Bezos' Prometheus Raises $12B, America Inc. Moves to Texas, Trucking Rebounds | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ 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?

  Bezos is getting very serious about the AI game. $12 billion raised for Prometheus. It's just been six months since he emerged from stealth with 6.2 billion in funding. The industrial AI startup, as they're calling it, raised another $12 billion in Series B. It's just a thousand times bigger than a normal Series A and a Series B. You used to go from 6 million Series A, 12 million Series B. Now it's 6 billion Series A, 12 billion Series B. Serious dollars, but AI is expensive. The valuation, $41 billion. Back in November, there was very little disclosed about Prometheus. We wrote about it a little. There was some speculation on the time.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Forty one?

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Forty one billion. Bigger than, what's a $40 billion company?

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  And this is a business that is buying existing companies?

• 0:57John Coogan?

  That's the thing. We don't really know. We don't really know, but it's a lot of money. Could be buying companies and trying to transform them.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, being able to raise that much capital to buy businesses with that little dilution is a pretty remarkable feat that pretty much only Jeff Bezos could pull off.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the Wall Street Journal has some more details and mostly it just gives you, takes you a little bit more inside the mind of Jeff Bezos and where he's thinking, like how he's thinking about the shape of the AI impact. The headline is very clear. Bezos bats down AI job loss fears while launching new venture. New startup Prometheus seeks to build an artificial general engineer. A G E is the new buzzword. You thought we were, we thought we were running out of them. We got AI, A G I, A S I, R S I, A I F D E, personal superintelligence, meta superintelligence, TBD, continual learning.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Standard intelligence.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Your regular intelligence.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Ineffable intelligence.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  The irregular intelligence, the irregular superintelligence company.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Of the dog patch.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  The dog.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Something like that. But artificial general engineer is the new phrase, the new term. And he wants it to be able to design and manufacture complex physical products. So Jeff Bezos expects artificial intelligence to create a labor shortage in the economy.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Interesting. There's some correlation between like liquid net worth and and and and your and your projection.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  And your optimism.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Employment. Right? Yeah. So he expects a labor shortage, rejecting fears that fast evolving technology will put humans out of work as he launches a new venture aimed at making engineers more productive. The billionaire founder of Amazon.com, and don't forget Blue Origin, is co-leading a new AI business called Prometheus, which plans to build an artificial general engineer that can design and manufacture complex physical products such as a jet engine. He said in an interview that the company's goal is to, quote, empower engineers and make innovation easier and faster, so smaller teams can do much bigger things on much shorter time cycles. That'd be good. It takes forever to build a jet engine. It takes forever to build a plane. We've talked to multiple founders that have been trying to build new plane

• 3:16John Coogan?

  designs for decades and haven't really been able to scale them up, although they've made incredible gains and traction and demos. Actually getting new planes on the runway safely approved has been far too long. If AI speeds it up by 10%, that's like years. It's crazy. The Amazon and Blue Origin co-founder joins a group of longtime technology leaders that have jumped into the AI fray. You got Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev, also Brian Chesky over at Airbnb. These folks are all building new companies around the AI boom, among others. Prometheus, which said it is valued at about $41 billion, has raised $12 billion from investors, including

• 3:59John Coogan?

  Bezos, JP Morgan, Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, went straight to the big banks.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Like the invest VCs are just like, yeah.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I mean, there's another world where doing six on 40 billion is just like your IPO.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, that is IPO numbers. That's, yeah, that's a crazy amount of money. Yeah, you gotta go to the banks for this. They've hired 150 people across San Francisco, London, and Zurich. Interesting. Despite Silicon Valley's enthusiasm enthusiasm for AI's promise, the broader population has become very wary, fearing widespread job losses. Some of the pessimism about AI among young people is the opposite of reality, Bezos said. And we've been seeing this in the jobs numbers, like the job, the economy is running hot. Inflation is high, but also unemployment is very low, lower than expected. We're adding a lot of jobs. AI will mean fewer workers are needed in jobs that exist today, but it will also create far more opportunities and increase productivity, he said. That's a very white pilling statement.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Bezos argued that if AI makes it cheaper, faster, and easier to invent things, employment will ultimately rise because even though you're shrinking the number of people needed by 10x, the technology will create more than 10x as many opportunities. And he certainly saw that with Amazon. The number of, you know, store workers in physical retail stores probably shrunk, but the number of entrepreneurs building products, selling them on Amazon in and around the Amazon ecosystem, not just in the warehouse, but in the broader Amazon ecosystem, probably increased. And we certainly saw that in the broad job numbers in the United States. Like, the labor market has grown unequivocally since 1999. We've added jobs all over the place as people have shifted around.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  There's going to be two-earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool because there's going to be so much productivity, he said. That's an interesting take. He's saying that there's going to be so much more productivity that some people will choose not to work. And of course, that won't necessarily show up in the unemployment rate because the unemployment rate only measures people that are actively looking for jobs. So you could have a world where the workforce is shrinking in terms of the number of people that have typical jobs is declining. But the unemployment rate is also very low because you have more single-earner households, one person working, making more than enough money to support the whole family. Sort of an older-school mindset, karkens back to, you know,

• 6:23John Coogan?

  the maybe apocryphal stories about the mid-20th century, but certainly an optimistic view nonetheless.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's notable, uh, neat levels have been rising since 2021.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  That's not employed in education or training.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Or training.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Not in employment.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so that trend started well before the current AI paradigm.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  But wouldn't be surprised if it continues, hopefully for the reasons that Bezos is talking about. I think there's gonna be a lot of focus on his summer plans, John.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  I think there's gonna be more scrutiny than ever. You know, this is a guy that, uh, can hardly jet around the Mediterranean on a big boat without being photographed every single day.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  And this was prior to these back-to-back, you know, multi-billion dollar rounds. And so going into the summer, I think people are gonna be paying extra attention, right? Is he doing back-to-back days at the beach club? Or is he keeping it to a four-hour window on Saturday? Lock him back in by Saturday night, getting a good night's sleep. Spending his Sunday, you know, preparing for the, for the coming week, right?

• 7:31John Coogan?

  He does have a co-CEO. Maybe they've split it up. Most people would think co-CEO is like they're both involved in every decision. Maybe it's more of like a, he takes the winter and fall quarters and the other co-CEO takes the summer and spring. Like if you divide it up that way, no one's ever tried that with a co-CEO. Just like, you run the company for six months, then I run the company for six months. And you're completely off on vacation, maybe?

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. The alternative is, you know, Bezos would say like Friday from 7:00 PM until 2:00 AM on Saturday. I'm not gonna be super available, super online. Uh, and then also from 2:00 AM till, till around 11:00 AM, I will, I'll be fully, fully offline.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Um, then there's about a one-hour window on Saturday where you can take like a lunch break, do whatever you need to do. But then from 1:00 PM until 2:00 AM

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  Sunday, I'm gonna be offline again. Uh, but back, you know.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Maybe if your co-CEO is, you should just do, I, I'm CEO of TVPN on the odd hours and you're on the even hours.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  And so if there's a big decision that comes down.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Is that the secret to non-stop productivity and seven-day work?

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Interlace them, yeah. So, oh, it's 3:00 AM, call Jordy. Oh, it's 4:00 AM, call John. Co-CEO is working out. They held talks to raise a hundred billion dollar fund, which is a lot of money. We will talk about SpaceX in a bit, but SpaceX is looking for 70 billion and it's a huge business with so much attention. This is an entirely new thing. And they wanna put a hundred billion to work, but of course Bezos has plenty of money and to backstop it, anchor it, do whatever he needs and he has massive connections. So the Wall Street Journal reported this and they said the goal was with that fund to acquire manufacturing businesses and deploy AI across their operations. Remember, we did that whole list of like, what could they actually buy for $100 billion? What would be a good buy?

• 9:21John Coogan?

  And there were some very interesting, like you could buy like Goodyear, for example, and work on tire manufacturing. And I think I was wrong in all my predictions, but it was an interesting exercise to just take a little tour of the American manufacturing.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  But my read on it is some combination of like a foundation model that allows you to generate full product, full products, basically, like product specs, designs, et cetera, to high fidelity.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  And then something like a send-cut-send style infrastructure where you can just make that product on the fly.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  And get it delivered.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  And that is the moment we're in right now, where on your computer, you can make at least an image of anything you want in the entire world. But then there hasn't been that much of a speed up on the other side, right? And so closing the loop there is going to be very, very cool.

• 10:09John Coogan?

  This company, Prometheus, is bigger than AIG, the insurance company, bigger than Chipotle, bigger than CBRE, the real estate.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  Are you on CompaniesMarketCap.com, John?

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Not on ChatGPT. Bigger than Baidu? Wow. That is, that is crazy.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  John, do you think that they're going to be punished for their hubris and chained?

• 10:28John Coogan?

  The nominative determinism of Prometheus is sort of crazy, right?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  But.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Enough fraternity, eagle comes, eats his liver every day.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Isn't Prometheus like the third time an AI company has done this? Because there was the Prometheus data center at Meta?

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  There was a company called Icarus, too.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Icarus, yeah, I got in trouble for that one because I was talking to a New Yorker reporter about that and sort of overstepped a little bit because I was like, they have a great team, I'm rooting for them.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  So I think we need another company named Hercules, right? Because Hercules saves Prometheus. He frees him from the chains.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  But then.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Is there a company called Hercules? That's a good company name. I like that one.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  I don't know. But yeah, so if raised, it would be the latest in a series of investors buying established companies and using AI to improve productivity and margins. We've seen a couple of these funds roll out, the AI rollups, AI modernization, private equity firms. Obviously, private equity firms themselves are doing this. But no one's come in with $100 billion. You're in a completely different tier from all the other companies that are doing this. AI's advances have paved the way for, quote, "a multitude of golden ages," not just one, happening simultaneously, Bezos said. He said, "This is the best time to start a company." I love the optimism.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. You can buy strategy, MicroStrategy, and Prometheus are roughly the same, value the same, as well as.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  MicroStrategy is in sort of a rough spot, right? Isn't Bitcoin down?

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  No, it's a good, I mean, it's an interesting, it's an interesting bet, right? What do you want to, what do you want to buy? What do you want to own it at 41 billion?

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  MicroStrategy is at 42, technically.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. You can buy Reddit. That's 33 billion. Anyway, the next story we got to talk about is gamers are rising up. Gamers are rising up. You heard that the government was trying to put gyms in airports. Well, the gamers had something to say. They're pushing back. Airport lounges are catering to gamers. The airport lounges where video games are more important than drinks. Travelers can kill time, play everything from Mario Kart to Minecraft before their flight. We got to do this. Get a little Rust going next time we're flying.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  Before we dive into this, has TSA gotten like better, more consistent?

• 12:43John Coogan?

  I have a hot take on this. I think TSA might be goaded.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  I think they're pretty dialed.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  I think it's good.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  Out of the last maybe 30 flights? I have not waited more than 30 minutes.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  In a, in a security line.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. And.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  And that makes, like, commercials obviously still.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Torture.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Torture.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  It's sort of a, it's sort of a.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Punishment.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Humiliation ritual, but that being said, being able to plan on a 30 minute security line.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Makes commercial travel.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Pretty.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it was the butt of every comedian's joke because it's so universal. Everyone's been through TSA. It's very slow. Take your shoes off. There's a million little places for comedy gold. That's highly reliable.

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  Don't have to take your shoes off.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Don't have to even take your laptop out.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  No, it's, it's getting back and there's like, I mean, I guess it's getting more surveillancy because they take a photo of you like 17 times on the way through.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  You can refuse that though.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  You can?

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  You can just say no?

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Nick, Nick does that. You could just say no.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  Say no, but then don't they?

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can just say no. They don't, they used to about, I would, I, I will say about two years ago, they would tell you more frequently, like it's optional.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  It's optional.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  Now they're just like photo now.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:56Jordi Hays?

  And you can read the text and it says like you can opt out.

• 13:59John Coogan?

  Okay. Can you opt out of the whole thing? Is it all just like a high agency test? You can just be like, actually, I just want to go around. I don't even want to go through the metal detector. And they're like, yeah, right this way, sir. No one's ever thought to break out of the matrix, but you reached the final level. You reached based reality. Good job. Continue.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but truly being able to plan on, it's going to take me like 30 minutes to get through.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  No.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  You can like comfortably show up 45 minutes before.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  It's very efficient.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Your flight.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Reliable.

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  Make it every time.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Every time, every time.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  Which means that you're pushing it even more to the.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Oftentimes I will be getting through security.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  And John will text, text and be like, just got my car. I'll be there. I'll be parking in 45 minutes. And I'm like, I thought I was cutting it a little bit close, but man, day of heaven, you always make, you always make.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  I always make it. And if you're not missing flights, at least like 10% of the time, you're actually, you're not cutting it close enough.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  But you have to be taking some level of risk or else you're just wasting time.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  No, because often, oftentimes.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  If you went to an investor and you were like, your goal is to never invest in a company that goes down. Oh, you're a VC. Uh, but you're, but you're, but if you get a single zero in your portfolio, you can never invest ever again. Would you do that? No way. No way. No way.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, I'm not engaging.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  No way. So you, you're gonna have some zeros in your portfolio. You're gonna miss some flights, but on average, your DPI is gonna be quite good.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  But the expected time, right?

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  Comparing, yeah, yeah, comparing some, comparing that.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  This is where, this is where the argument goes. I can just have as much fun as the, at the airport. So I don't mind showing up five hours early.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  No, no, but okay, if you miss your flight and then the next flight is like three hours.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Then like.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  It doesn't, it doesn't math out because like if you just get your flight 10 minutes, like a little bit earlier.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Then it, it'll like match, like, I don't think it makes sense.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  So, so basically like, like, let's say I fly once a week and I save an hour with my strategy. That's 50 hours a year and I only miss one flight.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  You're not saving an hour.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  I save, I save three hours.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  And you're not, you're not like saving the time.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  I am, I am.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  You were probably, you were probably at, at your, just like having another coffee at the hotel. And or having a conversation that you could just have.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  No, I was literally, before I go, before I go to the airport, I am literally locked in at the clock factory. Okay. I'm locked in at the clock factory. I'm being the most productive I've ever been and.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  Making clocks.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  I'm making clocks, clock by clock. And, and you think that that time's useless.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Well, okay, now you can be gaming at the airport.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, so.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  You should be getting there way earlier.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  I should, I should get, if I want a prestige on COD, I should get there maybe like 72 hours early.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John, you're just like, yeah, I gotta get up at 2 a.m. this morning. Like, I got like a, I got a super early flight. They're like, oh, what time is your flight?

• 16:48John Coogan?

  11 a.m.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  11 a.m. Like.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is this a coincidence? GTA 6 dropped and you're going to the airport 10 hours early? Well, now you can because airport lounges are starting to cater to gamers. Gamers are the most important constituency. We're gonna have a gamer president one day. The first thing that David Lee and Cassie Yang noticed when they popped into the new lounge in Terminal One at Minneapolis, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Friday wasn't a robot bartender, which they have apparently. I believe Ben will be traveling through Minneapolis-St. Paul. We should give him a little gaming challenge. See if he can, see if he can get to Prestige on COD before he hits his flight. It was something only parents in this digital device era could appreciate. Unfettered access to their phones.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Their kids, eight and 12, were busy playing Mario Kart and Crash Bandicoot at the lounge's video game stations to commandeer their phones for some pre-flight screen time. The Portal Lounge is by design not your grandfather's airport lounge. Yes, there is a small buffet and bartenders, robot and real, that pour that lounge libation staple an old fashioned. The focus is on entertainment there, gaming. It's the latest concept from husband and wife team on a mission to amp up airport downtime. Emma and Jordan Wallbridge, with backgrounds in hotels and medical device sales respectively, opened their first airport video game lounge at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in 2018, called GameWay.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  There are now 11 of them at airports across the country, and two more due to open this year. Portal in Minneapolis is the latest iteration of a concept with a few more bells and whistles. They zeroed in on video games after regularly visiting lounges on business trips and finding them two-state. "I always felt like I was in a library," Emma says, with some guests slushing others and throwing, shushing others and throwing side.

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm not gonna lie, this picture makes me feel like I'm a television screen.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Oh, because they're looking at you like you're...

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  With the control.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  You're the game, yeah, interesting.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  I think this is gonna be more successful than like the whole airport gyms movement.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  Like, every once in a while, somebody will post online, "Why don't airports have gyms?" There's been a few moments where it would've been nice to have a gym, but imagine a world where even just 5% of your flight had just gotten off of an hour on the treadmill.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  And was getting on the flight.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Pretty sweaty.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  Pretty brutal.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Pretty heavy, some heavy breathing going on. I don't know. But it's also trucking season. The four-year U.S. trucking slump is officially over, says The Wall Street Journal. It's over at last. Truckers who held on through almost four years of slumping freight rates finally have something to celebrate. It feels like a breath of air for an industry that maybe felt like they were running out of air. Trucking executives are calling it an end to one of the longest freight downturns in carriers' memory. They say rates have risen to more sustainable levels after a period of low earnings, coupled with Trump administration crackdowns on immigrant drivers, pushed many carriers out of the market. The logistic managers index, a monthly survey

• 19:53John Coogan?

  of supply chain managers, showed transportation prices increased in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's 10-year history. So if you scroll down, yeah, that chart is crazy. So, good news for the truckers. Of course, this is going to push up, you know, prices and inflation potentially, but it is good to have a healthy trucking industry, a healthy dry van spot rate, which I'm sure you've been following intently. Dry van spot rates for the week of June were up 5,200 basis points.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  52% year-over-year, excluding fuel surcharges, according to a report. So, the fuel prices get passed through, but the economy is doing well, and so prices for dry van spot rates are increasing. As he said, because of the stronger freight market over the last few months, the nationwide company is increasing its fleet of more than 10,500 trucks and expanding its pool of about 11,000 drivers.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  What is driving this?

• 20:55John Coogan?

  This has been a supply-driven freight recovery as opposed to a demand-driven freight recovery. Turnaround comes after four years in which carriers have been squeezed by a combination of too many trucks on the road and not enough loads. Drivers rushed into the industry during the pandemic, so there was a boom in online ordering, shipping, all the different things that happened during COVID. Consumer demand drove freight rates to record highs. Rates plummeted in 2022, forcing hundreds of thousands of smaller carriers out of business. Many truckers held on, even as costs for drivers, equipment, and insurance rose. The exodus accelerated over the past year. And trucking specialists say the industry has finally found an equilibrium where the supply of trucks is low enough to lift rates, which will of course bring more trucks into

• 21:40John Coogan?

  the market and rates will adjust of course, but higher fuel prices due to the war have pushed up trucking companies expenses, but operators are largely passing along those costs to their customers.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  We have some breaking news.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  What's breaking news?

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  Ty Morse says on Saturday, we finished construction of set number two.

• 21:58John Coogan?

  Set number two.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  So Ty had built a set for his interview with Elon Musk. It sounds like they built it in a place that they weren't, they were only able to occupy for this week.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  For like a week, seven days, next seven days on one hour notice. And that was on June 6th.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  That's on June 6th.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  This is gripping, this was a trending story on X. He says, for the past three months, I've been asking myself the simple question, what would Elon do? Elon would build the rocket and put on, put it on the launch stand before he got approval. He would ask, what's the biggest bottleneck to achieving my mission? And then go about systematically undoing the bottlenecks until he and his team had made the impossible happen. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. And so he has built yet another set that I think can last a full month. And hopefully he lands the interview. He's incredibly pumped up for this and the meta story of him building this set has done better than most podcasts.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  There's more views on.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  John, I want to read the summary of the book about the story of Ty Morse getting Elon on his podcast.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Like 7,500 people, 2 million people watched the video about the set. And so you do have this dynamic where the meta story is more interesting or it like it's by default more interesting because the interview hasn't actually happened. But there are plenty of Elon interviews at this point, like he does a lot of interviews that don't go super viral. Like he did this interview with Jamie Dimon and I think that's fully recorded. I think you can just. Search it and watch it, but I don't know that that's something that like everyone in tech saw and everyone in tech talked about, but this is a story people are talking about, the meta story. And people love to see bold moves. People love to see building and all these crazy things and risk

• 23:54John Coogan?

  taking and all of that is on display. And so Ty Morse is getting a lot of attention. So good luck to him.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Godspeed, Ty.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Texas is America's new center of gravity, says The Economist. Exxon's reincorporation, they were in Texas, they left Texas, they went back to Texas. Is one more feather in the state's cowboy hat, says The Economist. This is a hilarious, hilarious song lyric. "Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee, I should have known, should have known better than to take him back to Abilene, Abilene, Texas." They were singing about data centers in Ella Langley's "Choose in Texas," a song that has ranked near the top of America's music charts throughout 2026. Some of those listens may be coming from policymakers elsewhere in the country. Much like Miss Langley, they are, they are losing to Texas. On May 27th,

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Exxon Mobil shareholders approved a plan to cut the oil giant's ties with New Jersey and reincorporate in Texas, where it has long had its headquarters. It's not alone. According to CBRE, a property firm, at least 140, 184 companies shifted their headquarters to Austin, Dallas, or Houston between 2020 and 2025. Among them, Tesla, a car company, and Caterpillar, a maker of construction equipment. Texas is steadily establishing itself as America's, America Inc.'s new center of gravity. No state receives more business investment or is adding more people to its population. From 2020 to 2025, it created roughly a fifth of all net new jobs in the country.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  In early 20, in the early 2020s, Texas was luring remote workers fleeing high taxes, exorbitant house prices, and bad policies in America's coastal metropolises while benefiting from the Biden administration's subsidies for green energy and chip making facilities. Now the state's dominance in energy has made it a major beneficiary of the data center boom. Meanwhile, its technology and finance ecosystems have been deepening. This summer, it will ring its first standalone burst. The Texas Stock Exchange, joining outposts of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, already operating in the state. Donald Trump has called the New York Stock Exchange's new branch "an unbelievably bad thing for his hometown of New York," even if his social media venture was the first business to list on it.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  So that's a very funny thing, but, you know, he was obviously giving that in the context of like, New York is defined by its exchanges and in the context of just New York, the city, losing out to Texas, or New York State losing out to Texas, in any way, is bad for that state, I suppose. The state's appeal is to yuppies. To yuppies is growing with every stream of a country song. I've been listening to a lot of country songs. Joe Weisenthal plays in a country band, blues band.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  People ask, "Dream guest?"

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  And I tell them, "Dream performance."

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Joe Weisenthal acoustic set, if you want to know.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Unplugged?

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Unplugged.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Tiny Desk?

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  The Tiny Desk. What if we set him up with a slat wall set?

• 26:55John Coogan?

  We gotta get Roger from Conde Nast. He can jam.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but a little slat wall set.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  And he can just play.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  And SM7B podcast microphone on the guitar. That might be the trick. Might be the trick. To understand its ascendancy, starting in Houston, heart of the Texan energy industry, its oil and gas barons have been raking in profits as a result of the Iran war. But over the past years, the state has also become a hub for green energy. This year, it's expected to build two fifths of all utility-scale solar in America, a technology for which its wide-open flatlands are ideal. Interesting. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbna.com, and we will see you tomorrow for the SpaceX IPO.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna just be hanging out.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  We're hanging out, no guests.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have the stock price on the big board.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Be fun. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.