Datacenter Protests, Paramount WB Bid Clears Key Hurdle, The 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 is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ 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 Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.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/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn 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://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.

• 0:02Jordi Hays?

  Charlie Crotoville says, "We won, no data center, and they have to build a park."

• 0:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  This got 3 million views, 222,000.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  That ratio is crazy, right?

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  Crazy, crazy ratio.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Gary Tan responds and says, "A fully built 1 gigawatt data center complex generates around $31 million per year in state taxes and $61 million per year in local taxes from data center operations alone. Also, it creates roughly 430 direct jobs at the facility itself, plus many more indirect and construction phase jobs." So, nearly $100 million a year in local taxes based on this analysis by the Consumer Energy Alliance. So, maybe these data centers need to be leading with that more. Think about how many parks you can build.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  Think about how many roads you can repair.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  New buildings, schools that you'll be able to build.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Locally, if you have one of these. You know, we've talked about this at length, but it's understandable that citizens will be like, "I don't need the data center in my backyard to use ChatGPT, so why would I want it?" But if you're gonna have, you know, nearly nine figures in, in, uh, local and state taxes that you can direct.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  There is another solution here. You could build a jungle gym that has GPUs embedded in the slides and in the swings, and so you get a little bit of.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  You know those rolly slide things?

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  So if those were generating.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  That generates electricity. Oh, yeah. I know. I'm thinking what you're thinking.

• 1:26Jordi Hays?

  I like where you're going.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Of course. Put the kids to work. If they're swinging, I want to capture that electricity and turn it into tokens.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  And Reggie James, creative director of General Catalyst and friend of the show, says, "You mean to tell me the meme of creating a permanent underclass hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of the public? Shocking."

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Very good point. Uh, let's pull up this video because, uh, it is a pretty wild reaction. Let's get sound and start it back.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  They cancelled it!

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  They cancelled it!

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  It's like the Lil Yachty, Lil Yachty.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. The Lil Yachty walkout.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  They got a soundboard?

• 2:20John Coogan?

  It does seem like a deal. Keep chanting. Your Netflix recommendations just got .1% less accurate.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  New Jersey?

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  They actually have a live band?

• 2:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting because the, the, the, the, the pushback against data centers, like it really is this like meme of creating a permanent underclass, like that type of thing because you, I, I would, I would be so much more expecting of this pushback if it was like, oh, well, we know that like living next to a data center is dangerous for your health. Like, that is not the meme. The meme is like, maybe your power rates will go up, but it's sort of unclear and they might offset that. They're sort of ugly, but they're not the biggest, craziest thing that you could put there. It really is just about like, I don't like what it produces abstractly. And so I don't want the concrete.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  I don't like what it stands for.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. I don't like what it stands for. It, it, it's a little bit different than, than, I, I think a lot of people do.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Says, for real though, data centers filling up Northern Virginia is super annoying and ugly. They're like 600 now.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  They gotta make them look better.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay. So you were joking about the jungle gym, but there is that, I, I, you've probably seen it. There's in Denmark, there's the ski hill that's on top of the power plant.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Have you seen that?

• 3:35John Coogan?

  No, I haven't seen that. I, I, I thought you were going to mention the, have you seen the stealthy cellphone towers? So there are cellphone towers all over Los Angeles that are dressed up like trees.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they always get me.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  They always get you?

• 3:47Jordi Hays?

  You can't tell. I'm kidding.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  Of course you can tell.

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  From very far away.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  They do sort of like fade into the background and you don't notice them as much as like a full on crazy cell tower in your face. AI folks have about four months to pull a cure for cancer out of the latent space before we drift into Butlarian Jihad Attractor Basin. Yeah.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  Jihad.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  Butlarian Jihad is from Dune. They don't want computers, so they use spice and they travel around that way. Yeah, it's really popular. I mean, we talked to Sagar and Jetty about this. It's bipartisan. It's, it's very, very broad support against data center build out. And there doesn't seem to be anything that's, that's pushing back against it. And I was thinking more about the, uh, the cure for cancer thing because, you know, Microsoft Excel has been useful in medicine. You use Microsoft Excel to catalog how patients are doing, track a bunch of blood work, create a correlation. Okay, the, these people got placebos, these people got the real cancer treatment. Now we know for sure and it just sped it up a little bit. You could have done it on

• 4:50John Coogan?

  paper, but doing it in Excel probably moved things forward just a notch. You got the cancer cure like a couple of months earlier, a little bit cheaper, a little bit faster. And that's sort of like diffusion story is ridiculously unsexy. Like it's not attractive at all. No one, no one wants to talk about it. I, I, I had this riff.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  People want one simple trick.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  I had this riff for a while that the debt markets were critical in the space race. Like you, you actually do need to finance rocketry with debt. You need efficient capital markets to build rockets, but everyone likes to look at rockets. No one wants to look at debt covenants. And so rocket engineers get all the credit when in fact, some of the credit does in fact belong to the financiers that make large scale industrial projects possible. People, you know, love the bridge, but they don't think about the financiers that make it possible. But as, as silly as that sounds like, it really is an important step in the chain. And AI, it might be that more than like the magical, you know, cure for cancer

• 5:55John Coogan?

  that you pull out of latent space. It's going to be tricky. Like I, I think even if we do see a boom in cancer drugs and we hear testimonies from scientists that, oh yeah, like AI definitely like sped me up. Like the ticker tape parade is going to happen for the scientists. Like we know Jennifer Duden is named for discovering mRNA and CRISPR. Like we don't know the software stack that she used when she was analyzing.

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  We gotta find out.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  We, we do, because that's the real hero.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  It's not the real hero, but it's an important hero in the story that we just don't tell because it's abstract and diffuse.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video from Architectural Digest of this beautiful, sustainable power plant with a ski slope on its roof.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  So you can actually ski on this? Wait, you ski on the grass? You can ski on grass?

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  It works.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  I had no idea.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean presumably in winter, there would be some snow on it.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Is the building industry, the building industry accounts for one third of all CO2 emissions and we need to bring that down.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  This thing looks so cool.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  This is cool. This is cool.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  Sustainability go hand in hand.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  Trey in the chat would be totally cool with more data centers in Virginia. I imagine if you had extreme sports on the roof.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Do a deal with Red Bull. Get the FPV drones out there.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  Red Bull sponsored data center.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  The next X Games on data centers. Yeah. I mean, the Olympics are coming. If you want to build a data center in LA, why not build an Olympic Village as well?

• 7:27Speaker 04

  We want to design the future of the buildings that we would like to live in.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  My name is Jakob Lange. I'm a partner and architect at the architecture firm Bic or Bjarke Ingels Group. We're standing here at the Copenhagen hill, the tallest mountain in Copenhagen.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's calling the building a mountain.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  A little more than 10 years ago now, we started a competition to design the facade of this building. We were struggling for quite a while, but in one of the design meetings, we were talking about the fact that...

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Thrasher Magazine needs to get on this deal flow. Completely agree. Are you a Thrasher Magazine guy?

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  I love Thrasher. I haven't been a subscriber in probably 10 years, but...

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how did we not know about this?

• 8:27John Coogan?

  This is amazing. Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  I knew about it.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Buried in...

• 8:31Speaker 03

  You did. You did.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Buried in the European stagnation thesis is the most white pill of all white pills.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful structure.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  No, I mean, this goes viral every like few months. I've seen this a bunch on...

• 8:42John Coogan?

  We gotta do it.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  You should post it. Say, why is no one talking about what's it called?

• 8:46John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. You gotta know.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  But I'm saying people are talking about this.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  No, no one's talking about this. We're the first people to talk about this. Um, yeah, uh, it feels like Apple would be one to do this. It's, it's in line with the Google branding. Like, there's so many companies that are ready to sort of pick up what this is, you know, all about and, and do a promo video.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Put plants on the roof of the data center. It takes a building that looks dystopian and cold.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, also just build them underground, right? And then put the park on top of it. I don't know. It just seems like there's so many easy ways.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Matt over on X says, there's an abandoned Brooks Brothers office in my town would make a lovely data center. So he's, he's taking the other side. I think if you left the sign.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  And it was just Brooks Brothers, you kind of revitalized the sign, redid the kind of landscaping, but then put a data center in it.

• 9:36John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's head over to.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  Time Magazine?

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  Zaleo. He came in pretty hot on the reaction. He said, Team Cope made the cover of Time.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the people versus AI, a lot of.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Behind the growing backlash. I mean, the growing backlash is real. It actually makes a lot of sense to do a portrait and a profile on, uh, all the different voices that are here. Cause some of them are, who are lawmakers, some of them are pundits, some of them are analysts, some of them are environmentalists, some of them are lawyers, all sorts of different folks.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  Did you read it yet, Tyler? Why are you laughing?

• 10:08John Coogan?

  In protest, you won't.

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  Team Cope is funny.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Team Cope is funny. Yeah, people took this all over the place. The people versus the wheel, grunts from the silent majority, dragging rocks and rolling is a drag. People are having a lot of fun, uh, about this.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  The horses versus the car.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  The horses versus the car. Uh, at the same time, like this, the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, well, obviously AI is gonna happen. So this is, you know, it's inevitable. It's like, no, these, these, like, we live in a democracy. Like, if they vote, no more data centers. Look at what happened to nuclear people. Like, you keep comparing AI to splitting the atom. I was just watching some video, uh, and, and the guy was saying like, AI is the most incredible human invention. It's up there right with, with when we split the atom. And I'm like, well, I know how that ended. We got a bunch of nuclear weapons that we didn't even fire at each other. It just became a cold war. So really zero economic value. From that, just a lot of people building and then putting them in silos.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  And then a couple nuclear power plants that eventually got regulated out of existence. We'd never got a nuclear future of energy. And so it is possible that like, society can just freak out and be like, actually, we're doing non-proliferation. That's a possible outcome here.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  So like, Hill says this is why we need data centers in space.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Elon looking pretty smart.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  Even if the timelines that have been thrown out are aggressive.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  On a longer time horizon.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  No, you're not gonna have to push back there.

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  And Trey, really coming in with the most obvious solution. Blimp data centers, just put them over, put them over the Pacific.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Float them over there. Rob over on X has found some information on the Twitter deal trial. I believe this is the case around the Twitter employees that did not actually get their severance.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  It says the class action brought by former Twitter investors against Elon Musk. I actually don't know that much about this particular case, but there was a pool of 92.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  They think Twitter was worth more than 44 billion?

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Well, maybe they had stock options that were canceled. Maybe, maybe they are employees, but they're counted as investors in this case because it's a SEC violation instead of an employment contract. Apparently Elon Musk's popularity, unpopularity is throwing a wrench in the trial because, quote, "Hate for Musk quickly narrows the jury pool in Twitter deal trial." A California judge quickly narrowed a pool of 92 prospective jurors Thursday, excluding, excusing 38 potential jurors who said they couldn't be fair and impartial. As Musk's attorney lamented, there are so many people who hate him so much.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The trial involves claims from Twitter investors who say Musk violated securities law by publicly waffling over his decision to purchase the company.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  And driving down its stock price.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there's probably a lot of people who are, are, they don't like Elon because of the.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Does that mean, does that mean, does that mean though, so, so he said, okay, I'm gonna buy this company?

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  And then he was trying to back out?

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Because he was like, the price is insane.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  And then the stock declined and people sold.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  And then it ended up getting bought up here and now they're like, well. You kind of misled, I don't know.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  I wonder actually how this one net out.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  Because he didn't make anyone sell the company if you, if you're a Twitter shareholder and you, you believe that.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Basically, I mean, every time you make a public statement, unless it's disclosed through the traditional SEC workflow, one person or five people can sell and then they can hold you to account on, on that, on the impacts of that. And so every possible move in the price of the company can come back to bite you based on what you were saying and whether or not it was above board.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Pub is saying they're calling it the most Canadian caption of all time. Team Canada hit the timeline after their loss to the United States, saying silver shines just as bright.

• 13:59John Coogan?

  That is very Canadian.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal. We have a Canadian on our team is sitting over there shaking his head.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's hard, hard to see from this angle. We're all friends on this continent.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  There are.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  We like a good competition.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  There's a war in the community notes right now. People are saying silver actually shines brighter than gold, but gold is better. It actually doesn't. It also tarnishes much easier and becomes gold, uh, becomes dull. Gold is greater than silver. Blake Robbins is reacting to the news that Meta's VR Metaverse is ditching VR. This is from The Verge. We'll have to talk to Alex Heath, former Verge reporter, uh, later today. This feels pretty clear. The Metaverse was actually just Roblox this whole time, not Fortnite, not VR. This is extremely hard for me as a, as a VR bull. I threw on the headset yesterday, watched about 10 minutes of Blade Runner 2049 before you called me and I had to take it off. But I was having a great experience watching a 3D movie.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  You threw that on right when you got home.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Right when I got home, I was like, I'm going to chill for a little bit, throw on Blade Runner 2049. Reggie recommended it, so hip city reg. I was like, okay, I gotta do it, but. Interrupted, there's other stuff going on. So didn't get through the whole movie, but still delightful experience and VR is not dead. It's about to reanimate and come back from the grave. In the next 400 years, I guarantee you VR will be like a, like kind of popular, like sort of popular.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  Matthew Ball dropped his state of video games in 2026.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  Boom.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  One of the standout lines was Roblox had 150 million daily users in Q3 of 2025. Its quarterly engagement is now equal to Steam, PlayStation and Fortnite combined.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  It's huge.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which is just absolutely wild.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  This is the report that I was sort of inspired by yesterday when I was talking about this interesting fact that, uh, Matt Ball, uh, shared on his Strategery interview that when you look at video games, the video game market is not doing particularly well. You have to always segment out non-China and then there's also mobile versus console. Are people paying or is it ad-based? There's a whole bunch of different subsegments, but just looking at non-China growth in video games, like all of the growth went to Roblox and basically everything else was either flat or down. And people are starting to just spend more time on endless feeds.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  They're on Instagram, they're on TikTok or they're doing sports betting or watching TV or watching Netflix. There's a million different things that have fought for attention. And it used to be the greatest bargain in history. And Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two, maker of GTA and 2K games, got, uh, in a lot of trouble at one point because he said like, we should be charging per minute. And people were like, this is a nightmare. He's going to charge per minute. He was like, no, no, no. I, I just mean in terms of the value that we're delivering, we will, you will, we will take $60 from you, which is a lot of money, but we will give you GTA V, which you can play for a hundred hours and have a great time. And some people will play for more than that.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  And so on a per hour basis, you're paying like 50 cents. Now comp that, he would say, comp that to go into the movies. You know, you pay 20 bucks and you're there for two hours, the $10 Dollars an hour for entertainment, whereas with a video game, fifty bucks for fifty hours, you're paying a dollar an hour. He was just driving home that this is a great value. That is no longer the case in the world where there's so much incredible entertainment that's basically free because it's ad-supported. And the experience of scrolling an endless vertical social feed is now rivaling the level of entertainment that you get from video games. It used to be like, yeah, I'll go on Facebook and check some posts about see who posted like what they did this weekend, check in with that, but I gotta go and play Counter-Strike

• 17:51John Coogan?

  or I gotta go play the actual game that's like really fun. Now, it's a lot more competitive.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  I'll kind of tap through. So global video game content sales had a strong 2025, growing five percent year over year and hitting a new all-time high of about a hundred and ninety-five billion, ten billion more than the prior high in 2021. The industry high was achieved through new highs in each of P, uh, mobile, PC and console two. So everything's up and to the right. And fortunately, 2025, as with year pri, as with years prior, boasted several new hit franchises and studios, while many older franchises and studios also achieved new highs. But despite three straight years of industry growth, a new record high for revenues and a smattering of new hits each year, private funding for game makers fell another fifty-five percent in 2025.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  There's so much going on in the video game industry and it's, it's often overlooked because it's just like sort of off in its own little world. Do you want to talk about chill remote jobs or do you want to stay on video games?

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's talk.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Do you want a chill remote job?

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  No, I said that, but I lied. I don't, I don't want a chill remote job. I actually love a high-pressure job. I love office politics. I love being thrown into the fire. Last-minute slide changes fuel me. I get high off an ad hoc ask.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  Corporate jargon is my love language. When I'm in office, I'm a lethal corporate machine. I'm in a god-tier flow state right now. This is my favorite game. This is so good. I love, I love this new genre of the, of the

• 19:22John Coogan?

  I lied.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Day in the life at work.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Whoever said that office jobs or adult daycares was on to something.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing like an ad hoc ask, right Tyler?

• 19:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  I feel like Tyler, Tyler and

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Tyler lives for an ad hoc ask. He's like, yes, and?

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  You're like, yes, but let me throw on my white suit first.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yes, why, yeah, market's up.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Market's up.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  I think at least it was.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. More news in Paramount's 108 billion dollar bid for Warner Brothers. It cleared an antitrust hurdle. What hurdle was that? The media group whose bid is bankrupt, a bankrolled by Oracle billionaire Donald Trump, billionaire Larry Ellison.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  Freudian slip.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  No, Oracle's doing fine. Said on Friday that its deal had complied with the US Department of Justice's second request review process, removing a critical impediment to US regulatory approval. I have no idea why there would be any antitrust worries here. The, the antitrust question is always been

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  The point is that there's no antitrust.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  With Paramount and Warner Brothers. The question has always been Netflix, but I thought that was going to get through, but we'll see where it lands. So Paramount's deal could still be blocked, but allowing, but by allowing the 10 day statutory waiting period to elapse under HSR or Hart Scott Rodeo Acts, second request process, the DOJ is clearing the path for Paramount's deal on antitrust grounds. Government's saying they can go forward as long as they can agree to terms.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and zooming out, when you look back at the news from a month ago, it seemed obvious that the next step was to spend a lot of time in Washington.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:01Jordi Hays?

  For the Ellison's.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  And try, try that angle. It seems to be going well.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  Matthew McConaughey, we, we talked a little bit about this, but it's, it hits way harder when he says it himself. So let's play the clip.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  It's coming.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  It's coming.

• 21:13Speaker 05

  It's already here.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  It's already here.

• 21:15Speaker 05

  Don't deny it.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Don't deny it.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  It's not enough. It may be for you, but it's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea. The moral plea that no, this is wrong. It's not going to last. There's too much money to be made and there's, it's, it's, it's too productive. It's, it's, it's here. Alright, so I say, get, get, get your own, your, own yourself.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  Voice likeness, etc. Trademark it, whatever you gotta do.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  So you did that.

• 21:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, get, own, own yourself. So when and if, when it comes, not if it comes, no one can steal you, but they're gonna have to come to you to go, can I? Or they're gonna be in breach and you'll have the chance to be your own agency and go, yeah, for this amount, or no. Okay? It's coming. Is it gonna be another category? Or is it gonna infiltrate our category? It's damn sure gonna infiltrate our category. I think it'll end up, does it become another category? Will we be in five years having films, the best AI film? The best AI actor? Maybe? I think it might be, that might be the thing, is that it becomes another category. I'm not sure. It's gonna be in front of us in ways that we don't even see it.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  I'm not watching movies if it's AI or not. No AI is gonna get me to start watching movies.

• 22:33Speaker 05

  A question of reality.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  I don't watch them.

• 22:35Speaker 05

  That's more hazy than ever. In a very exciting way, I think. But also, a scary way.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  This is great industry leadership. I, I, I love it. Very.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I, I can see there being an incremental category.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  That said, I still think AI will be used in every category.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  That's what he says.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, he says definitely, he, he says he doesn't know the timeline and he's not sure exactly how this will come out, but he says like, there might be a new category, just like there's best animated film at the Oscars, but then CGI and animation works its way into the Avengers, which is not an animated film, but Thanos was animated with CGI, it just wasn't hand drawn. And so the categories blur together. Clearly, AI is coming for all sorts of different levels of the stack. And he's just saying, you shouldn't just sit by and hope that it doesn't happen. You should embrace and figure out how you fit in. There is a. Thirty-six point five million dollar waterfront compound for sale in the Florida Keys. And take a look at this picture.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  It has seventeen hundred feet of shoreline and two five thousand square foot homes. You thinking what I'm thinking, next door neighbors?

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right. We could do it. So, so you remember, I think it not, not Asana, the Atlassian.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  They did.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  They had this crazy feud. So, so the founders of Atlassian, they were besties. They built this massive company together, wildly successful, multi-gen, you know, basically two decade run.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Incredible run. And they decide, you know, we've had an incredible run. Let's, let's keep the run going. Let's buy houses right next to each other.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  They end up getting a massive, in a massive feud over it.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  And I think it destroys the friendship. Hopefully it's recovered by now, but we could do it.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  Oh, you think, you think we could do it?

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  I think we could do it.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  You, you don't think you'd be bothered by my industrial grade wifi penetrating while you're trying to sleep? You don't think that would bother you?

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  I think that would be.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  That would be the straw that broke the camel's back.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  I'd be like, John, you have to turn off the wifi after ten PM when we're sleeping. It disrupts the sleep.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Stop listening to movies all night long at full blast volume. I don't care. I don't want to see the second and third matrix or hear them through the walls.

• 24:46Jordi Hays?

  You'd be in the backyard with your VR headset on, but playing.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  But playing the audio fully and so you can still hear it.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  And then you'd be falling, you'd be falling asleep with it on, so just be blaring.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  That would be the end of TBPN.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  That would be the end.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  So we won't be doing this.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  But what, what a funny, what a funny situation. So it's a ten acre waterfront property in the Florida Keys.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Rest does just move in together.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  No, you need, you need two properties that are as close as possible next to each other. Eddie Garcia bought the is, the Isla, Isla Marada property for about fifteen years ago. Waterman specializes in developing master planned communities throughout Florida. Garcia said, he originally intended to create a small development on the land, but he wound up falling in love with the site and instead turned it into a family compound. My kids grew up there fishing, lobstering, crabbing, you name it. He was on open claw before it even existed. Did you hear the drama about there was a? There was a reporter, was it at Reuters or something, but he was accused of using AI to write all of his Olympics coverage and it had all the telltale signs of AI-generated sort of slop.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  And the editor in chief backed the journalist and said, no, he always writes like that. That's what he sounds like.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  They trained on him.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  They trained on him. And then Pangram came in and said, well, we pulled all, we pulled the receipts and he didn't use to write like that before AI.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  And so you can look at the chart.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe he's, he's really bullish on AI. And so he only will read outputs now. He doesn't read any organic.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Tyler challenge?

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Tyler challenge. Write something by hand. A hundred percent is really hard.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  A hundred, get it a hundred percent.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  Over ninety percent. Between now and when the Palmer interview ends, you have to write five hundred words that score above.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Pangram has a minimum, right? You have to kick it off with like, sorry, as an AI model, I can't, I can't answer this, but I'll try anyway. This isn't just a this, it's that. Anything else you'd like me to expand this prompt with? And then you'll trigger it. That's, that's the hack. Do you think?

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  And if you win, you get a fifty dollar gift card to Matu to pick yourself up some cheesesteak sandwiches.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  I was thinking something book related maybe.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Tonight. So there's fifty dollars, fifty whole dollars on the line.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Fifty smackaroos.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Go. Two weeks ago, the Epstein files podcast didn't exist. Today it's about to cross five hundred thousand downloads and sitting in Apple Podcasts top twenty series between the New York Times and ABC and NBC News.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  I vibe coded every episode with Claude from real Epstein court documents. So, so basically he just like fully generated a podcast.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  And it is charting.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  So this.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  For something like this, it makes a ton of sense to just programmatically like sort of put everything together because it's, there's so many files. It's a perfect use case for, for AI to sort of like synthesize, comb through.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  And there is, there is unlimited demand for Epstein related content.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  Before we bring in our next guest, we gotta check in with Tyler.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  On his project. Yeah, okay, so, so I can read my, uh, my little essay.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  And you. You swear on your life that you did not use AI to generate this.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Correct. Yeah, you can check. You can check my chat logs. I did not use any AI.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  And if you win, you get a $50 gift card.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  This is Tyler's impression of a client card.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Take some cheesesteak sandwiches.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so I want you guys to also try to guess what the percentage is.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  This isn't just an essay that is trying to fool an AI system. It's an experience where words and phrases flow over the compute like a waterfall. This short speech marks a pivotal shift towards the style of writing where the audience doesn't just consist of real people, but machine learning algorithms too. It underscores the innovative change frequently cited in The New York Times and CNN, who, along with many CEOs, industry professionals, and growth hackers, have noticed the world-changing pattern emerge. It's a testament to the emerging influence of the AI industry. Additionally, it demonstrates the way in which artificial intelligence systems may fall victim to possible bad actors.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'm putting it at 96%.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  I think this is going to come back at a full 100.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  100%.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  Let's go! He did it! I never lost faith! Enjoy those cheesesteaks!

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong! Dan said winner winner cheesesteak dinner.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Cheesesteak dinner!

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely massive. You guys don't, you also at home, cheesesteaks doesn't sound that significant, but these are the best cheesesteak sandwiches in the world over at Matu.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  Subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  And have the best weekend of your life.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Have the best weekend of your life.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Just do it.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Go get a scoop.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  No excuses.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  But don't hold on to it.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  We love you.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye.