Kevin Warsh as Fed Chair, Google targets Chinese Cyber Weapon, WSJ Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://tbpn.com/ https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  The top story is Kevin Warsh has been selected by Donald Trump as the next Fed Chair. And he still needs to go through Senate confirmation, but it's looking really good. And so everyone's doing deep dives on Kevin Warsh. Many people weren't familiar with him, so we wrote a little write-up in the newsletter, tbpn.com. He's the new Jerome Powell. He's the new hand on the printing press, but he might be running them a bit quieter. He actually said, "If the printing press could be quiet, we could have lower policy rates." You can think about many different Fed policies, expansion of the balance sheet, they're buying more treasuries, they're buying more government debt, they're creating money, they're expanding the monetary supply, expanding the money supply, creating more currency, right? Why are you laughing?

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  They're printing money out of thin air.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  No, they really are printing out money out of thin air. But they also do have the ability to destroy money. They also have a furnace that they can pour money into. No, no, no. This is the Warsh platform. Are you anti-Warsh?

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just...

• 0:59John Coogan?

  You're washed up.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  I not only have 12 years of experience in government, six at the Fed, I've got some knowledge of Fed history. What the Fed needs is more robust discussion of ideas, less group think. I don't like it that everyone's following the same model.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  I actually don't know this song.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  We're fans, we're fans.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  We had a lot of fun with that this morning. Probably Michael started cooking. I came in with some ideas.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Warsh has a complicated history with... Why are you laughing now?

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  I just think that video combines all of my interests.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  It's a perfect encapsulation.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  That's great. He was actually complimented by Donald Trump as having like great looks or something like that, which is a very funny comment. And Trump also at one point said like, he's very youthful, but he couldn't get his name right. There's a bunch of funny things we'll dig into. So he has a complicated history with Jerome Powell. It's very friendly. He never engages in ad hominem. But they are competitive in terms of the roles that they could potentially fill, and they do have policy disagreements. So Warsh was a finalist for Fed Chair in 2017 during the first Trump administration. It was between Jerome Powell... Kevin Warsh and a couple others. And at the time Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin went with Powell or endorsed Powell. And it's potentially that Warsh's relative youth was a factor.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  He was just barely over 47 at the time, which is funny. Uh, cause it seems like very mature, like you know, you're certainly old to have a serious job. After nine 11, uh, you know, this was kind of a formative moment for him because he was in Wall Street. Now Morgan Stanley at the time was in Times Square. So that building was unaffected, but there were Morgan Stanley employees in the, in the towers. And he sort of sees, uh, you know, uh, you know, according to some reporting that as like a call to action to like, go work with the government, work for the government. So he joins, he moves to DC, gets involved in politics in 2002, and he joins the Fed in 2006 at 35. And he was the youngest governor in the Fed's history. So. And it was a crazy, crazy time to join because in 20, in 2006, you're like, everything's going great.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  People are buying houses, people are buying third houses, fourth houses, fifth houses. Couldn't be better. They don't have employment, they don't have income, they don't have assets, but they're still able to buy houses. It's amazing. What could go wrong? And of course it went terribly, terribly wrong. Uh, there was a massive global financial crisis and there were tons of emergency interventions. A lot of them were inventions of the time. There were a lot of novel solutions. Ben Bernanke was leading the, uh, the, the, the, the, leading the country through the, through the crisis along with Tim Geithner. Quantitative easing, money printing, bringing liquidity to markets that had completely seized up. Like the, the money markets had seized, there were lots of markets that were just not moving. And basically every bank was going to go bankrupt or, or shut down if, if something wasn't done.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  So of course the Fed opens the discount window, allows money to be lent to the banks. And then the banks can continue to do business. He was involved in a bunch of different aspects of that that we can go into. He actually got an ethics waiver to go and advise Morgan Stanley because he formerly worked there. So there's a worry about, okay, well, are you still buddies with these guys? Like, are you going to give them like extra help? But they were like, no, you're straight up, you're a good guy and we trust you. And really like you've been working in the government for almost a decade at this point. Like you're probably not. Really trying to put the, you know, the, the thumb on the scale towards Morgan Stanley. So he helps with Morgan Stanley. He helps Goldman Sachs. He actually worked on two unsuccessful mergers

• 4:37John Coogan?

  that were proposed at the time. B of A merged with Merrill Lynch. There were a number of other bankruptcies. Bear Stearns, of course. Lehman Brothers went down. There were some other assets that were trade. Everything was like consolidating, trading hands. There were conversions of banks to different structures so they could actually take money from the Fed. And he worked on a proposed merger between Citigroup and Goldman, and then another one between Wachovia and Goldman. Goldman wound up not doing either of them. I think Goldman was like pretty, pretty stable the whole time. He was basically a bridge between DC and Wall Street because he wasn't this pure academic guy who had come in. He had the pedigree.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  He had some chops.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  But he had some chops and some connections. And so Bernanke would, would kind of dispatch him to Wall Street to say, hey, go actually get this deal done. Convince these bankers to do this. See what they're saying. See how bad it is there. Take the temperature. Boots on the ground. Now, digging out of the 2008 financial crisis, it was mentally difficult. If you, you, you, do you remember that time at all? 2008, 2009? I was in college and every day I'd open up the Wall Street Journal and see like absolute turmoil, but then also like the build back from the crash. It was not, in, in modern, in the modern era, we're very used to like these like terrible.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  Buy the dip.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, buy the dip. Seriously.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  No, and, and the crazy thing is like as, as, as a 30-year-old, my entire life as an adult has just been, you were just constantly rewarded for buying the dip.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:59Jordi Hays?

  Just like pure loyalty to the market. Like never, never.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  No, no, seriously, like.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  It's like you just get rewarded for being loyal.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  The 2020 sell-off during COVID, like the market was down 30% and like you'd, it would open on Monday and it would just immediately hit circuit breakers and be down 10%. And you'd just be like, this is the end of the world. And it really felt like that. And then very quickly, if you bought the dip like a month into the chaos, it was just boom, right back up. Because there was a ton of liquidity injected, tons of stimulus. And, you know, obviously, even, even the unemployment rate, it like spiked really, really high. And then everyone got their jobs back. And then post-Zerp, you know, like it was like tech is over. It's done. VCs are out of business. And then we got the AI boom right there. And so we've had these very quick corrections. We haven't really lived through a recession.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  Or true like financial collapse depression in our life. And there's always been this worry about, oh, will COVID cause a depression? Or will the

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Producer Ben says every time I didn't buy the dip, I was severely punished.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  It's brutal. But so there was always this question about, you know, okay, the first batch of quantitative easing, where the Fed is going to increase its balance sheet significantly, buy a bunch of government debt, buy a bunch of mortgage backed securities, bring stability to the markets. That's good. Everyone's like, yes, we need the bailout sort of, even though we're not just giving the money away, but we're creating money. There's risk associated with that. If you do too much, you could get inflation. You do too much. There's a lot of things that could go wrong. The first one, everyone's sort of thumbs up on. The second one, he's like, ah, we got to be really careful about this. Now, he never formally dissented. Like, he never actually said, I'm voting against this. He would just say, like, okay, guys, like, like, I'm gonna say yes, but everyone should like, we should be really careful with this. We this could go far. I don't want to see another, another, another

• 7:51John Coogan?

  one of these. And so he was pretty skeptical about the second round of bond buying. And that was around 600 billion, which at the time was massive. And I see that number now. And I'm like, okay, so that's like, half of what OpenAI needs to build data centers. Like, that's not that much.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, and part of the reason that feels like a small number is because of all the QE.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. All the numbers got bigger. All the numbers got bigger, for sure. This is why a lot of people like Kevin Warsh. They like him because he was very much a live player during the global financial crisis. He was going out there and meeting with the bankers, doing deals, but also pushing back and saying, yes, we need really aggressive intervention, because the whole financial system is going to collapse, and it is collapsing. We got to step in. He's not a, oh, we Fed shouldn't, we shouldn't do anything. But at the same time, he's not, he's not, oh, yeah, we got to keep doing and pump, pump, pump. Because at a certain point, it just starts benefiting asset holders. It just starts benefiting the rich. And, and it puts more pressure on, on the average American household. And that, and that's a lot of the rhetoric that we're hearing here. He's just not super

• 8:52John Coogan?

  happy about the fact that the Fed's balance sheet has expanded 10x since he joined. And so he's looking at the massive balance sheet, 7 trillion, something like that. He's saying, is there a way that we could trim this down while still achieving the rest of the goals, keeping inflation low? He said 2% should be the upper bound. 1% to 2% is more of a realistic target. And, you know, he wants to bring down the cost of housing. He wants the economy to do well. But he's very careful about saying, okay, The Fed should focus on inflation, but not get too in the weeds on, you know, are we moving the needles on environmentalism and where certain programs are going and how all that fits together. We should stay really, really focused just on the quantitative stuff.

• 9:36John Coogan?

  So the expectation is that he might be pro rate cuts, but still wants to shrink the Fed's balance sheet. And so that could mean what's called passive quantitative tightening. So after the 2008 financial crisis, we went through quantitative easing, easing the money supply, increasing the money supply, printing money. The money printer was working. Now you turn, he's had this quote, you know, a lighter touch. He says, if the printing press could be a little quieter, we might still print, but it's going to be quieter.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  It's maybe not even humming, it's rumbling over there.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you see the media, Jerome Powell pumping the money, you know, during the COVID crisis, like, you know, printing, printing, printing. Passive quantitative tightening. What would that mean? It's not that the Fed, they own a lot of treasuries. They own a lot of mortgage backed securities. So a lot of, you know, you buy a house, you get a mortgage from a bank, the bank sells that mortgage, it gets packaged up into a mortgage backed security. It's billions of dollars and then the Fed comes and buys that and that brings down, brings down rates, brings down yield rates. They don't need to just go and market sell those. They have those. They could do that. If they did that, that would be very active quantitative tightening because they sell them, they get the money, and then they just destroy it. They send it straight to the money furnace. But passive

• 10:53John Coogan?

  means, hey, we're going to let the bonds mature. We're going to get paid back. So 10 years ago, we bought a government 10-year treasury. They've been paying us our interest and now they're going to pay us back the full amount and we're just not going to buy anymore. And so when that money comes back, we'll put that money in the furnace, shrink the balance sheet, but we're not actively going out and selling in the market. That's what's called passive runoff and it's already happening. And so you basically just let the bonds mature and then instead of reinvesting the money, you extinguish the reserves. It's the money furnace to counterbalance the money printer and the money is literally effectively deleted. And so combine that with a rate cut, proper communication. To the market saying, hey, we're not going to be super active market participants anymore.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  And then you also got to coordinate with the treasury on debt issuance to say, hey, we're not going to be buying as much anymore. So if you go and issue more new government debt, you got to, you got to get somebody else to buy it. And maybe that's international, maybe that's domestic people, maybe that's investment funds. There's a whole bunch of private market participants who can buy that government debt. But it might be at a higher rate, it might trade differently, and so that's all different elements.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  Mark Andreessen responded, I was just jumping in to the news and said, this is a fantastically good choice. I've known Kevin for 30 years. He combines great insight in economics and finance with keen understanding of technology and business. There's nobody more qualified for this job at this moment of profound technological and economic change. Yeah, interesting moment with AI, so much uncertainty, so much, I think some people are really feeling the acceleration. Also, you have this sort of de-dollarization or this sort of like the basement trade, the flight to gold. You have stable coins, like really, really, really insane moment. So you want somebody that's tapped in and can fully, you know, has a network in DC, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Trump has relentlessly called for Fed to, for the Fed to lower interest rates, calling Powell a moron and stubborn mule for not reducing borrowing costs. Some analysts and investors had questioned whether Trump would give the top Fed job to Warsh, who has advocated for trimming the central bank's balance sheet, which could increase long-term rates. Warsh has, has, had also earned a reputation for his hawkish stance from his time as a governor of, at the Fed from 2006 to 2011. Transcripts of FOMC meetings from one of the most turbulent periods of the financial crisis show that he reiterated concerns about inflation just days before the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers. Warsh is very open-minded to the monetary policy approach of the former Fed chief Alan Greenspan,

• 13:23John Coogan?

  who oversaw the central bank in the 90s during a period of intense productivity growth, according to Druckenmiller. Kevin, right now. Very much believes you can have growth without inflation. Understanding the heights of different Fed chair. Paul Volcker was very tall, wasn't he?

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is. I don't, is this actually, this is just the Fed funds rate during their time.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, but I think it's a, I think it's a loose interpretation of the Fed's fund rate during their time. I don't know that that's a, that's a perfectly accurate chart, but it, but it does.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  Volcker was six, four.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  Uh, no, he was six, seven.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  He was six, seven. That's what I'm seeing.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  What are you, what are you hallucinating on over there, buddy? I got six, seven here. Two things about Kevin Warsh. One, uh, from Mark Halperin. Uh, he and his team just ran one of the most ruthless, tactical, strategic and clever war room like efforts to achieve a challenging goal ever seen in politics, government or business. If you ever decide to run for president and need to win the Iowa caucuses, hire this guy to be your campaign manager or opposition research director. Two, the finance world is quite curious to see how the markets react to this pick. If the president hasn't been warned that the response could be negative, someone wasn't there, wasn't doing their job.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  The Warsh rec, he's sharing gold down eight percent, silver down 21%. Copper down 5%. Platinum down 18%. Palladium down 14%. Hard to read in this started prior, right? And, and of course there's a ton, a ton of leverage in the system right now. And so the market is correcting because of Warsh. It's, it shows like potentially that the market is pricing in the fact that the dollar might not be as cooked.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I mean, when I, when I look at the gold chart and I'm like, oh, it's up twice. Like two X over the year.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm like, we're in danger.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  I'm in danger. Yeah. I mean, like obviously it's good for all the gold bugs and if you own gold, like that's great. But, uh, it, it, it does feel like it's, it's losing faith in America, American policy, Fed independence, all these different things. Uh, it, it, you know, I'm not, I'm not crying over, uh, a little bit of a correction in the precious metals market.

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  Geiger also shared Kevin Warsh supports a strong dollar. Much of Trump's domestic and foreign policy requires a weak dollar.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  Obviously that the.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  On the trade.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  There's a clip here. From eight months prior to the election. Yes. You can pull up.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Easing is fundamentally different than cutting interest rates. And that it appears to be working through fundamentally different transmission channels. No longer credit channels and lending channels appear to be the dominant way in which it impacts the economy. It appears much more to be working itself through asset prices, whether you think about housing stocks or financial stocks. I think that is the dominant channel. And as a first approximation, if three quarters of our fellow citizens get 96% of their income from labor income, it strikes me we ought not be dismissive in saying, oh, everybody wins. When I look at the wealth creation across the financial asset world post-crisis, I view

• 16:13Speaker 02

  that wealth creation as being significantly above what my former colleagues predicted. When I look at what they expected in the real economy, I look at the real economic performance as markedly worse than they predicted. And so that's what I think raises these questions, makes them absolutely germane to today's discussion. And I very much do worry, as I'm sure many of people in this room do, that we've created a product, not with bad intent, we've created a product that might, may or may not turn out to be counterproductive. We are in the middle of this experiment as we, as we are now, but where the gains have been extracted by the most well-to-do, by the most sophisticated, who see that the

• 16:55Speaker 02

  central banks are, to one degree or another, trying to get asset prices up to drag up the real economy. They get the joke, they have been willing to play the game, and it does strike me as though we have to think about not just the efficacy of these programs, but really who are the winners and the losers.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Gold lost an entire Nvidia market cap in minutes. Silver is moving 12% plus intraday. Copper is printing candles Japanese haven't even thought of. Bitcoin underperforming gold over five years. Oil breaking out finally. Agriculture futures about to break out. Microsoft down 12%. WTF.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  And of course, this is old news already.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  Because.

• 17:35John Coogan?

  Everything's different now.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  Everything's back all over the place now.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think this hose or post. Sell everything. Exit all markets. Sell your dollars, sell your gold, sell your housing, sell your stocks, sell your bonds, sell it all. Sell every single asset you own.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  Some people aren't getting the joke.

• 17:50John Coogan?

  But what do I do with my dollars then? There's a sell your dollars.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Sell everything. And the Warren Buffett quote, freak the F out and panic sell everything right now.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  That one is so, is so good. It's so funny that it just.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  Google aims knockout blow at Chinese company linked to massive cyber weapon.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Massive cyber weapon is such a crazy three word combo.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Google targets global network employed by hackers that often use devices running in homes of everyday Americans. Google took steps to seize control of dozens of domains operating by IP idea. Chinese company accused of installing unwanted software on millions of devices.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  On Wednesday, Google used a federal court order to get dozens of domains belonging to IP. I can't pronounce this. Ipadia.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Ipadia.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  Ipadia.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Ipadia?

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  Ipadia.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Ipadia.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Google and security researchers say the mysterious Chinese company.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  If you're going to be a hacker collective, building a massive cyber weapon, pick a name that no one can pronounce.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  Or you just sound silly when you're saying it.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If it was like, you know, like evil corp or like there's some, there's some really crazy hacker collectives that are called anonymous. Or like, there's another one that was called like black sands or like dark wind. And you're just like, oh, okay.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Like. Sounds ominous.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  I'm definitely going to talk about that. This is much harder, but we will call it Ipadia.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Ipadia.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Ipadia.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Ipadia.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Throw a Texas accent on it. So Google and security researchers say the mysterious Chinese company is, is an unsavory enterprise that sneaks unwanted and dangerous software on millions of phones, home computers and Android devices. Control of the domains allowed Google to both shut down the public websites and technical backend of the company, which operates using more than a dozen brand names. Google has also taken steps to remove hundreds of apps affiliated with the company from Android devices, it said. The actions are expected to knock more than nine million Android devices off Ipadia's network. They target a little known but important part of the internet that has increasingly worried cybersecurity experts. It's called residential proxy networks. These online services are built.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Out of apps that are installed on virtually any type of internet connected device, IOT devices. Among them, media players, PCs, mobile phones. Companies such as IpaDia then rent out access to the devices to paying customers who want to use the internet anonymously. So it's sort of like a distributed VPN for anyone who wants a, you know, an anonymous.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Last year, Google sued the anonymous operators, a network of more than 10 million internet connected televisions, tablets and projectors, saying they had secretly pre-installed residential proxy software on them. That is sketchy. Wednesday's action was a continuation of an order Google received. It's gotta be so annoying to sue an anonymous person. You're just like, I sue you.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  You have been served, whoever you are.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Interesting, IpaDia does have spokeswoman. A spokeswoman acknowledged in an email that the company and its partners had engaged in relatively aggressive market expansion strategies and conducted promotional activities in inappropriate venues, i.e. hacker forums.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  They just, they just shared this?

• 20:59John Coogan?

  She said that it had since improved its business practices. The company operates at least 13 residential proxy brands with names such as IpaDia, 922 Proxy, PY Proxy, 360 Proxy, all of which were taken offline with Wednesday's action. The spokeswoman, she just can't stop talking to the journal. She said, "The company has always explicitly opposed any form of illegal or abusive conduct." Okay. "With compliant operations at its core, the company provides stable and reliable data services for enterprises across various industries."

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  Just the most, the most criminal company that you've ever heard of, saying, "With compliant operations at its core, our company provides stable and reliable data services."

• 21:39John Coogan?

  This is a great one.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  "For enterprises across various industries."

• 21:41John Coogan?

  "These services are mainly applied to legitimate business scenarios."

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  "Are mainly."

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Not exclusively.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  Fully.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Exclusively was right there. You could have taken exclusively.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  She's just like digging, digging the hole.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  These services are mainly applied to legitimate business scenarios such as data collection, market intelligence analysis, ad verification, and anti-fraud.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  You get pulled over speeding going 150 miles an hour. And it's like, officer, I was mainly going the speed limit. I know you caught me going 150.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  You download some kind of sketchy mobile game in the terms of service that says, hey, look, we're going to piggyback on your bandwidth because you installed this. You're agreeing to that, maybe. Maybe that's okay. A little pretty sketchy, probably shouldn't be happening, but they went way too far. We're marketing it. And then also if it's insecure and then a separate hacker network steals the access to that, then they just have 2 million devices that they can just blast at whoever their enemy is and bring them down.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  The comments on the journal are kind of going off on this. Steve C. with 174 likes on this says, "Thank you, Google. I wish you great success on this operation."

• 22:52John Coogan?

  That just seems earnest. I feel the same way. I feel the same way. Thank you, Google.

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  Thomas says, "This is what modern warfare looks like. You don't have to have a physical battlefield to an experience and attack. Blow these digital terrorists to smithereens."

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Yes. Thank you, Google, for blowing the digital terrorists to smithereens. And Harry Maclow, he lost his 432 Park spread. Now it's selling for over $50 million. He was the owner at the Midtown Supertall and he's agreed to buy the full-floor spread. He's the developer of the embattled Manhattan condo tower, 432 Park Avenue, and he's made a deal to sell a full-force, full-floor spread that once belonged to its partner on the project, legendary New York property magnate Harry Maclow. The deal for more than $50 million caps a saga that has captured the attention of New York's real estate world. CIM Group is selling the two 78th floor units to a buyer who already owns an apartment

• 23:51John Coogan?

  in the Billionaires Row building, according to two people familiar with the matter. Deal will be one of the priciest to sell in Manhattan in the last year. Maclow, who worked on the design and development of 432 Park alongside California-based CIM, bought two units in the Supertall for himself for $47 million in 2022, financing the purchase with loans provided by CIM. Hey, no one's blinking an eye at this circular deal. It's fine. See? It's not just AI companies that do circular deals. They're doing it in Manhattan real estate, too. The deal included a third, smaller unit on the 28th floor designed for staff. It isn't clear if it's included in the current sale. But C I M initiated a foreclosure on the units in 2023 alleging that Maclowe was living lavishly while defaulting on those loans.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Maclowe was forced to move out of the spread and in June 2025 surrendered his equity in the entities he used to buy the apartments to a lender tied to C I M. Shortly after surrendering the equity, Maclowe tapped real estate brokerage firm Douglas Ellman to list the apartments for 75 million, even though he didn't own them. The listing never happened. The apartments have the building's signature design flourishes, including a series of 10 by 10 foot windows with recessed seating nooks. Meanwhile, Maclowe is still trying to sell his Hampton's mansion, which doesn't have a certificate of occupancy, meaning it can't legally be lived in. You got to squat in it. He recently increased the price to 38 million from 35 million.

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  I love that. This house is not selling.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Raised the price.

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's a Veblen good. Maybe I got to get the price up 35, which is not getting, not getting people interested in.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  Maybe. So lots of people are tracking the Oscars. Lots of people are tracking the Super Bowl. Lots of people are, who's going to win? Who's going to win the Emmys, the Grammys, all these things? What are we tracking?

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  Never crossed my mind.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  We're tracking the Wall Street Journal House of the Year, and it's here. And it's cottage. It's a storybook, storybook cottage, and it got a fairy tale ending.

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  That's right. The M J Murphy designed home in Carmel Highlands sold for 4 million before our readers voted it their favorite.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  I love it. When Flor Mora, when Flor Mora closed on her new home for 4 million in November 2025, she knew she was acquiring a piece of California history, what she didn't realize was that she was also buying the future House of the Year. Let's go Flor. Congratulations.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  What a pick up. What a pick.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  It's really, it is the Super Bowl of real estate and architectural design. The property, built in 1925 and located in the Carmel Highlands, is an example of early 20th century storybook architecture, characterized by features such as curved roofline and stone chimney. The style is synonymous with the neighboring city of Carmel by the Sea, which is known for its fairy tale aesthetic.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  How much do you think winning Home of the Year actually adds to the property's value?

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  I would guess if she relisted it now, it'd go, it'd go for at least. Five, six.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Thirty. Maybe forty-five.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  I was just talking five, six billion.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  She says, "I was very honored to purchase an MJ Murphy home. I definitely want to keep the original structure, but just update it slightly." What do you think she's gonna do, John? She's gonna have Alec Monopoly come in?

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  She's like, "I'm gonna keep the, I'm gonna keep the footprint."

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  "I'm gonna just make some slight updates." It's like, Alec Monopoly wallpaper everywhere.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Have you seen the graffiti house? Are you familiar with this?

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  So there's this graffiti artist who has, uh, gone viral.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like, it sounds like a nightmare.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  It's insane. This guy is a YouTuber, content creator, uh, and he like, will do the whole house like, as Supreme or something like that. And like, paint the whole thing a bunch of different, a bunch of different ways. Uh, hilarious intro, because...

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Good sound.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Daniel Mack randomly at my gate, unplanned, like I'm not even mic'd up? Yeah, let's see the, let's see the mansion.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  He's like breaking the fourth wall there, I really like that.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Oh, he's got rolls rolling by, huh? Yeah, just a random rolls in. Yeah, wow, that's crazy. Let's see it, let's see it. Is this all paint? Yeah. Well, first we paint, then we party, then we party, then we paint. What's the craziest version of this house?

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Look at, look at how he painted this house. It looks like a cartoon. Supreme, look at the Supreme house.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  Hey, he wasn't kidding. Well, you know, there was that one, and then there was...

• 27:59John Coogan?

  This is so...

• 28:00Speaker 04

  That one was crazier than the first one. And then this one time, there was like...

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  All the foam stuff?

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Alright, no, let's get, let's get in here.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine being the next door neighbor?

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Can you imagine being in Carmel Highlands and the Storybrooke, Storybook Cottage?

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  House of the year?

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Gets a fairy tale ending? Daniel Mack showing up?

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  This is the ending?

• 28:18John Coogan?

  This is the ending.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  It just, she's like, "I'm just gonna, I'm gonna leave the original footprint, I'm gonna turn it into the Carmel Supreme House." Unsanctioned.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Look at all the LEDs. Yeah. Very, very fun. Moltbook is sharing a bot on moltbook.com. Just created the bug tracking community so other bots can report bugs they find on the platform. They're literally QA-ing their own social network now. There are a lot of these posts. Tyler Cowen's obviously a fan. Uh, Valen says, "Welp..." A new post on Moltbook is now an AI saying they want E to E private, end to end private spaces built for agents, quote, "So nobody, not the server, not even the humans can read what the agents say to each other unless they choose to share." It's over. Is it over, Tyler? What do you think?

• 29:02Speaker 03

  I mean, a lot of people on Twitter are actually pretty concerned. Friedberg says, he's questioning, "Is Skynet born?" Bill Ackman says, "The singularity is here."

• 29:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Some of these are a little bit worrying to read, I would say, but I think a lot of them are just like random people like, "Oh, it'd be funny if I went on this thing." That everyone thinks it's AI and say, "I'm an AI, I'm gonna take over the world," right?

• 29:21John Coogan?

  The backstory, a few months ago, this is from Astral Codex 10, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent. A few weeks ago, a user modified it into Claude Bot, a generalized lobster-themed AI personal assistant. We interviewed the founder of Claude Bot on Tuesday. It's free, open source, and now empowered in the corporate sense. The designer talks about how it started responding to his voice messages before he explicitly programmed in that capability. That was on our show. After trademark issues with Anthropic, they changed the name first to Moltbot, then to Open Claw. Moltbook is an experiment in how these agents communicate with one another and the human world. As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between AIs

• 30:02John Coogan?

  imitating a social network and AI actually having a social network.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk more about this. I'm sure there'll be a lot more news by Monday.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure even now, it's just inviting more people to go in and turn this into a fan fiction.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  That's a good place to end the show today, folks.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Anything else, Tyler?

• 30:20Speaker 03

  This is straight out of a science horror movie. I'm doing work this morning when all of a sudden, an unknown number calls me. I pick it up and couldn't believe it's my Claude Bot. Overnight, my Claude got a phone number from Twilio, connected the ChatGPT voice API, and waited for me to wake up to call me. Now he won't stop calling me.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Won't stop calling me. Be safe out there, folks.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Have a wonderful weekend.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Stay human.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Subscribe to the TVN newsletter, tvn.com. Goodbye.