.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  But everyone's like, "Hey, this, you know, basically like jobs aren't tasks," right? This sort of narrative is building, like we need to figure out how to, we've built a bunch of very useful tools-

• 19:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  And they are going to have powerful effects in our economy.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  But we have to kind of change the narrative around this because like a fear-based approach is not working. And meanwhile, Dan comes in, he's like, "AI is coming for your job, everyone knows it, write your obituary." Madison's insane.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Right here, bitch.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  It's so not, so not helpful and, and, and they're not even doing AI related job cuts.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  No.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  So I just don't understand. I don't understand this whole press cycle.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  I love, I love that he just comes in and just immediately starts blackpilling. It's so wild to just get this job and immediately start blackpilling.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Like, do you think this is a setup for, for a much like deeper layoff than they've done historically?

• 20:24John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, it's possible, but I, like, I think that they would need to do some serious like AI tooling and implementation and actually like, I want to know more about the breakdown of those 90,000 employees or 80,000 employees. Like, what are they actually all doing? Which ones are actually just sitting there being like, I just do tasks all day long. Like, form comes in, I type it into an Excel sheet and I email it to somebody. Like, that type of job, yeah, that's probably going to be automated in some way and that person will have to find a different way to make a play inside the organization. But for a lot of, but for a lot of the folks at Verizon, I imagine that they're, that they're working on bigger projects than just, you know, just throwing, throwing tons and tons of people at a single problem.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  At the same time, who knows? Maybe, maybe it's 50, maybe half the company is customer support reps. I don't know. It's like we all wanted to live in the Renaissance or like when fire was first invented, how cool would that be? He continued, we're in that stage. We're not just appreciating it for what it could be. That's a very optimistic take. I like that. I like that sentence. That's good. Blue Origin rocket stumbles on first commercial mission. AST Space Mobile, who we've talked about a few times here, Jeff Bezos's rocket company said the satellite from ASTS was deployed into an incorrect orbit. And so a little bit of a setback for them. I think the stock traded down in the news a bit. The launch of the company's new Glenn rocket started smoothly with the vehicle shooting into the sky from the Blue Origin launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  During the flight, new Glenn's third ever, the vehicle, the vehicle's huge booster returned safely to earth. Only a feat only Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX have ever achieved orbital rockets. But the mission later suffered a mishap. A satellite. The rocket was carrying into orbit for AST Space Mobile, a company building cellular broadband network in space, wasn't deployed correctly. In a post on X, Blue Origin said its rocket delivered AST's satellite into an incorrect location in space. The payload was placed into an off nominal orbit. AST said the satellite's altitude was too low to sustain operations and that it will be taken out of orbit. The cost is expected to be covered under its insurance policy. The stumble comes as Blue Origin works to ramp up flights with new glances.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw some of the AST retail army saying like, don't worry, keep holding.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Keep holding.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  It's covered under insurance. Very unfortunate, but somewhat.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  It seems like it's rebounded a little bit.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  Somewhat to be expected, right? As Blue Origin like figures out their commercial business.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it traded on like 16% overnight, but it's down just 6% today. So a little bit of a rebound.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  And we got a fantastic video of the booster landing that we can pull up here.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  Courtesy of Jeff.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  Tyler, you dug into why doesn't ASTS just launch on SpaceX?

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Well, so there are two things. I think one thing I thought was interesting is like, there's this whole press cycle about it like, oh, it was like a failure of a launch or something. But this was like happened a number of times before, like SpaceX in 2024, there was Falcon 9, that that kind of the upper stage like failed and then a few like Starlink satellites.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Just went into the wrong orbit.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. And then they're too low and then they just get burned up.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, companies don't typically like to talk about when they send something into space and lose it, basically, but that happens too. I remember at the beginning of last year, there was a launch for a venture-backed space company and, you know, they basically put a satellite up and almost immediately lost contact with it. So it's not unusual, unfortunate, but they'll be back.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  In 2016. SpaceX blew up a Facebook rocket. Mark Zuckerberg laments the loss of internet.org satellite. Facebook CEO said he was deeply disappointed in the explosion of Falcon 9 rocket carrying satellite intended to provide internet coverage to parts of Africa. Writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said, "As I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent. The accidental explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket early Thursday morning," this is back in 2016, referred to as an anomaly by SpaceX engineer, "destroyed both the rocket and its cargo, the AMO6 satellite."

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Dolly Bolly says, is showing a screenshot from, I believe, is Biz by Sell, a laundromat, which is selling, it's got 421,000 of EBIT, asking just under 3 million. So getting a better multiple for your laundromat than most, than most public SaaS companies out there right now. And it was established in 2024.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  They just made this business in a couple of years.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Lifestyle business.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, "I would like $3 million for it now."

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Okay, a couple more posts. John Fio, friend of the show, says, "The sphere is probably the most important piece of architecture in the last 100 years. It's a hot take. It's what the VR trade was trying to be, but manifested in the real world with a real novel experience instead. It's what Apple and Meta were trying to go after, but failed because they tried to shove it into a scalable box instead of building for real life. A sphere in every major city will be a proprietary technology for a new kind of stadium. It will suck in only the best acts and they'll stop playing regular stadiums. It's the perfect example of mixing real novel tech with real novel life. This is how you capture value over the next cycle." I agree with this. I think this is a great take. So.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you rewind a year ago, you're like, companies are going to announce hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of Nvidia orders. Meanwhile, we have the Sphere, which they built the Sphere.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  It's one concert venue.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  They built a, they built a really cool concert venue in Vegas. They got a bunch of debt, but it's awesome. Which one do you want to own?

• 26:14John Coogan?

  The trade is.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  And of course, on Nvidia, you were, you were still up, you know, a hundred percent over the last 12 months. But if you had bought the Sphere, you were up 442%.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, did very well. I, I made a whole YouTube video about the Sphere two years ago and was pretty bullish on it. Uh, had dug into the founder and how it got built. And, uh, it was just a fascinating, fascinating story. But I think, uh, he's right that, uh, that there will be a sphere in every major city. There is technically a sphere-like, uh, location in Los Angeles over by SoFi Stadium. It's not technically a full sphere with LEDs on the outside, but it has a big screen and you can go and watch a football game there. And I think it's doing well.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of a miss that we've never done anything with the Sphere.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  No.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Last, a little white pill here. Meta announced, level up a free four-week training program that takes people with no prior experience and prepares them to work as fiber technicians on data center construction sites across the US. We built this program with CBRE because the fiber technician field and the broader construction industry is facing a nationwide shortage at a time when data center demand is higher than ever. And, uh, I'm sure people will come up with reasons why this is bad, actually. But, uh, I think this is, I think this is great. It's a great opportunity. And Tyler, uh, uh, we didn't get a chance to talk with you about, talk with you about this before the show, but you're actually going to be going through the program, um, starting tomorrow. We got you a slot.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, so get. This actually seems fun. I would be interested in doing this.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  It's data center, they made data center simulator in real life. They made data center simulator in real life. That's amazing. Tyler, do you ever play Elden Ring?

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  No. Oh, it's such a good game.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  More like online games.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  More on Elden Ring can be online.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I don't know.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  You can play with people. They're making a movie about it. A live action adaptation of Elden Ring, produced by A24 in partnership with Bandai Namco, and filmed for IMAX is slated for release March 3rd, 2028. Wow, that's a long ways away. Production will begin in spring. But if you haven't played Elden Ring, it's a fun time. It's really, really hard. And sometimes it just gets like a little bit too much.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, folks.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in. We will be.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpm.com. And flashbang out. We'll see you later.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Throwing flashbang.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Throwing flashbang.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye.