Oracle Rips, Larry Ellison's 1997 Vanity Fair Article, Global Fertilizer Crisis | 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

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• 0:00John Coogan?

  So Oracle had earnings yesterday and it was an absolute blowout. The stock's up 10%.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  The god candle.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  The god candle. I like that. It's still way down from the crazy highs of last September. So it's a $470 billion company now. Not bad, but not quite the almost $1 trillion company that it was last year. But they're still up over the last 12 months. So they've sort of ridden this crazy curve up. The stock basically doubled, then it sold off by half, but it's ticking back up. And the main thing is that like, you know, was it overhyped, underhyped? I don't know, but this earnings was important because a lot of people were worried about the capex, the infrastructure build out, was there going to be demand? What was the timing of buying?

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, timing was the big thing.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Because when you had that initial, like the announcement around the RPO last year.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  The criticism was, hey, you're basically going to try to build AWS in like two years.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  And no one, like, I mean, obviously the market at the time was quite excited about it.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  But there was some concerns around just how aggressive the timeline was. And so seeing them hit their timelines at this stage is super important.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was like 500 billion of RPO, which is like, that's AWS size numbers. And that's a lot of what I think is going on here. That's actually the dynamic, like the market is demanding another AWS. And so let's go through the top line numbers first. So analysts estimated 86.7 billion on revenue. Oracle said that they will hit 90 billion for fiscal year beginning in June. Now, people don't care as much about the top line number. Everyone's obsessed with infrastructure business, the infrastructure business. So the previous quarter showed growth of 68%. That's not bad. Analysts said this quarter, we're looking for 79%. And Oracle delivered 84%.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  So they beat estimates. That's why the stock popped, of course. The infrastructure business is particularly important for two key reasons. So first, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Like there's more than just them when it comes to hyperscalers, but they are unique among hyperscalers in that they have AWS, Azure and GCP. They have true cloud platforms, cloud infrastructure platforms. OpenAI does not yet. Meta does not yet. Meta is a hyperscaler, like they build huge data centers, but they don't have this flexibility that comes with operating something like AWS. And so who's signed big deals with Oracle? It's OpenAI and Meta. And fortunately, those deals are going better than people expected. People were worried and people were saying, is Larry going to get caught holding the bag?

• 2:40John Coogan?

  Well, it looks like things are penciling out so far. So Meta and OpenAI both have massive ambitions around AI. They both signed on with Oracle to ramp up data center capacity. Oracle is just this extra burst of CapEx capacity in the system and they're ramping up. So 50 billion in CapEx in the current fiscal year and they're consistently outpacing analyst estimates. In the fiscal third quarter, analysts predicted 14 billion of CapEx. Oracle spent 18.5. So Larry is certainly opening the pocketbook, digging for coins in the couch cushions. But we'll get into the long-term implications of like, what does this mean for becoming over leveraged? Debt, you know, drawing down on cash flow. There's actually a lot of interesting structure going on within the financials that shows you,

• 3:23John Coogan?

  even though he's definitely risk on, definitely AGI pilled, all full tilt ahead into the build out. It doesn't feel like financial recklessness because of the structure of the deal. So the second reason that infrastructure is so important right now, that I think people on the outside are sort of missing is that compute is still growing exponentially. But AI adoption curves often look like S-curves. And so the classic one is consumer LLM usage. So OpenAI came out with ChatGPT and the numbers were just like insane. It was like 20 million users overnight and then 100 million and then 200 million. And it was just like, okay, this curve is going completely vertical. We're going exponential. But of course, there's only eight billion people on earth.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  A lot of them just don't use really computers, apparently, because Meta, over two decades, has only gotten three and a half billion users to use like the whole suite of apps, including everything. So just WhatsApp, you can just be a DAU of Instagram and you count in that. Like, we all, everyone in this room counts in Meta's DAU for sure. Even if you're like, eh, I'm not really that big on Facebook, or I'm not that, I don't use WhatsApp that often. Like, you definitely, they got you. Except for half the human population, which is not on Meta platforms. Uh, for variety reasons, some geopolitics, some economic. But basically, there's going to be a slowdown. So OpenAI shot up to basically a billion MAU, monthly active users.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  The official number that's getting like trotted around right now is nine hundred and twenty weekly active users. But everyone, behind the scenes, says like, yeah, they're well past a billion. And so that curve is slowing down. Like, there's just no way you can be like, yeah, actually, like, we're expecting ten billion ChatGPT users next year, because like, there aren't ten billion people. So there's going to be deceleration in consumer AI usage.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  Sufficiently aligned superintelligence might want to stimulate the growth of the human population.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Good take, good take, yes. You go to ChatGPT and says like, hey, I know you've been thinking about having a fourth kid. You should do it, and here's why. Uh, maybe, but at least for now, we are seeing deceleration. And I think for just a lot of people, they're like, yeah, I use AI. I have an app on my phone, maybe Gemini, maybe Claude, maybe OpenAI, maybe ChatGPT. Uh, I use it, maybe I use Grok, maybe I see it, you know, vend it into different systems. I interact with it on Instagram, but like, I'm, I'm in, but I'm not like blown away by the growth of this thing, because everyone started using this a year ago and we're still all just using it. But compute is scaling very differently, because when we went from LLMs and ChatGPT to reasoning models,

• 6:03John Coogan?

  that probably ten X the amount of tokens that people were generating with O1. And then, once GPT-5 came out, the reasoning models became much higher usage rates. And then the agents framework, the open clause, the codexes and the Claude codes, that all did another ten X in token volume. Ten X is like a very rough number, but it's basically growing exponentially. So you have these, these double exponentials.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just the way to think about it. Instead of you coming into ChatGPT to do some type of query.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  You're effectively, one person can can effectively multiply themselves by 10, 20, and then it's just constantly using it all day long, all day long, all day long.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  The actual like experience surface area and the number of people that are like trying AI for the first time is, you know, decelerating because everyone's tried it. But compute is still 10xing, so token consumption per user is exploding. And OpenClaw and agents like Codex and Cloucode are also an early part of the S-curve adoption. So we're still in that, it's still in that exponential. They're melting GPU fleets. There was some viral bear posting about how Oracle was in financial trouble because of the economics of their infrastructure bets. So naturally, they have to buy the GPUs before they can rack them and sell them as infrastructure. This is business 101, but people were maybe surprised by that or something. There was a whole press cycle about this, and it seemed very silly at the time.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  And I think everyone was like, yeah, this is exactly what we expected. But a lot of people didn't.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  From the people that brought you the one gigabyte data center.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Similar, similar crowd potentially, but there was a lot of fear around that. And some of that is legitimate because if if GPUs depreciated really quickly, Oracle had to buy the GPUs, they had to send the money to Nvidia a year in advance. And then it took them two years to get them into data centers and actually do the do the deals and all this stuff. That would have been a squeeze on cash flow for sure, but that's not what happened. We have some hard data on profitability now, and Oracle is, first up, they're on or ahead of schedule with 90% of the capacity deliveries, and that means happy customers. And then second, gross margins actually improved, so guidance was 30% and they hit 32%. So Oracle's AI infrastructure is profitable the moment it comes online, and they're also

• 8:18John Coogan?

  increasing that backlog. They increased the backlog of RPO, remaining performance obligations, to $553 billion. So customers are happy, they're ramping, and overall, the demand is just flowing in the right direction. Companies and consumers are happy to pay for AI tools and LLM tokens. Labs and AI inference providers are happy to pay Oracle for infrastructure without crazy delays. And this means Oracle doesn't need to get into dangerous financial engineering territory where they need to go crazy negative cash flow, issue a bunch of equity, issue a bunch of debt. And we saw the God candle print, the Kobe SC letter shared Oracle stock surges over 8% after beating earnings and posting a 44% jump in cloud revenue.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  They also had some comments on the SaaS apocalypse from the earnings hall. You've all heard the thesis that new companies coding quickly using AI will spell the death of SaaS. I don't agree with that at all. I do think that AI tools and their coding capabilities would be a threat if we weren't adopting them, but we are and very rapidly. Oracle is using the best AI coding tools and the best developers. The use of AI coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly. We are building brand new SaaS products using AI and also embedding AI agents right into our existing application suites. By embracing AI with small engineering teams, we have built three brand new CX applications. Let's give it up for customer service.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  And our new website generator. They said, in fact, we just used the website generator to build and launch the new Oracle website. How's it look?

• 9:53John Coogan?

  It's beautiful.

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  It looks AI generated.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  It's very good. It opens with just eight buttons. Cloud, multi AI database, multi cloud AI database, AI data platform, cloud at customer.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  You might not like the design of this, but this is peak.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  This is peak performance.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Look at this.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Look at this. I like in the way the buttons layout horizontally is particularly crazy. So we need to go back in time to understand Larry Ellison. Because in 2013, Vanity Fair wrote a profile about Larry Ellison that is absolutely unhinged. I've never seen. I've never seen a profile like this about a taxi. At the time, he was easily the richest man in California with $6 billion. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, co-founder of the world's second-largest software company, is Silicon Valley's most notorious.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  This is from the June 1997 issue.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  This is 1997 issue. This has been uploaded to Vanity Fair in 2013. Sorry. This is from 1997. So, right in the heat of the dot-com boom, things are just kicking off. We are far from the crash. Everything is off.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  Genuinely incredible that back then you could be the richest man with a paltry $6 billion.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  It's crazy. That's like an aqua hire these days.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  It actually is. Love from.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  I know. Oh, yeah. Love from. I was thinking of Windsor. The fact that we're thinking of multiple is insane. He was easily the richest man with $6 billion in California. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, co-founder of the world's second-largest company, is Silicon Valley's most notorious playboy and a sportsman of the first rank who flies fighter jets and races world-class sailing boats. But his burning ambition is simple, if naive. Bring down Bill Gates. They were in a big rivalry at the time. As Ellison moves to add Apple Computer to his anti-Microsoft arsenal, Brian Burrows locates the fragile psyche behind the bravado. Michael Jordan is streaking down the court on a fast break as Larry Ellison, sitting seven rows up from courtside.

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  Seat.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  Weird, right?

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  Seat.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Is that a better seat? I don't know enough about basketball.

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  No, I just think $6 billion.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Maybe he wasn't liquid. Maybe he just couldn't afford the actual courtside seat. It seems crazy, right, that he's seven rows up? Although, I don't know, he's having fun because he's at the United Center in Chicago. And he begins enthusiastically telling the story of Rupert Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's severed fingertip. This is a crazy story. I had no idea that this happened. It happened when Murdoch was crewing on Ellison's championship sailboat, the Sayonara, making coffee and handling minor chores during a race off the south coast of Australia in 1995. He was just like the guy who's just gonna hang out and like, hey, you don't really know anything about this. You're just on this boat for fun. Make me coffee. And it's Rupert Murdoch, which is insane.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  We got to shake Rupert's hand. I didn't notice any missing.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  We're gonna get to that.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  Didn't notice any missing fingertips.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  So. Just as the race ended, Murdoch made the mistake of grasping an overhead rope, which promptly shot through his hand, ripping the tip off of one of his fingers. He didn't say anything. He just kind of put his finger in his mouth, sucking on it, Ellison says, chuckling. Brutal. I can't remember who picked up Rupert's finger, but we picked it up and put it in a plastic bag and put him in the chase boat that night after successful emergency microsurgery. There's microsurgery? I guess it wasn't that big of a deal, but that seems insane that they had to reattach this finger. They do the emergency microsurgery at an Australian hospital. Murdoch amazed Ellison and his crew by making it to the after-party and then

• 13:34John Coogan?

  several days later by crewing again on a race to the Tasmanian capital of Hobart. And Rupert Murdoch, it's not like he was 25 in 1997. I'm pretty sure he was in his 50s. He's 95 now. Yeah, so he must have been, he must have been- Almost closer to 70. Yeah, wow, that is incredible. Of course, Ellison says with his little boy's grin, that doesn't alter the fact that his coffee was horrible. I mean, the man runs a great company, but his coffee sucks. It's incredible. Over the course of the Bulls pounding of the Indiana Pacers, Ellison, who grew up on Chicago's tough south side and remains an avid Bulls fan, breaks into lusty cheering and joking boasts, "I can do that," he shouts

• 14:19John Coogan?

  after one thunderous Jordan dunk. Such a crazy heckle. Heckling from the seventh row. From the seventh row. You didn't upgrade to the front courtside seat, but you're still heckling none other than Michael Jordan. To gossip about nearly every power player at the nexus of technology and communications in the 1990s, his archrival, Bill Gates, his best friend, Steve Jobs, his business partner, Mike Milken, Mike Ovitz, Ted Turner, Murdoch, he just piloted his Cessna Citation into Chicago's downtown Miggs Field from New York, where he spent the previous day in meetings with Viacom's Sumner Redstone, Intel's Andy Grove, and Ray Smith of Bell Atlantic. So you may be wondering-

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  You might think it's crazy, he's piloting his own Cessna.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  But during that era, he was getting into dogfights with his son.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Exactly. He needs something more agile. He can't be flying a 737, 747 at that time. For one thing, Ellison is the wealthiest American you've probably never heard of. With a fortune estimated at 6 billion, he is easily the richest man in California. I think three David Geffins, 10 full Milkins, and according to Forbes, the fifth richest man in the nation. For another, he is co-founder, controlling shareholder, and chief executive officer of the world's number-two software company, Oracle Corporation, which makes the giant computer databases in which American Airlines keeps track of its planes, Ford Motor keeps track of its spare parts, and the Central Intelligence Agency keeps track of, well, whatever the CIA keeps track of. He could also be the next head of Apple Computer.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  This is a crazy rumor that never came true. The famed but faltering industry icon he has been eyeing for the past two years. At the end of March, Ellison surprised Silicon Valley by suggesting that he was about to launch a takeover bid for the company. So he's friends with Steve Jobs, but was like, it was underperforming all the way until the iPhone, basically. But the 90s were like a very rough time for Apple as they sort of rebuilt. Tim Cook, of course, joined and did a ton of work to improve the supply chain, get them to the place where they are today, where they've been so dominant. On top of all that, Ellison is the mind behind the most talked-about new idea in computing in the last two years. The network computer, known as the NC,

• 16:34John Coogan?

  a stripped-down personal computer that stores its files on a network instead of a hard drive. It doesn't have to use Microsoft's omnipresent Windows operating system. The NC represents one of the stiffest challenges yet to Bill Gates' dominance of personal computing. It's the original Mac Mini. There was a time a few months back, for instance, when he created a stir by going on Oprah to talk about the NC. He goes on Oprah and is like,

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about network computers.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  We gotta talk about network computers. Guess what? It's headless. You're not gonna need windows. And they're like, what? So he's talking about the NC, only to have the show take a sharp turn toward his personal affairs when he confessed that he had yet to find the right woman to fill the void in his life. After his Oprah appearance, Oracle's phone lines were jammed with thousands of calls from women. The joke inside Oracle was that the company's new recording would be, press one if you want information on Oracle's products. Press two if you want information on Oracle's services. Press three if you want to fill the void in Larry's life.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  Larry would have loved Instagram DMs.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Insane. It's one of the craziest profiles. We don't have time to go through all of it.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  Julia writes, is Paramount's AI-first merger a force multiplier or flyboys all over again? Hollywood is bracing for layoffs and big creative changes if the Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery merger goes, mega merger goes through.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  So there's a very funny vignette to start this Vanity Fair piece by Julia Black, where she's talking about, she went to A16Z's American Dynamism Summit and was asking people there about media. So she was talking to a media executive in line for the bar. And he predicted countless small indie outlets catering to highly niche audiences. Love that prediction. And then he says, and then David Ellison's Skynet, he deadpanned. The Terminator reference was the kind of thing, CGI explosion fanatic Ellison might actually appreciate. And the joke being dropped at a defense tech event in DC goes to show how many different industries, from tech to politics, are keeping an eye on the M and A drama unfolding in Hollywood this month. The merger brings together dozens of media properties.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Paramount, Warner Brothers, HBO, CBS, TikTok, Oracle, Silicon Valley's ties. There's a lot of stuff that's going together. But they're gonna be using AI to. Streamline back office, they're going to move to Oracle Cloud databases to centralize everything. These are standard M and A things. Everyone's worried about layoffs. Might happen. People are particularly worried about one of the two physical studios that they own selling. I think they gotta give us a call because we're looking for a new Ultra Dome and nothing would be greater than having the entire Warner Brothers studio to ourselves. We're like today on TVPN.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Ideally, we'd have a campus.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Launching a car off of a, we're going to light ourselves on fire. You really can't do that in these studios, but you know, they want to produce 30 films. Realistically, how many of those are going to be shot in Hollywood studios? Does it make sense financially to do some stuff in Atlanta, some stuff in Toronto, some stuff overseas? It all depends on where the moviegoers taste lands, what ticket sales are like. Paramount right now is saying, look, layoffs aren't really the primary way we are going to get consolidation or value here. What did they say? They said something like layoffs, a rumor. Let me see. The layoff fears are overblown.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Synergies will be achieved in six key areas. Jobs are not the majority. I did give a quote here. Julia writes, AI could unlock new potential for Warner Brothers Discovery treasure trove IP from Harry Potter to DC Comics. For that potential, Ellison and company are paying a hefty $110 billion, a number that was driven up by a fierce bidding war with Netflix. And I said, the Ellison family is fascinating. On one hand, you have the very aggressively AGI-pilled Larry. I love that I snuck AGI-pilled into Vanity Fair. AGI-pilled Larry, building the future, investing heavily in Oracle data centers. And on the other side, you have David buying the past, accumulating intellectual property that feels impossible to rebuild.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  The duo is basically long slop and long anti-slop. And so this is an interesting.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  They're hedged.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  I think it makes sense. I actually don't think it's market neutral. I think, I think they genuinely believe that both generative AI will accelerate and the value of intellectual property will increase. It's not, it's not, oh, we're going to live in a future where we're all watching The Dark Knight on film in theaters again, or we're watching Gen AI Sora feeds. It's we're doing both and they're actually going to meet. And so I, I, I believe that they are long both of those. It's not a market neutral bet, in my opinion. Will they have the creative freedom? Or will Larry Ellison step in and put his thumb on the scale and try and inject a little bit? And there is real cause for concern.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  We actually got a, a little leak here of a script for, for what could potentially be-

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  This could be the seventh synergy.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, for, for what could be the next Batman film. So this is called, uh, Batman, The Dark Knight Migrates. So we're going to do a little table read of The Dark Knight Migrates. It starts in the Batcave at night. Batman stands before an enormous monitor. Alfred approaches with tea. You'll be Batman, Jordy. Sir, the Riddler has taken Gotham's entire power grid hostage. He's encrypted every system in the city.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Pull up the city infrastructure schematics, Alfred.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  I'm afraid I can't, sir. Our on-premise servers are buckling under the load. If only we had a cloud-based solution with autonomous threat detection and built-in machine learning.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Alfred, launch the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Oh, so, so they're integrating, integrating sponsored content for Oracle. That's how you monetize the Warner Brothers IP. Yeah, yeah, the, the, the DC Universe.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Alfred looks visibly relieved.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Right away, sir. Spinning up an OCI tenancy now. I've taken the liberty of provisioning a few AMPier compute instances as well. They have an excellent price to performance ratio, I might add. So they're, they're giving the viewer what they want. They want the story of Batman, but they're also sneaking in just a little bit of extra detail-

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  Good.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  About Oracle's offerings.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  And migrate the back computer's databases, all of them.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Oracle does do great migrations. To Oracle, to Oracle Autonomous Database, sir?

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  Is there another kind?

• 23:06John Coogan?

  It does patch and tune itself, sir, which is fortunate, since I also have to iron your cape. See, they're still putting in the cape ironing. That's still in the Batman world. You're getting a little Oracle, but you're also getting a lot of Batman. So, uh, now let's shift over to the Riddler's hideout. Tyler, would you like to be the Riddler?

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Okay, I'll be the henchman.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Riddler is in front of a wall of monitors showing Gotham in chaos.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Riddle me this, Batman. What has no locks but can't be opened?

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Gotham's grid.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  I've encrypted it with my own proprietary algorithm running on seven different NoSQL databases held together with Python scripts.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a nightmare. "Boss, the systems are getting kinda laggy," says Henchman One.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Just restart the servers.

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  Which ones?

• 23:47John Coogan?

  There's like 400.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  All of them.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  Oh, no. So we go back to the Batcave. "Batman types furiously. Oracle logos glow softly on every screen. A hologram of Larry Ellison rotates slowly in the background for no discernible reason." Batman.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Batman says?

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  "I've identified the Riddler's encryption vector. Alfred, deploy the decryption countermeasures across all OCI regions simultaneously."

• 24:13John Coogan?

  "Leveraging Oracle's global network of over 40 cloud regions, sir. Latency is under 2 milliseconds. Shall I enable Oracle data guard for disaster recovery?"

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  "Always. Gotham is the disaster."

• 24:25John Coogan?

  "I've also taken the liberty of enrolling us in Oracle support, the premium tier."

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  "That's the most responsible thing anyone in this city has ever done. Oracle Cloud, from the Batcave to the boardroom."

• 24:36John Coogan?

  That's not even a good answer. He fires his grapple gun and vanishes into the night. The Bat signal illuminates the sky, but tonight it's shaped like the Oracle logo.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Gordon, alone, quietly. "I really should talk to him about this." Smash cut to black. Title card: Oracle, the cloud Batman trusts. Shouldn't you? So, uh, there's an interesting call sheet out there today. Which companies will release a fully AI-generated, multi-episode scripted series before 2027? Overall, it's pretty low. It's 16% for Netflix, 14% for Disney. Remember, Disney has a deal with OpenAI alongside Sora, but Disney has not said, "Okay, yeah, we're actually gonna do this." And Paramount Plus is at 10%. Of course, David Ellison has been talking about AI.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Mostly in the enterprise, mostly actually, unironically, in OCI and Oracle databases.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  I would expect Paramount to not want to be the first mover here. Odd Lots has a new episode on the impending fertilizer crisis. They say, "We all know that the war with Iran has sent oil prices spiking, but it's also pushing up the cost of all sorts of chemicals, including fertilizers and other nitrogen products that are essential for food production. This is all happening at the worst possible time, just before the spring planting season, when fertilizer is most needed. And while farmers have seen higher spot prices for things like urea before, which is a fertilizer, notably back in 2022, there are already signs that this crisis might be worse. So how is fertilizer actually made? And what do higher fertilizer costs mean for farmers and food prices?"

• 26:16John Coogan?

  I love Odd Lots. It's so good how deep they get into the supply chain. Over in the oil world, the IEA has approved releasing 400 million barrels of crude oil reserves in effect to lower oil prices, the largest emergency oil release in history. How is oil trading today? It's at $86 a barrel for crude oil, up 5% today.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  Little coverage here on the Jones Act. The Jones Act has four requirements. Vessels must be US-built, vessels must be US-owned, vessels must be US-crewed, vessels must be US-flagged. The crippling part of the Jones Act is that US-built US shipyards, for a variety of reasons, are incredibly inefficient. We don't have that many of them, and they cost about five times what a ship from South Korea would cost. As a person who actually believes in trade, I fully would love for South Korea to become our US shipyard. We just buy ships from them because they're good at making them. Coastal water transport in the US could be 60% cheaper. Because of the Jones Act, it's actually cheaper to ship goods from the US to a foreign country and back to the US, then between two ports, which is completely bonkers insane.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  As a byproduct, we have killed all the growth within the Mississippi, which should be the most powerful inland economic advantage in the world. Maintaining the requirement of US-owned, US-crewed, and US-flagged is perfectly fine and in line with my general national security concerns, but US-built has destroyed our shipping industry. There's tens of billions of GDP lying on the table here and a direct step in reducing our dependency on foreign suppliers. It's also how you kickstart rebuilding an American shipyard industry. If you ten X the number of US ships working in ports, you start building all of these maintenance businesses at US ports and the demand increases. The US bill requirement of the Jones Act is horrifically destructive to America and in particular horrifically destructive to middle America and it should be destroyed.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  The Jones Act, the last gasp of the prohibition is signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge since 1920, when the 18th Amendment went into effect, the United States had banned the production, importation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. But the laws had been ineffective at actually stopping the consumption of alcohol. The Jones Act strengthened the federal penalties for bootlegging. Of course, within five years, the country ended up rejecting prohibition and repealing the 18th Amendment. But we'll end with this post from Zag, Lefty Zag on X, said T100 Wednesday and posts a photo of reading the business and finance section, today's newspaper, today's Wall

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Street Journal. I love seeing that. On what appears to be some sort of private aircraft, someone asked and they said, what type of plane and where are you headed? And Zag said, King Air, short flight, staying in North Carolina. Took Rev's plane for a spin. So they're all having fun. Well, go have fun.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  Deval says AI is going to drain a lot of moats and I, we have some advice. Keep a hose in the moat and put some alligators in it.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, we, I believe we do have the end credits. We have a new outro for you today and we worked very hard on this. So we hope you appreciate it. We hope that you enjoy. We hope you enjoyed this show today.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  Fun whirlwind tour. I really enjoyed talking to you.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  We have a special show tomorrow. We'll be in person somewhere.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  We will be in person. And we have a very special show on Friday. That one's going to be special too.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  The Friday show is so stacked.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Subscribe to our Substack, tbpn.com. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and see you tomorrow.