Big Tech turns to mining, Thinking Machines loses top executives, NYC Sauna Wars heat up | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. 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/ 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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Tesla is sharing that they made a ton of progress on their lithium refinery. And then simultaneously, AWS did a deal with Rio Tinto to buy a bunch of copper. Not that much copper, we'll get into how much, but they're sort of underwriting a new a new chemical process for refining copper. And it's also sort of interesting that, you know, Marc Andreessen published the software is eating the world story back in 2011. And I think even the folks in tech who took that seriously were saying, oh yeah, of course. Well, that just means that-

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  I didn't take it seriously. I took it literally.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Took it literally, yeah. But the people that took it seriously were thinking, okay, well, you're going past just the first wave of the internet, the newspapers on the on websites, that type of stuff. And yes, we're going to get the Ubers. We're going to get, you know, more and more tech companies that are consumer facing or business facing, and you might see some transformation in legal services, financial services, logistics, airlines will be using apps to let you book. But we're now in the era where the tech companies are starting to vertically integrate so deep that they own the mines and they own the refineries. And it's not just that they're actually building software for the mining-

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not software, it's technology eating the world.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's a new layer of vertical integration that sort of just crept up on me because it wasn't an issue until the AI boom really necessitated massive, massive industrial scale build outs, new industrial policy, which admittedly can't turn on a dime, but we're now two, three years into the chat GPT boom, into the AI boom, the data center build outs are getting bigger, we're seeing bottlenecks all over the place, whether it's chip shortages or energy shortages. And so, you know, the companies like Tesla, AWS, a lot of other folks are really looking deep into the supply chain, all the way into the ground, into literally eating the world.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Because I see mining as a sort of terraforming, I see it in some ways as as literally eating the world, like you said. Amazon's buying the first new copper produced in America in over a decade. It's a very exciting project and Tesla now has a Texas facility that can convert raw ore directly into battery-grade lithium hydroxide. It's a more efficient process. We can get into that. Tesla originally broke ground on this lithium refinery operation in May of 2023. It feels like they were sort of quiet about it, but now they're getting a lot louder. Obviously, the narrative around China controlling 90% of rare earth extraction and rare earth elements has been in the news and this is sort of their response.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Refinery is the first spodumene to lithium hydroxide refinery in North America. We're deploying a new technology platform that is inherently much more environmentally friendly and cleaner, it's a simpler process.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  It's not that big of a facility and this should be able to create enough lithium for 500,000 vehicles a year, EVs a year, maybe a million a year, I've heard. Now Tesla is shipping 1.65 million, so this won't be 100%, but you copy paste this two, three times and you got enough coverage for all, for the entire Tesla fleet.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Take it through a kiln and cooler. From there, we take it through an alkaline leach and additional purification steps, take it into crystallization and produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide. Our process is more sustainable than traditional methods and eliminates hazardous byproducts and instead produces a co-product named annalime used in concrete mixes.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  From breaking ground in 2023 to running rock through the kiln in 2024 to start a full integrated plant.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  Guy looks so tired. He's just like, yeah, it's been, it's been great working for Elon. Ah, hi, I love it.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been relatively relaxed here.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The, you know, we sleep in the factory. In this case, it's just dirt, but sleeping in the dirt, surprisingly comfortable.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  This refinery really enables us to have access to the critical minerals for energy storage, for battery manufacturing.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  Good Texas music.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  And it enables us to accelerate Tesla's mission by regionalizing supply chains for battery minerals and materials, by providing jobs, by cutting emissions from the transportation network that's required for those supply chains. That really allows us to usher in energy independence for North America.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Who would have thought that Texas would be the home of EV domination?

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  I know, narrative violation.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  California really dropped the ball. Tesla's shipping 1.65 million. That was a little lower than the previous year. I think they were up at 1.7 million, but you get a couple of those facilities and it should be enough to cover everything that they need. There's been a whole bunch of news around rare earth minerals generally. Last year, a company called Iconic or Ionic Mineral Technologies made a large discovery of 16, 16 different types of minerals in Utah late last year. This was in December.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  As we do.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has been funny. There have been rumors about this, but they found a huge deposit of, of all these different minerals. Amazon's partnership with Rio Tinto is a little bit different. They're not fully vertically integrated like Tesla is, but they are partnering with Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto had been working on a new method of refining low-grade copper deposits. So basically like there's a fair amount of copper in the ground, but there's a lot of dirt, a lot of other stuff that you have to process out. That can be very expensive, but because of the data center expansion exploding, the price of copper has, I think, nearly doubled in the past two years. Copper is not the main ingredient to an AI data center, a token factory, but it is important because the

• 5:48John Coogan?

  biggest data centers use tens of thousands of metric tons of copper to move electricity around. So you need wires. There's copper in circuit boards. There's wire in the, there's copper in the transformers that move electricity around. And there's tons of miscellaneous electrical components all over a data center that need copper. So this particular AWS Rio Tinto deal is only 1,400 metric tons over four years. Years, I don't even think that's enough for a single AWS data center. But it's allowing Rio Tinto to underwrite this sort of risky new process methodology. That if it works and they get the price down on this new process, then they can apply that to tons more copper reserves.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  That's locked up in, you know, messy, messy ore that otherwise would be uneconomical to refine. Uh, 70% of the global supply of copper uh is currently locked away in ore. That's not economical to refine into actual copper right now. So if this new process technology works, you effectively triple the amount of copper. You triple the supply and so price should fall. It's doubled, you triple the supply, maybe price comes down. Uh, good news for anyone who's in the copper market.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  Rio Tinto, some quick backstories, one of the world's largest and oldest mining operate uh corporations with a history that spans over 150 years. Uh, name is inspired by the Rio Tinto in southwestern Spain. Uh, but uh, the founding again goes back to the mid 19th century. Spanish government was facing financial crisis and they started selling off their older mines. And so crazy story of just like a very old company, you know, continuing to be uh, a key player in an entirely new tech trend.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also for lithium ion, they do some stuff there. They had one investment that I think they wrote down, then they spun another one up. They've been uh, back and forth. X freeze broke the Texas lithium ion uh lithium refinery down a little bit more. It's the first in North America to convert the raw ore into battery grade lithium hydroxide, skipping intermediate steps in the long term, probably more economical. It went from groundbreaking to first production in just 19 months. An unheard of timeline at this scale. The process is cleaner, no hazardous waste, a useful byproduct that can be turned into concrete. The single refinery can supply lithium for over 500,000 EVs per year and directly challenges China's 60% grip on global lithium refining. Uh, Elon chimed in and said it sounded like I.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Saw another number that was maybe closer to a million, but either way you do two or three of these and you're good. As we predicted in our annual predictions episode at the start of the year, unless someone shows up with super conductivity or carbon nano tubes. Copper is the only game in town and AI is a huge demand driver for a very under-resourced material. So he's taken a victory lap with his thesis on copper. And speaking of AI, there is turmoil in the trade wars, in the talent wars. Breaking, Thinking Machines has terminated its CTO, Barrett Zoff, due to unethical conduct. According to two sources familiar with the matter, CEO Mira Maradi announced the news in all hands with employees today. Sumit Chintala will be taking over as CEO.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  And Mira posted as well, confirming the news, she said, we have parted ways with Barrett. Sumit will be taking the new CTO of Thinking Machines role. He is a brilliant and seasoned leader who has made important contributions to the AI field for over a decade. And he's been a major contributor to our team. We could not be more excited to have him take on this new responsibility.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  And Alex Heath actually has some new news.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  Broke thirty minutes ago. He says more Thinking Machine employees are in the process of joining OpenAI. After three of the startup's co-founders rejoined yesterday.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  Of course, the Thinking Machine co-founders had previously been at OpenAI. Not great. I think potentially more controversial news was that Thinking Machines has branded squat racks at the office.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Peterson posted a photo.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Ryan posted this.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people, a lot of people took this as somewhat of a red flag, right? People say, you know, the, the sort of common guidance is don't make merch until you're generating some real revenue.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  Right? And so if you take that further, it's like, maybe you shouldn't have.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  What was Ryan doing to get this photo?

• 10:13Jordi Hays?

  I think he just walked by.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  He's going journalist mode here. You see this? He's like, he's not in.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  So if you zoom in, you can see these things look fantastic. So.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  Well, Ryan, you're, you're outside.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm somewhat.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  You're outside the Thinking Machines branded gym.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm somewhat, uh, somewhat envious. Uh, these things look fantastic. I'm kind of mad that, that we didn't get the branded, uh, plates. But this coming out while losing, you know, half of your family.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  It has to be weird. I mean, how, how much did they raise? It was two billion at 12 billion, something like that. It's gotta be so weird to start a company and on day one have enough money for a custom gym. That's just like unheard of. Like normally you, you, you start your company in the garage and maybe there's a weight in the corner you can lift or kettlebell.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  One dumbbell, not even two.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  One kettlebell or something, but to just come in and say, yes, we're taking class A office on day one, uh, hiring a massive team, uh, bringing on six, six or seven co-founders.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  Atlas was saying like the other red flag is where are the, where are the 45? I think, I think I'm gonna assume they're just not in sight, you know, like you can't see them, right? They would be, they would be mounted, they would be mounted lower, right? On the rack. In case you forgot, Andrew Tullock left Thinking Machines in Q4 of last year.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  Zuck had been trying to poach him and, and offered, uh, increasing amounts of money. The sense is that Andrew was like, you know, I can't be bought.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  But he, he needed the money. He needed, he needed, he, he, he had a shopping cart filled with Chrome Hearts Supreme. And, and he was like, wow, like my next outfit's gonna run me 500 mil. I gotta get a new job. I can't afford it. I can't afford my lifestyle. Maybe it was a case of lifestyle inflation. They talk about that.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, do you remember the final amount that Meta paid? It was like, uh, cause, cause I, I always appreciate.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  There were a lot of rumors. It was in the billions though.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  Like my, in my head, it was like Andrew was like, yeah, like I, I'm really like honored that you would make such a big offer, Zach, a billion dollars. But like unfortunately, like I'm a mission driven, uh, there's really no price, uh, that I would take to leave the company that I started.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  And Zuck's like, two billion.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Well, so I, I think, uh, I think all the rumors were actually from the summer when there was like the, all of the talent wars going on. So first there was, I think it was just one billion and then.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Just one.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  There were rumors of three and a half. And that being turned down, but then later in the year, then he eventually.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Okay, so people kind of assume that the rumor is true because uh because it uh he eventually made the move.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I mean, it's not necessarily higher than three and a half, right? Because now we're seeing more people leave. Like, why are they leaving?

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  You know.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  At one point, um, one of my buddies who works at a big lab, he was saying a- at that time, Think Machines has like the best team.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  Like any of the big labs.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  There was already immense amount of pressure and like a really, really, really high expectations on Thinking Machines around what they put out first. I don't think these these people leaving, maybe it makes it harder to deliver, right, on those expectations, but the expectations are still sky high. I did feel like kind of rough messaging, uh, very, very rough messaging, right? You know, pushing this like unethical conduct angle. People at OpenAI have obviously their bias, but they've denied it.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Some quick thoughts on Barrett Zoff and Mattson Schoholz, going back to OpenAI. Barrett was the vice president post-training at OpenAI before he left for Thinking Machines. He left OpenAI in September of 2024. Barrett would have probably would have probably initially had options for about 10 to 30% of Thinking Machines. That's insane. They had six co-founders. How could that be so high? Post-training was one of the more valuable skills that launched, I suppose. Okay. The seed round was $2 billion at $12 billion. So this would mean that he would have options now for around 8 to 25% of the current company. This seems all hypothetical here. There were rumors back in November that Thinking Machines was in talks to raise at 50 to 60 billion. So this puts his equity at $4 billion to $15 billion valuation.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  Thinking Machines could probably exit somewhere at between 30 and 60 today.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Who has that money? I don't know. Maybe Nvidia buys them or something.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  At least at some point in the over- over the next two years. I think the most likely acquirers would probably be Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia. Okay, large cap company that wants to build a frontier model. Barrett would have been just over his one-year cliff, so assuming he was not fired for cause or thinking he doesn't want to litigate. He still has about one to three billion.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  That part's incorrect. How does that math work?

• 14:49John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's called thinking machine now because there's only one left. No, there are three left, so it's still plural.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  Reading into this, I mean, there's got to be some real excitement on OpenAI has just been outflows, outflows, outflows. Getting some of these superstars back on board has got to be good for Meron.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  So is this what the elves and Valinor? Do we know what Rune was posting about? Because we learned that Rune posts the elves have left for Valinor every two years, apparently.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Okay, well, he posted it once before, yeah, in 2024, about in January 22nd.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so now, he posted this like on the 12th, so three days ago. I think most people have now taken it to mean, to be about this, right? People leaving, thinking machines going back to OpenAI. But I think there's a couple of ways you can look at it, right? So if you look at it in the context of the last time he said this, it was the exact same quote, the elves had left for Valinor. Like, okay, what is Valinor in Lord of the Rings, right? Valinor is where elves go, so they don't like diminish, or like they don't like kind of fade away.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  So it's, okay, what does that mean? Like, maybe it's, you're just basically securing like massive wealth, right?

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Or the other way to read that is like you go to, you go to like one of these newer labs and you could be a superstar, but your, your abilities could fade away with time, right? Because you just don't have the scale or the resources.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  So I think in the 2024 context, Valinor actually was the Neo Labs, right? Because you can basically go start a company, be the co-founder, you guys raise at 12 billion. You're just like, let's go, like, yeah, you just secured insane amount, like massive bag.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  But then now.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Now OpenAI is Valinor.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  OpenAI is now Valinor, right?

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  They're setting aside 50 billion just for pay packages.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  If you go back, I mean, you're doing pretty well.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  It's another bag.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  It's pretty safe, right? You don't, you don't have this startup, you know, you're not sure if it's going to work or not.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's focused on the AI wars, not enough attention going to the Sauna wars. The real heated rivalry is at the bathhouse.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  From bathhouse to other ship to altar. A wave of bathhouses in New York City are popping up just blocks apart.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  Igniting a war of zen. This is especially relevant to the TVPN team because

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  we've been in somewhat of a Sana war ourself, which we'll get into at some point in the story. The Flatiron District in Manhattan has been a center of nouveau wellness for around 15 years with its many boutique fitness classes, gyms, acupuncturists, and stretching and recovery centers, now a wave of bathhouses that offer dry heat and cold plunges face off in a few blocks. There is Bath House on West 22nd with others shipped two blocks away, and Alter is set to open this winter. You could walk between all three in mere minutes. Williamsburg has its own cluster, right, in parallels. It's like a supercluster. Welcome to the sauna wars, where dedicated bathhouses compete with members' clubs like West Village's Continuum, which costs $40,000 per year, that has a bathhouse setup and

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  the financial district co-working space, WSA's Wet Lounge as well. Co-working space with a wet lounge, not something you hear about every day. The fitness chain TMPL has a whole subway ad campaign entirely around their bathhouse facilities, featuring women in swimsuits reclining in a suggestive way that one doesn't really find in saunas in real life. And of course, the Russian and Turkish baths in the East Village, which is the sort of place newcomers are brought to see a slice of the real New York City. It's usually teaming with people, some getting whacked by bushels of oak leaves in a treatment called plazza, and has two owners who rotate weeks of ownership. That's interesting. It's no frills and even a little gritty. For those who are used to conveniences such as booking ahead, there's

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  none of that to be found. They do have a nod to modernity with an active TikTok account featuring guest endorsements, recently highlighting Uma Thurman wrapped in a pashmina and calling it "one of the greatest, best New York institutions." The first time I went to 10th Street Baths was in 2007. I love the authenticity and how it made me feel. "I would find my way back there when I felt depleted, underslept, whatever it might be. I would come out feeling great," says James O'Reilly, who is one of the founders of the co-working space, Noi House. His latest project is the new Lore Bathing Club. This is where you go if you want to cultivate lore in your life, I guess. Founded alongside restaurateur Adam Elzer, Lore takes some inspiration from the Russian and Turkish baths,

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  as well as the communal sweat traditions of Europe and Asia. And drops it into a 6,200 square foot space finished in travertine and white oak in NoHo. The bath world is quite a scene, one where skincare brands such as Pharrell Williams, Human Race, send out a press release to announce they're temporarily supplying Lor locker rooms with their signature 7D gel sets. What is a 7D gel set? Tyler.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  Other Chip is hosting comedy nights. Alter will be selling bathing suits that are custom made in Brazil and has hired a lighting designer who has worked with Billie Eilish. It is a sauna boom reminiscent of the glut of boutique fitness studios that flooded the market in the wake of the success of SoulCycle. It used to be that you would go to a gym and it was outrageous to go to an expensive group class, says Jafari, but now there are 99 boutique fitness concepts in a four-mile radius. Still, there are not as many as the peak days pre-pandemic. Not every boutique fitness studio survive, let alone thrive like Solid Core and Tracy Anderson. Competition is always something we are aware of, says Emily Bent, Other Chip's co-founder and director of marketing. The saturation in North America for bathhouses is not even close to what it is in Europe.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  We're starting an industry and rising tides and all that. While the message from founders blissed out on 180-degree heat is one of bringing together community and good vibes, the reality can be cutthroat. Consider the case of Bath House, probably the most well-known of the businesses in the second wave of New York City sauna culture. Co-founders opened their first location in Williamsburg in 2019 and a second in Flatiron in 2024, both featuring sauna steam rooms, warm pools, and cold plunges. Goodman, the founder, saw the company's more is more approach through the model of working on large event production. You think like an experienced designer, so going to Bath House is not a monolithic experience, but more of a choose-your-own adventure. When it first opened, Bath House was jokingly called the Bitcoin Bath House as they used

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  the heat generated from mining to warm the tubs.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Being a meta, we gotta talk about meta because they just laid off 1,500 people in their metaverse division. Obviously, 1,500 people is a ton. That's a lot of people, but they still have 14,000 people working on Reality Labs. So there's a question about like, what exactly will they be doing? How much does this represent a shift? The Reality Labs team worked on a bunch of different stuff and it started as sort of, you know, the Oculus acquisition of VR headset, then all of a sudden it was Meta Raybands, which is, you know, mostly just a camera. Certainly not a VR headset, but has, it feels like it's sold many more units. I actually don't know the precise numbers.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm super curious how, how many of those 1500 people will end up working in VR as in their next role?

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Somewhere else?

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's just like, can the, can the industry really?

• 22:07John Coogan?

  Absorb that?

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Absorb that many people?

• 22:09John Coogan?

  A year after the name change in Pivot, the Journal reported that the company's flagship Metaverse product called Horizon Worlds was failing to catch on with users. It had less than 200,000 monthly active users and most so-called worlds were never visited by anyone at all.

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  I still believe Meta is a fantastic name for Meta.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think Salesforce should rename? I wanted to ask Benny off that yesterday. If he's ever just gonna go Force.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Metal Force.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Just Force. Metal Force would be a good name. Meta's been ramping up AI, spending on AI, pushing its capital expenditure to 72 billion last year with plans to accelerate that spending this year. It's also doled out offers worth tens of millions, tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to AI researchers and engineers and recently acquired a Singapore-based AI startup called Manus for more than 2 billion. Company's Ray-Ban smart glasses equipped with AI have also started to take off. The company sold more than 2 million pairs and has delayed the rollout of its newest glasses in Europe as it struggled to keep up with demand in the US. The sort of Ben Thompson takeaway from this was that even though Mark Zuckerberg has effectively complete control over Meta and can rename the company and move very aggressively

• 23:19John Coogan?

  and acquire big companies, at the end of the day, he does respond to shareholders and the shareholders have been watching the Reality Labs losses pile up billions every year. And at some point, if you have a new sort of big, you know, money pit initiative that's AI and you're gonna spend tens of billions there, you have to sort of make a sacrifice or at least like show the shareholders that you're refocusing on the new thing.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I wanted to go back briefly to the, to the son of things.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  I didn't get a chance to give a take.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  I am. Extremely bullish on Americans starting to sweat more.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  Because the evidence is like so clear that if you use a sauna every day.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  You will probably extend your house band lifespan. It's heavily, heavily studied just because of how popular it's been in the Nordics for like decades and decades. So very bullish on sweating. One of the things that's interesting though is that New York is like the center of consumption, right? People have tiny apartments, so they're just constantly consuming, right?

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  Food, you know, exercise, shopping, etc. But I don't think it's representative of the way that the Americans will like sweat broadly. Because you can get a sauna for like a couple of grand. And so all these bathhouses are like a few hundred dollars. And so I think for some people, they want the social experience. Whereas for me, I don't like the, I'm not really like that into the.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  You don't like talking in the sauna?

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  I do like talking in the sauna. We've obviously had our sauna wars. Our sauna wars are, I guess we were talking too loudly in the sauna the other day. Cause this guy just absolutely, absolutely snapped. I, I was, he was a bit of an angry elf. But, but anyways, like the most, most consumers are going to be looking like, I can go and buy a sauna for $2,000.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  And I have space for it because I have a two-car garage and a backyard and maybe a pool. And like for the average American, it has a little bit.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Last time I lived in an apartment, this was like six or so years ago.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  I had a whole cold plunge that I snuck into my apartment.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  No way.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  In the sauna, just, I had a two-bedroom loft.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  You had a sauna too?

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I had two. So I had a two-bedroom, I had a two-bedroom loft. And in one of them, I just put a, it was just like a cold plunge on a wooden floor.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  And I had a sauna.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Of course, I don't think you're allowed to bring like a mini swimming pool into your.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  No way. If it leaks, you're gonna destroy the whole.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I did, they did eventually tell me I had to get rid of it because there was a leak in the building.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  And they went in to look. You have to understand as you're, you know, for other ship in these companies, like you have to go, I think, into dense areas where people don't have a lot of space and have saunas. Because a lot of people are gonna look and say, either have one in my gym or. I can, you know, people can go and just, even if they don't have the two grand, you can use a firm and like you're effectively paying a couple hundred bucks a month for like a private

• 26:16John Coogan?

  private

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  experience.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Beijing has told Chinese firms to stop using CrowdStrike.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  If you didn't have a reason to start using CrowdStrike, this is a pretty

• 26:26John Coogan?

  Is this the TVP N effect? They saw, they saw us run a couple ads over in Beijing and they were like, yeah, they're too powerful.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  Too powerful.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  They're too powerful. Yeah, homegrown cars.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, this is already very tiny business for CrowdStrike, so not super impactful.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  But in other news, OpenAI's number one hater in the entire world, Nick.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Is back on the timeline.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he was the hater, OpenAI hater of the year last year.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  He's probably, he's really gunning for it again this year.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  His camera roll is all just pictures of Sam Altman.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Trying to go for a double

• 27:00John Coogan?

  It's all, his camera roll is just all Sam Altman photos, for sure. OpenAI and Sam Altman backing a new bold take on fusing humans and machines. It's called Merge Labs. We've heard about this before. We talked to Rob Taves. They now have uh, two hundred and fifty-two million dollars in the bank and an all-star, all-star crew.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  Sam Altman wrote in 2017, a piece called The Merge. I'll read and uh, short, a few paragraphs on it. He said, "More important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen. Genetic enhancement is going to happen. Brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves. The Merge can take a lot of forms. We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a Merge is probably our best-case scenario of two different species, both want the same thing and only one can have it.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  In this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond. They're going to have a conflict. Imagine if dolphins, imagine if Benioff has been working with the dolphins to secretly help them merge and they're like in a, in a crazy dolphin-human race to see who can merge first. Because it's that dolphins basically created

• 28:13John Coogan?

  We need neural links in dolphins so that we can just like generate B2B SaaS product ideas constantly.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  Billionaire Rams owner Stan Kronke.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Oh, he's a land back.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  Biggest private land owner.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  For Stan, let's Stan, are you a Stan Stan?

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  He's listening to the show.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  I'm a Stan Stan and Stan Stan.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  Buying nearly 1 million acres of New Mexico ranch land. Farmland investing becomes increasingly popular, especially now that, you know, maybe somebody comes in and wants to build the data center on your farm and pay, you know, 10 times what you paid for it. At 2.7 million acres, Kronke's holdings are larger than Yellowstone National Park, or the equivalent roughly 2 million football fields. According to the trade publication, Singleton Ranch's transaction is the largest land purchase in the U.S. in more than a decade. Land is back.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Back on the menu.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Speaking of land, Greenland is in the news, of course. Dylan says, this is the equivalent of affordability in Greenlandic politics. And he shares a screenshot here. It's a quote from a Greenlander who says, I hunt whales and seals. In the United States, they think whales and seals are cute and shouldn't be hunted. That's what I'm afraid of. Don't bring your fear of hunting. Don't, don't bring, oh, whales are cute.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  I like this, he's looking for a carve out, he's looking for a carve out.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Let me keep hunting my whales. Let me keep hunting my seals.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  What if, what if, what if, what if he's selling the blubber out the back door to power data centers?

• 29:46John Coogan?

  We got flashbangs, we'll throw a flashbang in the ocean. All the whales will be doing this.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  I think I'm against whale hunting. They're just so majestic.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  Majestic, that's, that's a synonym for cute.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  But seals.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  You're the problem. Oh, you don't like seals.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  I have deep beef with seals. Growing up surfing in the cold waters in Northern California, seals will, will like mess, would mess with me. I'd be out alone surfing in Northern California, water's very sharky. And these things are the dogs of the sea. So they'll run up and they would just slam into me. And all of a sudden, I think I'm getting attacked by a shark. And then I'd just be in the water by myself beefing with a seal.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  This is incredible skill issue for you. Oh, seals annoying me. Oh, I need, I need, I need, I need seals to be hunted. It's fine. Hang out with the seals. Let the seals mess with you. They're, they're the dogs of the sea.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much for tuning in. Have a wonderful afternoon. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you very soon. Goodbye.