Stripe’s $53B PayPal Offer, OpenAI’s First Device, TBPN’s New Business Ideas | 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 Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ 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.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Big news in the fintech world, not related to Ramp, actually, but Stripe, another founder's fund project. It's Founder's Fund Day. Stripe is offered to buy PayPal. This was rumored and on the timeline on and off over the past year as PayPal's been a little beat up. We can pull up the five-year chart. It's down over 80% since the pandemic highs. If you go back further, the 2020 to 2021 era for PayPal was like sort of an anomaly because of the big shift to e-commerce during the pandemic boom, but things have not been looking good for the last five years. And so just a couple, was it a couple of months ago?

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Shiel Monot posted in February of 2026, he posted a little, a little question for the timeline. He said, so who's buying PayPal? He says, it has the opportunity of being one of the great distressed value opportunities in fintech history. It's down 85% at the time, still, still generating $5.5 billion in free cash flow. This is a $50 billion company. We'll go through the PayPal, the Stripe offer, which is at 53 billion, but you know, you're getting a 10% free cash flow yield. I'm unaffected.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I'm still, I'm still working through these, these two.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  We got new ones. But if you think about it, it's like you have a $50 billion company printing 5.5 billion in free cash flow. You can use a lot to finance debt, obviously, which is what's proposed here. 400 million consumer accounts. So lots of consumers have PayPal accounts, have Venmo accounts. Maybe they're not fully active, but they're ready to be engaged. It's a huge footprint and huge distribution mechanism. And they have bank info attached. That's difficult. You can't get that from many other consumer applications. That's sort of the, the white whale of consumer. How deep can you go in the KYC flow, in the consumer bank relationship? You really know these customers, which is valuable for, for, for

• 2:05John Coogan?

  a potential buyer like Stripe in this case. So checkout buttons are on millions of merchant sites, although that has been slowing and, and that's part of the reason why a change of ownership might make sense at this point. And they also have this peer-to-peer brand with Venmo, which was bought by Brian Johnson, Braintree, and then sold to PayPal. Old lore. So Shiel, the first company he calls out is Stripe. He says, they have a lot of desirable assets for Stripe, a consumer-facing checkout, bank account details for hundreds of millions of consumers that you could integrate into Stripe's checkout flow. And they have a, and they have a consumer brand in Venmo. Apple would also be a potential buyer, says Shiel. Good complement to Apple Pay for e-commerce penetration. They never got social payments going. Shiel says, those are the two logical options from a business value creation perspective,

• 2:50John Coogan?

  but he identifies a problem. He says, in both cases, Apple and Stripe, the culture fit makes them a non-starter.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  I take it back. They actually did buy a BNPL platform.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  That I've never heard of called Paydy.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  For 2.7 billion.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Okay. So they, so they do have an asset there that they are hopefully trying to grow.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  But prior to that, they had already built their own.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Got it. So Shiel calls out that culture fit might be a problem with PayPal integrating into Stripe. PayPal is a, quote, sprawling legacy fintech with 25,000 employees. That's a huge company. Decades of technical debt. Neither Stripe nor Apple would want to absorb that, although technical debt, you can clean it up. Coding agents, not too bad these days. Apple also might face big tech antitrust with this type of thing. That's a good call out. And yeah, you do have to, you do have to wonder Stripe, incredible on the product side, on the innovation side, on the, on the, just building a fantastic massive $159 billion as of last tender offer business. But are they the, are they the team to be the ruthless

• 3:53John Coogan?

  cost cutters if that's what it takes to turn PayPal around? That might be a different challenge culturally. Same thing for Apple. They're not this private equity firm that goes in and buys and legacy assets and turns them around. So a little bit of an, of a culture shift that I think Shiel is correct to call out. He also identifies Visa and Mastercard as potential buyers. So they could both afford it and they've been creeping into merchant acquiring and checkout. Also, we talked about that. The, the big banks are now taking a shot across the bow of Visa and Mastercard with their own card network. So there's potential that Visa and Mastercard might want to expand into a different territory, although that's not what's playing out right now. But who knows what other bidders will come out of the woodwork now that Stripe has made this offer to buy PayPal for 53 billion. So PayPal's

• 4:35John Coogan?

  checkout button placement is enormously valuable real estate for either Visa or Mastercard. The networks have been trying to move beyond interchange into direct merchant relationships and PayPal could accelerate that by years. I think they're, they may be burned out on antitrust. Either network acquiring the largest independent online checkout provider would and should face brutal regulatory scrutiny, says Shiel. He goes on, he says, what about Elon? Elon co-founded PayPal and always wanted it to be called X. So there's some poetry in it coming back under his fold as X. Of course, he is a Stripe shareholder, I believe. I think he was an angel investor, one of his very rare angel investments with Stripe. So, you know, he might be getting a slice of PayPal with this. Not too bad. His bandwidth is spread and possibly thin across Tesla, SpaceX, XAI. This is pre-merger. X, politics

• 5:19John Coogan?

  and replying concerning to post at 3:00 AM. Never been a problem for Elon, but he said, but you could have made the case. He was spread too thin before he started to acquire this last several companies too. Technical debt at PayPal is a big challenge that he knows. I would never count him out. I just don't see it though. And then he says, in his opinion, Shiel says, JP Morgan makes the most sense. They've spent heavily on payments and acquisition and an acquisition could get them closer to building a consumer super app alongside Chase. 50 billion would be a huge acquisition even for them, but they could stomach it, assuming they could get regulatory approval. Venmo gives them a P2P brand that they've never been able to build, especially among younger consumers. PayPal's branded checkout button sits on millions of merchant sites. Remember, didn't JP Morgan,

• 6:01John Coogan?

  is it JP Morgan that bought that company that Charlie Javas founded and then she went to jail or was accused of crimes? Because, and that pitch for her company was.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  It was consumer facing.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Consumer facing.

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  They had a relationship with alleged, I guess.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  I think she's been convicted.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they positioned it as having a lot of relationships.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  With younger consumers, college students. And so I think the deal came in like north of $100 million and then it was later alleged or discovered that those accounts were maybe generated programmatically. I think this was the pre-AI era. Now it's even easier if you need to generate a bunch of fake data, but don't do that because it's fraud.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The question is, like Stripe makes so much sense because to be able to pull off an acquisition like this, to be able to get the, the level of debt needed to do this, you need to have so much confidence that they're going to actually be able to, I'm assuming they'll end up reducing headcount pretty dramatically. I'm assuming Stripe looks at this and says, hey, I don't think we need 25,000 people running this business. So who has the operational strength and know-how to make PayPal run? If you could make PayPal even run half as well as, as Stripe, that's probably worth double what it's currently worth. So yeah, if you're, if you're a lender here, I don't, I don't see, or a partner,

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  I don't see that you can find a better partner than, than Stripe on a deal like this, period.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Stripe is a fun option. I agree with this. It's funny, this teal-backed fintech company buying a teal-founded company, full circle. The first offer's already facing some pushback. Michael Burry, I believe, is a shareholder and he posted on his Substack about why he's not selling at this current price. He thinks that PayPal can get back to their previous share price from a year ago. But the basic structure of the deal is as follows. 53 billion for all of PayPal, $60.50 per share offered, 28% premium over yesterday's closing price, but it's a steep discount to last year's valuation. 50 billion has been committed in bank financing and the FT is reporting that PayPal has been reluctant

• 8:12John Coogan?

  to engage with the offer thus far. Stripe is much bigger than PayPal at this point. Also interesting, this offer was apparently sent over to PayPal weeks ago, maybe a full month ago, based on the reporting, and it didn't leak. So whoever's working on this team, good job. Kept it under wraps.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  They're taking it public. They're taking it public. And Rikay, Lores.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Yes, CEO.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  CEO over PayPal just got the gig. He'd been over at HP.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  And you can't imagine that he's, you know, took the job wanting to just basically be acquired in a short period of time.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  I would imagine he wants to get credit for a proper turnaround here. And so I think they're going public with this now in part to try to put pressure.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  So Stripe is partnering with private equity firm Advent International for the deal. They have a lot of deal-making experience in. FinTech specifically, and I think they're going to go 50/50 on the equity portion, but then there's a whole bunch of bank financing coming in. And they will point in their offer to the fact that branded PayPal checkouts are slowing. There's fierce competition from Apple Pay, Shop Pay, Klarna. These are reasons to sell. PayPal will likely fire back saying, hey, we just brought in a fresh CEO. We have a restructuring plan in place. We're executing against that. Once that happens, once we're successful, we will get back to the 70s for our share price, which we traded at just a year ago.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  So yeah, maybe we're not going to go back to the pandemic highs anytime soon, but this offer is just too low for right now. But we will see. Overall, I mean, Stripe has done an excellent job expanding into many adjacent markets. Atlas is a great example. And they've never cracked consumer, but also they've never really tried, in my opinion. And so I think it'd be really awesome to watch this play out, see what they do with it. But it does seem like it'll take a few more rounds of negotiation before anything fully materializes. Anyway, there is news out of OpenAI. The first consumer hardware device will reportedly be an AI companion speaker. According to Bloomberg, the device will be screenless and movable, designed to serve as a new kind of home computer for the AI era.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  And I believe Tyler has a mock-up of what we think it would look like. I think I sent it to you. Did that make it into the timeline? Let's pull that up when we have a second. It will be able to answer questions, control smart home devices, play music and tap into GPT's capabilities. But the bigger goal is for it to become increasingly personalized over time. OpenAI envisions it as an AI companion that gets to know its owner, understands their habits, and it can even draw on personal information like email to provide more useful assistance.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  And we have the image here.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. Let's pull up what I think it probably looks like, based on this description, that it's screenless, movable, and designed to serve as a new kind of home computer for the AI era. That's what I'm hoping for. Sort of a function one concert level speakers that have wheels and can be wheeled around. It's movable, smart speaker.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  It weighs, it actually weighs one ton.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. A full speaker stack.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Onboard battery system.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  They want it to be mobile.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  They don't want you to worry about plugging it in.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Imagine just wheeling this around and just pumping out a Tiesto at concert level volumes throughout your home.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  Inside any room in your home.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Any room in your home. Ideally, those wheels would be motorized. It could follow you around and deafen you in any room, sort of Brian Johnson's worst nightmare. Not to call back Brian Johnson, but unlike today's smart speakers, the device is designed to feel more lifelike.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  And yes, that is a bit.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Yes, this is a joke.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  This is a joke.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  But.

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  We have not been intentionally not been read in on anything in device land because we want to figure out what's happening in real time with you guys.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  But if you've been using Codex and you are running Codex on, or just the new ChatGPT app, which is fully Codexified, if you've been running it on your computer, it's pretty remarkable when you're on your phone and you're in your remote into your computer and you can have it go and just open your actual email. And if you're logged into a new site, it will just use your actual login to go and open the website in your Chrome browser, which is logged in, and get you whatever information you need. So having the full control, I think that people are with the ChatGPT app on iOS, integrating to Codex or ChatGPT app on Mac. We're now crossing the chasm of like the OpenClaw experience for people that weren't ready to set up the OpenClaw.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Whole like agentic workflows and do all of this stuff, jump through all the hoops there. These are just apps that you can install. You never really get hit with a terminal window whatsoever. So like the next wave of consumers are adopting effectively these, I don't even know, they're agents, but it's more like computer use plus agents plus desktop integration that makes it ultimately more usable. So unlike today's smart speakers, the device is designed to feel more lifelike, according to Bloomberg, and it will include mechanical elements that move on their own, along with a camera and other sensors to understand the surroundings. Powered by GPT Live, OpenAI's new real-time voice mode, it should be able to hold more natural conversations and recognize when you enter a room.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  You'll also be able to take it around the house, thanks to its rechargeable battery. Johnny Ive is helping design the product. Bloomberg says OpenAI's hardware team is developing roughly five AI devices, with the speaker expected to be the first, targeting an unveiling this year ahead of a planned 2027 release. We have another example of what we think they should do in the device, in the device battle. The new smart device that I want from OpenAI is of course the, you've heard Greg Brockman say this, taste is a new core skill, right?

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  So what can computers, what are they uniquely bad at doing?

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Taste.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Creating tastes for you.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Right? There's no real smell-o-vision yet. There's no computer device, there's no smart device that actually puts a taste in your mouth to signal what's going on with your AI agent. So I put together Melt, my pitch for the next AI device from OpenAI.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  A custom-fit oral wearable that turns AI agent status into flavor, so you can feel a ChatGPT Codex run without watching the terminal.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yes, so you don't need to look at a screen. This is perfect if you're trying to cut back on your screen time. You don't need to hear anything. You can just listen to the beautiful surroundings of wherever you are, and yet you're still tapped in. You still know whether your build is failing or not, because you pair it with, you pair it with Codex, it maps the signals and it ships by taste. So when your agent is done, a clean sour pulse tells you that it's time to review the work. If something breaks.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  Like a good, like a good.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, sort of like a Sour Patch Kids.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  It's a little sweet, but it's sour, you know? It lets you know, hey, it's time to go check on what's happening, review some code, make sure everything's shipping as you hope it is. If something breaks, you get a flash of heat, it gets spicy in your mouth. This pulls your attention. You gotta, you gotta lock in, so you have some spicy flavor in your mouth. If your API balance hits zero, you get this bitter taste. It's not good. You gotta go refill those credits.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  A bitter note makes the problem impossible to ignore.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yes, but if everything is green, everything is shipping appropriately, everything's good to go, you get a sweet pop in your mouth that rewards the win. And it's also a Pavlovian feedback loop, because you're just on the hunt for the next burst of flavor. And it can also look like an iced out grill, which might be nice.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  More seriously, we were over here at TVPN HQ. Any, any idea that we have immediately gets turned into a website now.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  We have the laptop detailing company of San Francisco.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  And, and this is a business that we actually think should be built.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  John was cleaning his laptop last week, and whatever product you had ordered off of Amazon.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  I didn't order it. Team ordered it. It's a, it's a normal like screen wipe, but I didn't realize that you're supposed to use gloves when you use these screen wipes, and it gave me a chemical burn all over my hands. Be very careful, like my whole, all of the skin on my fingers.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Screen.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Healing off, it's been terrible.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  So we think that there is a silly but real business opportunity to make a laptop computer, you know, like a computer detailing service, like a car detailing service.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  For laptops. You sign up a bunch of companies, startups in San Francisco, you know, early-stage companies, enterprise, et cetera. You give them a monthly plan to keep all of their employees' laptops clean and polished. And yeah, this was, this was one shot, and I think it gets the job done. So no excuses. I think that the only thing I disagree with on the site is the pricing.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  The pricing. How much?

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think 20, 29.99.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Well, you know why this is so subsidized? Because the screen cleaners are looking for trade secrets and then trading off of them. But of course, if you're doing this, you need to have the, the no, no insider trading guarantee, which is featured here. To be extremely clear, our detailers will not photograph, memorize, transcribe, trade upon, tiff off a roommate, or otherwise profit from anything visible on your screen. Hundred percent information is not used, right?

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's a great.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  You gotta let them know.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  That's a great offer.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  We clean screens. We do not read them. It's almost like he doth, she doth protest too much. Even if your screen contains an unreleased earnings report, even if the font is very large, even if the ticker symbol is impossible to miss, our detailers will not be trading on your inside information.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think these have to be onsite visits.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  What's another big problem in the world? Big problem is that everyone knows the phrase, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Well, what if you could? What if you could? What if toothpaste came in a luxurious jar? The company's called Paradox Toothpaste Out of the Tube. It's a refillable frosted glass jar that turns the most ordinary part of your morning into a ritual worth displaying. Do you think this would sell? Paradox? Most toothpaste is designed to be hidden. Paradox is designed to be seen and used with intention twice a day. Scoop one precise pearl, no crusty cap, no guesswork, no wasted squeeze, brush your teeth, then you can refill it.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  What do you do with the spoon, though? You're, you're just.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  You dip it back in the toothpaste, luxurious toothpaste.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  It's over for this idea.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  This is a bad idea?

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, though.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  It solves the problem. You can't put toothpaste back in the tube. Everyone's been clamoring.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everyone's been clamoring for this.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  To put the toothpaste back in the tube. Now you can. Tyler made one. He has a pitch for Keydra.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was another idea I had for an OpenAI device. So basically, it's a water bottle with a keyboard wrapped around it.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  So if we can pull this up here, you can see like, you know, a lot of times you're typing and then you go to grab water, you're thirsty.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  You want to keep typing.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this also is especially pressing now because of everyone's using Whisper, right? You gotta talk in, you can't talk while you're drinking water, right?

• 19:24John Coogan?

  So why not just put a microphone on here?

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  No, no, that's the whole point. When you're in the act of drinking water, you can't.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  Oh, so you gotta switch to typing?

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  So you have to start typing.

• 19:31John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  It sounds like a flute.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  This could be pretty promising.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  I actually think that when you showed me this image, I think just aesthetically, it's a cool looking bottle, even if the keyboard isn't functional whatsoever. I think people would just rock this type of bottle because they like the aesthetics of a keyboard. Sort of like that Nvidia purse. You've seen the GPU purse that's it's clear plastic. And then inside is a A100 or some sort of Nvidia GPU. And it just sort of shows you the circuit board and the circuit board is the art is the design of the purse. I thought it was pretty cool. I would pick one of these up if you manufactured one. What do you think?

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not. We have another new car alert.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  New car.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  This one car is called Chip.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  Chip Motors.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Let's play this.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  It is. It is funny. It is funny.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  I want to see their pitch.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  A year ago, you could have been sitting there thinking, why has no one made a cute EV car for getting around your town or your neighborhood?

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  Why has no one done that?

• 20:34John Coogan?

  And now there's like seven companies that are doing it.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of companies. Apparently, a lot of people had the same idea.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  Jamison from the CEO of Chip Motors says the next great American car is a robot. It talks, parks itself, more customized than your coffee.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Mmm.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  Eat Chip. You can reserve today.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Let's play this video. I want to see it.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Yes, Saturday's here. I'm Chip, by the way. Let's get moving.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Hi, Chip. Hey, Chip.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Hey, my crew's here.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Ready to roll.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Oh, he's got crazy FOMO.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Bye, Chip.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Go get him, guys.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Have fun. Love you too. Man, I'm talking to myself. Um, hi. Go park, Chip.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  You got it, boss.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  I like the LED screen on the front.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  I've seen demos of that in like Chinese cars.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Chip, I forgot the snacks again. Can you run to the market?

• 21:39Speaker 04

  On it.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Drives itself?

• 21:43John Coogan?

  This is bold. This is going to take some regulatory approval.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I love the vision.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  And I think as just the base model in its current design will sell units, right? Uh, I.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  I mean, there's like to channel Doug DiMiro, he'd say it's no, there's no way it's going to wind up shipping at 15K. There's going to be a bunch of upgrades. It's going to be difficult, but yes, like it at 15K with these features like 100%. But this is a demo.

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  Even at even at even at somewhere in the range of, you know, 20 to 30.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  I think these things sell because I know what these sort of like higher end neighborhood golf carts go for.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  They're already all in that range. So yes, I agree. It's probably.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  But at this point, you said like, yes, I will buy this this neighborhood golf cart to like seven different golf carts. And you're like 400K in the hole on golf carts and you could have just got a Luchia and chopped the top.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Chop the top on the Luchia.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Chop the top.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  It's not a bad idea. Um, imagine you're the example I think they use was like a kid's soccer practice. Can you imagine like parking for a kid's soccer practice or a soccer game and being like, yeah, robot that I just bought, like go park yourself, like that just sounds like the sketchiest situation.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  This customizer is so cool. You can you can get livery of like an American flag from the factory.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  It's taking a different direction than Amble. Amble is betting that you're going to want something that has less technology, right? More more simplicity. They're going very tech forward. Everything from autonomous driving to, you know, screens and AI in the device.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  Different different bets, different customer bases. I think that can both work. Um, we're we're in touch now with with the Chip team. So we'll we'll look to get them on on the show at some point soon. And hopefully they can just drive this thing right right behind the horse and get on the set.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  I'm excited. I mean, I do really, really hope that the time to market for startup, these weird like sort of niche vehicles and these new EV makers shortens because we had this moment where it was impossible to start a new car company. Then Elon built Tesla into what it is, the number one selling car in, I think, the US and in China. Well, the Model Y. So huge success. And then there were a number of follow-ons that were like Nikola and a few others that that either ended very poorly or went bankrupt or didn't really get to breakthrough. And they took, you know, years and years and years and billions of dollars in capital to ship something.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  And they didn't weren't really able to find their footing in the in the market. Because at the time when, for example, like Lucid, Lucid, you know, eventually launched a premium EV SUV or a premium, eventually launched SUV, but sedan. And by that time, like the Taycan was out and a few other and Mercedes had the EQS. And so there were a lot of other major brands that had been able to deliver on a similar promise on a similar timeline, whereas Tesla's advantage was that they were able to be the first EV. And they had like a monopoly on EVs for like a decade, basically. It was the only viable one. It was like that or like the Nissan leaf. And now there's more competition, but they're they're established. I'm interested to see, can this come to market in two year timeframe or three years, something?

• 25:07John Coogan?

  As opposed to, I would be really, I'd be really disappointed. And that might be regulatory failure. That might just be the supply chain. There might be a variety of different things, but based on the speed with which we see China shipping all sorts of vehicles that crab walk and spin around and do jump and all these crazy features. I would certainly hope that startups are able to bring cars like this to the market much faster. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Do us a small favor and have the best Wednesday afternoon of your life.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  Indeed, indeed.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  It's the least you could do.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  And we'll see you tomorrow.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Goodbye.