Tech Earnings Quadkill, Red Button vs Blue Button | 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. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:02John Coogan?

  What a day in financial markets and technology markets. There is a ton of news today. Gergavin summed it up well. Huge day tomorrow. He's posted this yesterday. 10 a.m. Canada interest rate decision. 2 p.m. This is Eastern Time, USA interest rate decision. That is in Fed held rates constant. So sort of a nothing burger, I guess. Not the best news. I think some people were hoping for a cut, but everyone sort of expected this. It met it met expectations. But the news is that just five minutes ago, the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates on hold at a range of 3.5 to 3.75% at Wednesday's meeting. And Jerome Powell is giving a speech

• 0:47John Coogan?

  in just 30 minutes at 2:30 Eastern. Then at 4 p.m. Google earnings, Amazon earnings, Meta earnings, and Microsoft earnings. It is a massive debt.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  And no big deal. No big deal. They only represent just under 20% of the total market cap of the S and P 500.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  All reporting within.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  But people are optimistic. Semi Analysis put out a note this morning, according to YC, YieldChad, expecting hyperscaler capex to be revised upwards and beat street expectations as hyperscaler cloud revenue is accelerating. And they are seeing positive ROI on cloud investments. I can sort of go through my earnings preview. It's a tech earnings quad kill today. And the big question is just how is the AI build out going? Obviously, the capex numbers were huge. We saw the first time ever we've seen a $200 billion number from Amazon last quarter. But everyone's up in the is there even a word for triple? It's like, what, 11 digits or something like that? 100 billions. Everyone's in everyone's

• 1:51John Coogan?

  spending at least 100 billion these days, at least if you're in the Mag 7. But financial performance has actually been strong, even in sort of legacy areas such as search. Google search is growing, e-commerce sales, Amazon core business is growing, enterprise software seats, Microsoft 360. Five, we're going to have more news on all of that. Even though all of those businesses, they're working, they're chugging along. The big question is around durable revenue tied to AI infrastructure, because you have this matching problem. You spend a bunch of money, there's depreciation. When do you actually get the cash flow back? How durable is this revenue? What are the moats around this revenue? What do growth rates and margins look like in this new era of something that looks maybe a little bit more like a railroad business,

• 2:34John Coogan?

  an oil business, as opposed to something like you build a website, people just show up and it's 80% margin, which was the dream of the previous software era. We're going into an entirely different era, but it is very exciting and we're getting a lot of data today. So everyone has seen cash flow from these hyperscalers, to Nvidia, to power companies, to data center builders. But everyone's wondering, what's the exact conversion cycle to higher revenues and higher profits? What's the pathway there? Because you don't want to just be drawing down on cash endlessly. Eventually you stop making money entirely. So let's start with Google. Google has the most fully integrated AI stack, arguably. They have consumer distribution.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  They got model training with DeepMind. They have custom chips with the TPU and a bunch of product services where they can stuff AI's features. Google Workspace. Google Workspace. Search, YouTube, Android, cloud. They can deploy solutions all over the place. And so the flywheel should be spinning very, very quickly. The key question that investors are asking is, does AI change the unit economics of search too quickly? Does AI do LLMs? Do AI search overviews, Gemini generally? Are they able to monetize those results fast enough to offset any potential declines in search ad revenue? And so people will be looking for how is search monetizing?

• 4:02John Coogan?

  How are the new AI disruptors monetizing? And so, but there are tons of places to pick up growth, even if growth does slow down in the core search business. Tons of opportunity in cloud. But the question again is AI overviews and Gemini, are they expanding search usage? Are they increasing ad ROI? Or are they compressing the model, the financial model? Microsoft is also coming off a strong quarter. Honestly, everyone's coming off strong quarters. Everyone's doing very well. Revenue's up 17% at Microsoft with cloud, which includes Azure, M365, some LinkedIn stuff. There's a, it's a big bucket. Cloud, Microsoft Cloud's growing at 26%, but if you dive in and you double click on Azure,

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Azure is growing at 39% and of course Azure is a bigger lever on CapEx, which is run rating around 150 billion, not bad. The biggest number in the Microsoft earnings is RPO, remaining performance obligations. Last quarter, it was listed at 625 billion, up 110%. That was the eye popping number of the last earnings. About 45% of that is coming from OpenAI, but they have lots of other partners that have signed on for really long compute contracts. And that is starting to show up in the financials saying, hey, we're spending all this CapEx, but we have this RPO and we have these deals signed where companies are, it's not just us that we're forecasting some really high growth here. The entire industry is forecasting high growth.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  And so we have done deals to justify the CapEx that we're spending right now, even with depreciation, which seems like a less of an issue than people thought it was, since H100 still seem to be monetizing just fine, but we can go into that. So Microsoft has the cleanest read on enterprise AI monetization, which I think is something people have been really looking for, looking for numbers. They know that, you know, subscription LLM chat apps monetize at a decent rate, that the margins at a lot of these companies are, are okay, the tokens, the APIs are working. But what does it actually mean to deploy AI into the American economy, into everyday businesses, into large scale businesses? All of those businesses are on Microsoft overwhelmingly.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  And so there are a ton of data points that can help you understand how AI is flowing through the global economy, but also the American economy. So what are we talking about specifically? Azure growth, how much cloud hosting is going on? Gross margins for Microsoft Cloud, that's very important. Are you seeing cloud compression? Because if you go to your Microsoft Cloud provider and you say, hey, I'm gonna, this Teams thing, I'm paying a lot of money for it. I actually vibe coded something, you gotta give me a discount. That would show up in cloud margins. Will it show up? I don't think it will, but we'll see. I think it's gonna be fine. Copilot adoption and ARPU, how much are they actually rolling these out? Are they actually getting incremental spend? Are companies willing to send more of their hard earned dollars to Microsoft?

• 6:52John Coogan?

  For better AI services, better features, copilots? Then M365 seat growth, that's a really important one. Are people adding more seats? Are they hiring? Like, we've seen some layoffs in big tech, but how is the overall economy doing? How many more seats are are being rolled out? Again, with the question of like, does your AI agent need a seat? And so you have more seats? Or does your AI agent replace 20 seats? And then you only have one seat? And you have 20 agents that are all logging in through the same M365 seat? These are like more long term questions, but we're getting an early read today. GitHub Copilot momentum. This will all paint a picture of what is happening with AI adoption in enterprises broadly. Interestingly, Copilots at Microsoft, it hasn't been the most hyped product. GitHub Copilot, early, very, very early to the party.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Huge run rate, rocketed up to 500 million ARR very, very quickly. But the the horse race has always been, you know, windsurf cognition and cursor and codex and Claude code. And like, the battle has been the startups for the most part. Gemini has been in there. GitHub Copilot has felt like it hasn't been dominating the narrative. But we're gonna find out, is it still growing? Because the market is really, really big. It's possible that everything's growing, even if there's, you know, a horse race back and forth between the the leading laps. There will be a bunch of other questions answered around, you know, how nuanced is the diffusion adoption question?

• 8:18John Coogan?

  So, Microsoft has an incredible go to market team, incredible go to market motion, enterprise sales motion. And so, is there an advantage that they have? That they can press GitHub Copilot? Even if it's not the sexiest product next to whatever's hot this week? Can they get that into people?

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Teams, right?

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Same thing, yeah, yeah. Slack was definitely like the hot one, the hyped one, and Teams wound up doing very well. And so, we'll get a stronger read on what's going on there. And then, of course, that M365 seat growth will tell us a lot about what does the future look like for seat-based enterprise software, the SaaS model broadly? Because if all of a sudden that's falling off a cliff, well, it probably doesn't look good for other seat-based SaaS companies. For Amazon, everyone wants to see strong AWS acceleration to justify the Mag7 topping CapEx numbers. They guided to 200 billion in CapEx in 2026, so expect a lot of focus on AWS revenue growth and margins. Q4 was healthy, though.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Net sales up 14% for Amazon, AWS growing at 24%. The sneakily huge ads business over at Amazon grew 23% to $21.3 billion. They're almost making $100 billion a year just on ads. That's remarkable, and that's a lot of cash flow to fund CapEx and other AI initiatives. And so, operating income overall was 25 billion for last quarter, and they generated free cash flow of 11.2 billion, so still huge cash flows. They're obviously drawing down on those, and that 11.2 billion number was down because of increased AI spending.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  So if AWS accelerates, all the CapEx looks like buying scarce capacity ahead of demand. Like, they will be GPU-rich or just compute-rich generally at a time when it's good to be GPU-rich and compute-rich, and they will look like geniuses. So people are hoping for strong AWS acceleration. Consensus for AWS revenue is around 36.7 billion with growth in the mid-20% range, but the market's really hoping that it starts at the 3. Everyone's hoping for 30%, something like that, at least this year, at some point. You know, re-acceleration would be a treat for the market. Lastly, Meta. Meta's an interesting spot.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Super-clean Q4, nothing really to prove today. Despite all the flood, all the fear, uncertainty, and doubt around the talent wars, new team members, the new lab, the sometimes clunky model releases, they didn't get behemoth Without what, you know, different adoption of Meta Vibes, the video app like there, there's been all these questions about the AI strategy. All of that needs to be put to the side in the face of just AI is already working for Meta.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Let's get an update on Reels.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're, I mean, they're, they're, they're absolutely crushing it. So 3.58 billion DAUs, daily active users. And they grew the ad business a ton. And so, uh, the revenue overall grew 24% to almost 60 billion last quarter. Uh, ad impressions rose 18%, average price per ad rose 6%, family of apps, um, operating income was 30.8 billion, which makes losing 6 billion at Reality Labs like quaint. It's just like, who, who cares? It's totally worth taking a side bet on the future of devices and maybe you get a platform out of that. Makes a ton of sense. And so, uh, capex was 72.2 billion last year. Uh, the guide this year is somewhere between 115, 135.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  I think we might see that tighten up today, um, uh, because it's a little bit wider than some of the other hyperscalers that are targeting. But clearly, uh, a near doubling, almost doubling of capex. What are you laughing at?

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  There's one possibility where he goes, you know, he blows it out.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  250.

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  We can't, we can't, we can't count that out. We can't count that out. They came out with a, they came out with a solid, they, they came out with a solid model.

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  He's putting mirrors in space. He wants to be a player.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of focus is on the, the, the new Meta models, but, uh, all of that, it just financially, at least in the quarterly earnings, like it will just take a backseat to, uh, what's going on with the AI in the ad placement, ad monetization funnel, because that's where Meta makes so much money. And so the question is, how much more juice will AI bring to the ad business? Expectations imply revenue growth of around 31%. And the question's always the same. Is there enough incremental growth to justify the capex? An AI advancement delivers better ad performance basically immediately. And this is the good news for Meta. So improvements in AI move the needle at Meta incredibly quickly.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Like a new model can come out and there can be some breakthrough in like thinking, reasoning, coding agents. And if you're in the enterprise software world, it can take time to do a deal, roll it out to different developers, different organizations, change management, understand the, the. The guardrails, the security, how does this actually flow through an enterprise to drive incremental demand? Not so at Meta. If there's a breakthrough and they have a model that is placing ads more effectively, they can quickly A/B test that, run that across the entire family of apps. And you don't even notice it as a consumer. You're just like, oh, like, I was shopping for a car and I saw an ad for a car. I was shopping for a shirt and I saw an ad for the perfect shirt.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  And the ads just got a little bit better and just a little bit better means like another $20 billion in profit. So it can be, so they just don't have a diffusion question. They don't, they don't have a diffusion problem. There's no, oh, we have this amazing model. If only we could get people that open Instagram to use it. Like, there's nothing there because they use it when they scroll and they see an ad. And so that's an incredibly fortunate place to be in. So every company is trying to answer the same question. Can you turn AI capex into proprietary distribution, higher customer retention, measurable revenue growth before the depreciation catches up? It's the Super Bowl for big tech, so get your popcorn ready. Everyone's, everyone's excited.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  There are, there are AI worries, AI jitters in the Wall Street Journal. AI worries have returned to Wall Street, now come earnings. And so everyone is going back and forth. On the OpenAI news, shares of Oracle, CoreWeave and SoftBank slumped, but CoreWeave is up majorly today, 8.4%. They dropped at least 4% after hours yesterday, but then they're back up. That revived investors worries that technology giants' massive investments in artificial intelligence won't produce the blockbuster profits many expect. The report was particularly jarring, coming ahead of key earnings for major players, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, all scheduled to report Wednesday with Apple following on Thursday.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  "The ice is thin, the leash is very tight," said Dan Morgan, portfolio analyst at Cenovus Trust. Any evidence that would come out that would add doubt about OpenAI, Anthropic, or any of these companies is obviously going to create a sell-off. Morgan said he hadn't adjusted his positions on Tuesday and didn't think Investor concern was broad based because companies, including IBM, Texas Instruments, and Intel had reported strong earnings in recent days. Instead, Tuesday's losses centered on the companies with biggest stakes in OpenAI's business. OpenAI had forged close ties with these companies to secure funding and gain access to computing resources, which are essential for training AI systems and providing answers to queries and executing user requests.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  And so Oracle and CoreWeave, we talked about, fell. OpenAI has defended its financial footing and said its leaders are aligned on securing computing resources. The business is firing on all cylinders and the mood internally is incredibly positive, the company said in a response to the journalist's article on Tuesday. Colin Tadard says, "My children might not eat tonight if this doesn't go well," because he is excited for all four of these earnings on Robinhood. And we have Vlad from Robinhood coming on the show later today.

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  Kramer says, "Intel is such a horse."

• 16:37John Coogan?

  I have no bear case.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  I have no bear case.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  And Intel is up another 10% today? Yeah, up 10% today. Wow. I mean- Forty percent on the week so far. Forty percent on the week.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 16:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Based on everything you've seen so far in your six-month career, Tyler, is that good?

• 16:58John Coogan?

  That seems incredible. Looks pretty good to me so far. Yeah, I mean, there is a, there's, like, the idea of a, of a CPU shortage generally is just being digested by the market right now. I think it took, I mean, I remember Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross going on Stratechery and talking about, after ChatGPT saying like, "Yeah, Nvidia seems like it could be important." And they like quadrupled in value. And this, this tends to happen as people digest the new reality of demand around certain pieces of the AI supply chain.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  And we have an interactive game set up?

• 17:35John Coogan?

  We do. So there has been a viral, I don't know, what is it, a brain teaser? It's like a poll. A poll, but it's more, it's a thought experiment. It's a thought experiment. It's not, it's not purely a poll. It's a- It's a, it's a brain teaser. It's a thought experiment. And did this, has this existed before? Did this start with, did this didn't start with Mr. Beast, right?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  No, so I

• 18:03John Coogan?

  It started with Tim Urban?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, Tim Urban, I, I don't think Tim Urban like created this either, but I think his post was the one that first went like really big.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  But I, I don't think this is new. I feel like I've heard about this before at some point.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  But Tim Urban was the first one to make it like go viral this

• 18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  cycle.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  So he got 24 million views on April 24th. And then Mr. Beast came from behind four days later with 10 million views on a very similar question. Let's start with the original Tim Urban question. And we will ask everyone in the chat to participate and vote for what you would pick in this thought experiment. So here is the question posed by Tim Urban of Wait But Why. Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red button or a blue button. If more than 50% press the blue button, everyone survives. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only the people who press the red button survived. Which button would you press? What are you, what are you pressing?

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  So, so the sort of like normie answer is you immediately just go blue. Because it feels like a lot of people would go blue, but like the safe answer is you just, if you, if you're hyper rational, you'd be like, obviously you hit red. Because if everyone's just super rational, everyone hits red and then everyone's all good. You don't hit over 50%, right?

• 19:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, because like no matter what, so if I press red, no matter what anyone else picks, like I survive, right?

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yes. But there is a risk.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  But, but like, you know, if you want everyone to survive, then you need 100% of people to pick red. Right?

• 19:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  But, okay, so, okay, so originally I was blue.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  I think I was like, complete normie, right? And then I went to Jordy's take.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  I was like, wait, no, that doesn't make sense. Like, even though, I mean, we'll see what happened in the poll, right?

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  But, you know, I was like, okay, if I'm thinking about it super rationally, I should just pick red, right? Then I save myself 100% of the time.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  But then, like, if there's some people that pick blue, then like, they're gonna die for sure.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Like, I'm basically voting against them.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're, you're sort of, you're complicit in their demise.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  If you want everyone to live.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  And you're, and you're going for red, you need 100% of people. But i-if you're going for blue, and you want everyone to live, you only need 51% of people, right?

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  So you need to convince way less people.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Quickly, let's, let's tell the chat how to vote.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so 1 is for red.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  1 is for red.

• 20:32Jordi Hays?

  We got intern Ben here, and 2 is for blue.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  2 is for blue. So type a, a single character, just a 1 if you want to vote for red, and just a 2 if you want to vote for blue. Oh, do we have this up? Ooh, we are tilted towards red. This is crazy. This is not what happened with Tim Urbans and with, uh, uh, Mr. Beast. Uh, because Tim Urban, 58% said blue, blue won, no one died. And with Mr. Beast's, uh, 55.7% went blue, no one died. It's not looking good for the blue team here. 33% of the chat is, is gonna get cooked right now.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  It's possible a nation-state is voting.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Yes, that would be very, very high risk. Mike Solana says, "For what it's worth," uh, and this is embarrassing, but I'm gonna admit it. "My instinct was blue, and I pressed blue. Then I thought about it for a moment, and the answer was clearly red. I can't make a rational case for blue, but understand where blues are coming from." Parenthesis, "They are wrong." So, your final answer, you, you, you flipped.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  I think I'm still going blue, yeah.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  You're still going blue.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Because I, I think you have to assume that there's gonna be some variance.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Like, some, there's, some people will just pick the wrong one.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Yes, and so...

• 21:51Speaker 02

  The, the correct one is red. If everyone is, you know, 100% logical, everyone should be picking red.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  Hmm, uh, yes. If, if 100% of people are rational, they will all pick red and no one will die.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  But if...

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Clearly, some people are not gonna do that.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  90%.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  If 90% of people are doing it.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  If 90% of people are rational.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Then, everyone should just be picking blue, because you want everyone to live.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And then, and then the people that make the mistake, they go for the red, they are saved anyway. But there are, there are some folks who are, who are sharing different, different illustrations. Kremu has one here. He says, "If this was how the buttons looked, what portion of humanity would press blue?" And he has two images pulled up. One is the red button, nothing happens. And the other one is the ultimate death gamble, press blue. You enter the ultimate death gamble. You and everyone who presses this button dies, unless more than 50% of people choose to press this button. And so that makes it pretty clear. I think this is the Mike Solano position as well.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  You gotta press red in this case because nothing happens.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  But, but that's not, but that's not entirely true. And so people have sort of, have sort of flipped this around because Prirat here has the opposite, which is instead of the ultimate death gamble, it's the ultimate murder gamble. So, blue, if everyone presses blue, nothing happens. Red is the ultimate murder gamble because you initiate the ultimate murder gamble. Everyone who pressed blue will die unless 50% of people choose red. And so it goes back and forth and you can see both of those. Do you want the blood on your hands from playing the ultimate murder gamble? Or do you want the risk of the ultimate death gamble? I, I think it's underrated to just be a little thrill seeking and want to press blue because you know, you're bored and you want...

• 23:41Speaker 02

  No, you can tell blue is the correct answer just because of the massive polls where over 50% of people picked blue.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  That's true, that's true.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  You just pick blue because you don't want to kill, you know.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  Once you're at Mr. B scale, this is like a real world simulation.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  It is, it is. Well, we're still, we're still red.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Simone Sayed says, "Red button pushers will leave their wives and children to fend for themselves in disastrous situations because their kids can't run fast enough." Mike Solano says, "Blue button pushers are literally leaving their wives and children behind to fend for themselves." They aren't guaranteed to push red. Yes. People are going back and forth. "Red cells won't believe this, but some people make a distinction between nothing and mass genocide." So they see pushing the red button as effectively committing mass genocide because you are potentially condemning the blue button pushers to death in this scenario. Selfmaxer shares a version of the...

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Of the trolley problem where the red team is not on the rails, but the blue team is pushing the lever to save themselves. Is this an accurate description? Is this, is this a fair, is this a fair contextualization around this? It's obviously charitable to the red team, which of course the TVPN audience seems to be represented by, standing next to the trolley lines and not standing on the, on the rails. But you would be there, Tyler. You would be a blue button pusher pushing on the, on the trolley.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Seems like I'm an idiot.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Seems a little risky in this scenario. It does. When you have the option just to stand there and watch the trolley go by, you know, it's, it's all about frame of mind here.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  No, but like you can tell that from the polls, from the big polls, you can just tell that blue is the correct option.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Potentially. Do you know that beforehand?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  No, you don't. But those people who voted in it did not know beforehand.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  And so if, if 10 million or how many hundreds of thousands of people voted, I think you can just assume that that's.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  The question is like, if this actually was a real vote.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  Would people spend a little bit more time thinking about the problem? And would that influence their, their answer?

• 25:52John Coogan?

  It is, it is a very.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Because the social media poll, people are scrolling. They see Mr. Beast ask a question and they're just like curious. There's no real stakes.

• 26:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  And so they just answer quickly.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  But the blue is very much a, it's a faith and humanity restored moment. Right? If everyone works together, nobody dies at all in this hypothetical. David Shore says, we ask this to a large.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  Hits the death gamble button together.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Humanity wins.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  There are, there are analogies to that in real life. You know, national sacrifice, community sacrifice, everyone pitching in for a greater good to save those who didn't even chime in to serve or save the world. The, you know, you think about Armageddon, the sacrifice of going to the, the, the asteroid, to destroy it. The, these are heroic, these are heroic stories. What is, what's the chat saying?

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  They're not a, I don't think they're, they really are big fans of my position.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  No.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Well, you know who is a large sample of nationally representative Americans? Blue won by a large margin, three to one margin. And everyone voted blue here. They asked a whole bunch of people. To close out the blue-red button discourse, they polled 14,000 people, cross-tabbed survey responses by 204 commonly-used psychometric questions. The top four personality questions, most predictive of button choice, were displayed below. I tell the truth. The blue-button pushers strongly agree I tell the truth. People who don't tell the truth were still more likely to select blue, but a little bit more likely to select red on average.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  A very, very, very interesting social experiment. Have a great day, everyone. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.