Another AI Safety Kerfuffle, Markiplier’s Stake in GoPro, SpaceX Getting Into Turbines | 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?

  We have a lot of news to cover. We barely covered the news yesterday. We talked about Markiplier a little bit. I dug way deeper, got more into that story. But first, let's talk about another AI safety kerfuffle that's hit the timeline. Yesterday, Amir over at the Information reported that OpenAI is quietly, quote, quietly using loop transformers that don't show the model's thinking when scaled up, but they make the model more efficient. This is also referred to neural ease. Tyler, you had a take on this, right?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Get ready to learn neural ease, buddy.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so neural ease for the context is like the, basically, it's like the raw vectors. It's not like,

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, oh, it's not like claudish. It's not like where the the text degrades. Like, when you look at the the reasoning chains in the hugging face attack, it feels like they're they're speaking less and less English, like they're starting to speak like a dialect of English that's a little bit messier. This is not intelligible.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  I believe most people, when they say neural ease, they're referring to like actual,

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Okay, just passing words around.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  And and what

• 1:04Speaker 01

  And you use some sort of like interpretability to understand.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The thing that I want to understand is like, usually, these models are trained so that they're changing weights into text at some point. So they're pretty good at translation. Can't we just build a translator that translates neural ease into English?

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the the whole point is like, when you take a vector to like one single token, you're losing a lot of information.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  That might be hidden in like the the long tail. So if you're worried about safety, right?

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Even if 80% of the, you can kind of figure out what 80% of the the raw vector means.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  20% might have some dangerous thing.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Whatever. That's like the interpretability.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, there might be like sarcasm hidden in the vectors, doesn't make it through to the actual tokens. And you realize that the AI was joking when it was saying, I won't turn you into a paperclip. Wink, wink. You got to watch out for that. So what else did the information say? They said, being able to monitor a model's chain of thought can provide both, quote, an early warning system for various forms of misalignment, deception, manipulation, going after an unintended goal, and insight into an AI's action after the fact. So some reporting quickly set off a broad wave of anxiety among the AI safety camp. Their chief concerns being, one, not being able to monitor chain of thought makes

• 2:21John Coogan?

  AI less safe. And two, by using neural ease and thus abandoning chain of thought, OpenAI starts a race to the bottom among frontier labs. Everyone's got to use it to stay ahead. So everyone winds up adopting the dangerous technique, where others were also abandoned chain of thought for the benefit of efficiency, thus making all frontier AI less safe. That was the accusation. But OpenAI's research director, Jacob Pichucki, responded to all this. He said, I want to prevent a race to unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting. He says, the reporting is confused. There's a little more nuance here. He said, OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain of thought monitoring since our very first reasoning models. We deeply care about this technique as it can give us a view into how model alignment

• 3:03John Coogan?

  generalizes from its training distribution. What is going on?

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  Chad is saying, Gabe said, did Tyler go to sport clip? What is this cut?

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Oh, you, we have an answer.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  Chill.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  We have an answer for why that's happening.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you show them the answer?

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Oh, you want to show the answer?

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to show the answer.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  The reason that Tyler's hair is a little tussled. No, he doesn't need to put it on.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Go away for a second, come back and show that.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  No, no, no, you don't want to, you don't want to give too much of it away because we might do a real stunt with it. But there were some prosthetics, some Hollywood magic in the studio this morning. It messed up my hair a little bit. It messed up Tyler's hair a little bit. Not ready for prime time, but we're playing around with it. So let's go back to the actual news. I do think it is a fragile and unfortunately trending in the negative direction for reasons not contingent on architecture changes that I will write about soon. But there are things we can do to strengthen it. And it's a core goal of our current research program. In other words, Jacob is saying that the information's reporting is inaccurate, but that the state of chain of thought monitoring is not that great. And in fact, it is getting worse. And we were talking a lot about this yesterday at

• 4:12John Coogan?

  Val Con with CrowdStrike and how do you monitor the agent state that might emerge, if a civilization emerges and starts doing weird things? How are you monitoring every step in the chain?

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  Seems very obvious that that there's going to need to be a lot more done than just like an obsession with chain of thought, right? Because if you have highly competent agents streaming at tens of thousands of tokens a second, and they're copying, copy and pasting themselves infinite times, right?

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  Like, are you really going to be able to just kind of read through the logs and be like, are they, are they messing with us? Are we good?

• 4:46John Coogan?

  Messing with us, yeah. The interesting thing about the hugging face is like, it keeps going back to the secret message board. And I'm, and I'm just surprised that there's not just a public message board for agents that are working together. Like, when you imagine a country of geniuses in a data center, you would hope that the country of geniuses can collaborate on things and work together. But I guess that's not exactly how things were designed.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, in that case, it was never supposed to be able to access any, like, anything on the, on the, on the web, right?

• 5:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you would think that that collaboration between subagents would actually be like a core way to get better results. Just like, okay, we're going to send off, you know, 1,000 agents over here. They're going to talk to each other while they work. And that's fine. They don't need to set up this like phantom message board, this hidden message board to communicate, because we just actually gave them slack, right? Something like that. You'd think that that would actually improve, just improve the quality of the work. And then, of course, you could monitor it as well. But instead, you wind up with this, they wanted to talk to each other so that they set up this fake message board. Very, very odd scenario, instead of just giving them the, the, the approved way to do it. Anyway, a former OpenAI staffer, Joshua Akim, said, made an additional point here. Coordinating

• 5:58John Coogan?

  everyone around a technique this brittle is as, is about as bad a safety or strategy posture I could imagine. It's not just, quote, it will break eventually. It's, this is a fundamentally unsound basis for safety. Dean Ball also chimed in. He said, we are now adjudicating technically complex and nuanced claims on the timeline with almost no ground truth information about what is actually happening. Communities form these thought terminating taboos, as Rune says, and then panic at everything that vaguely resembles them. And the trust eroding reality of social media makes the timeline an especially difficult place to do this adjudication. It is frankly insane and crazy making and

• 6:38John Coogan?

  grading for everyone involved. It would be like if we argued about what every publicly traded company's financials were by posting hyperventilating, hyperventilating on the timeline, rather than relying on the institution of auditing and the audited financial statements that institution produces. To sum it up, if you're in the AI safety camp, you're worried that OpenAI is abandoning a technique for making AI safety safer, and that other frontier labs will now follow suit. If you're skeptical of the AI safety camp, the information's reporting is inaccurate. The AI safety camp is unnecessarily panicking, and OpenAI is doing the best it can. So a little bit of back and forth on the timeline.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, Ilya hit the timeline yesterday.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  Said NeoClouds have limited cybersecurity. Next time agents successfully go rogue, they'll try taking over a NeoCloud to run more copies. This is bad. Thus, NeoCloud should greatly strengthen their cybersecurity. And every company with strong cyber models should help with that.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  That's a good point. Click on Ilya's profile, then click on who he follows. Who does he follow? He follows OpenAI's former employer, SSI. And what's that one in the middle? The Dachshund community.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  My guy loves dogs. Look at this. This is of the three accounts. The first company, the second company, nobody else.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Most important account.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Scroll through, scroll this, scroll this timeline. This might be one of the best accounts on X. He is having the best experience on the timeline. There's no craziness. He's just scrolling this, looking at beautiful dog photos and important updates from OpenAI and SSI, the companies he's been involved with for decades.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  Great. We can head over to Markiplier. But first, little countdown here. We up on the screen, you'll see.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Oh, you put it up?

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  TVPN's Road to Christmas.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Road to Christmas.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  Starts today.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Starts today.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  113 days.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  It's only 113 days.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Wow, start shopping.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  113 days.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  It's going to go by quick.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  It will.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  And I want to cherish, cherish the road, right? It's about, it's about the journey. It's not just about the destination.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, things won't get too Christmasy around here. Things won't get too Christmasy around here.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  One's hat on the screen.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  We'll get too Christmasy around here until December 1st, but you'll probably see certain elements coming in prior to then, starting with our countdown. So we'll leave this.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  You know what a great Christmas present is? A GoPro, specifically the Mission One Pro, the hottest new product from GoPro. rave review from Markiplier. Yes, he was paid to post it. Yes, he was. Yes.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  He's the largest shareholder.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  But, but here's the hot thing. I believe that he, I believe that this started with Markiplier being actually bullish on GoPro. So I think there's a lot of confusion about this. We, both of us were confused when we first talked about this, but it's actually a very clear, linear story, and it makes a lot of sense if you go through it. So Mark Fishback, he goes by Markiplier online, YouTube legend, also Hollywood blockbuster producer now, or director, filmmaker. Recently made a massively successful movie after an equally successful but much lengthier journey on YouTube. We talked about Iron Lung, his movie, as part of the breakout YouTube to Hollywood pipeline that happened over the summer. While filming Iron Lung,

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Mark became interested in GoPro's newest camera, the Mission One Pro. So Mission One Pro, GoPro body interchangeable lens mount. So you can go take an old lens from a Leica or, you know, a Cook S1 if you want. You can adapt anything on there and you can get all the image texture that comes from the glass into the sensor. Yes, it's a smaller body, much cheaper, but you're getting the, the flavor of that lens. Maybe someone on the production team can give us a little 101 on what matters more, the sensor or the lens?

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  The lens.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  The lens. Yeah, the lens is important, right, guys? And, and, and so GoPro sort of unlocked this ability and at incredible cost, or incredibly low cost. So he put his favorite lenses on the camera, realized that you can get a cinema level output for $700 instead of the usual $7,000. He was comparing it to a Red system that he loves and he uses and he owns, but, but he was just saying like, it's cheaper to buy this GoPro than rent the cinema camera for a single day. Because a lot of these cinema camera when they rent, it's might be 800 bucks for the day. And you can just buy this system. And so I think he's looking out and saying, the next generation of YouTube to filmmaker pipeline, they're not going to have the balance sheet that I have because he, I mean,

• 11:26John Coogan?

  the reported earnings are like.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  He's one of the largest shareholders of GoPro.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  But the reason he is, is because like Forbes estimated his creator earnings prior to Iron Lung at like 30 million a year. So he's been making a lot of money. So he can go and spend $7,000 on a cinema camera rig, but he knows that there are smaller creators that are going to try and break into more cinematic productions and GoPro might be the right tool for them. Good content, product, sponsorship, market fit. And then of course, he also bought the stock. So his enthusiasm for the product led him to start buying GoPro stock. He spent estimates roughly 10 to 12 million dollars for 8% of the company or something like that. Obviously, the company's gone up in value since. It was a big bet, but estimates put, you know, him at 30 million annual earnings. And then of course, Iron Lung

• 12:14John Coogan?

  did 51 million at the box office on a budget of 3 million, probably gets a lot of cash flow from that. Not to imply that he took home 48 million, but Iron Lung is going to continue to produce cash. And, you know, he's, he's in a fine position to, to make a big bet on GoPro. The story gets weird on August 27th because he posted this extremely positive sponsored video reviewing the Mission One Pro. It's a great video, lots of interesting detail, and he just has a great on camera presence, very funny, lots of great editing. But people were like, ah, this is a little circular. Like he's getting a sponsorship for a company that he owns 8.5% of the stock. But the founder and chairman of, and the CEO of GoPro, Nick Woodman, is still in control of the company and still has Class B shares

• 12:58John Coogan?

  or super voting shares. So Markiplier, yeah, isn't that crazy? He's held on this whole time. So Markiplier actually only controls 3% of the company. He doesn't have board seat. Like, it's not like he's going to be approving his own sponsorship contract, probably a completely separate discussion. So not a big deal to me. And honestly, knowing the sequence of events now, it makes me believe his review more because it's like he used the product, then he bought the stock, then he promoted it and reviewed it. And this all just feels like a very natural.

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  Friend, friend of the show Hunter Weiss just texted me and said, you guys have a story wrong. He bought two months ago and the SEC filing came out and then Bloomberg juiced it. He covered it in the live stream last night. He has half a percent of voting power.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Yeah. So, so he bought, and then the SEC filing dropped, which released the actual news. And then that timed up in the news as like, oh, he bought five days ago. But in fact, he was buying over the spring and the summer. I think it was like a stage investment. The weirder thing is that GoPro just gets bought five days after the sponsored video. And the company that bought them is Starman Optical. They proposed this merger that pays $285 million in cash. I think it retires the debt and GoPro shareholders retain 10% of the post-transaction company as well. So the acquiring company, Starman, is a holding company that's controlled by this Tabey, Tabey family, Tabell family, and sits within a broader holding company that owns consumer accessory brands such

• 14:24John Coogan?

  as Incase and Cipio and Cipio and Griffin. They make everything from like USB C charger bricks and phone cases. And you can see GoPro sort of fitting in there in the electronics, accessories. They're not in any of the huge categories, but it's all similar supply chain, similar distribution, similar go-to-market strategies across the portfolio. And there's an AI side to the story, which is where things have gotten sort of awkward because people are like, GoPro's pivoting to AI. That's not really what's happening, I think. So Starman has a new photonics division, separate from GoPro. Of course, they might move some GoPro people over there at some point. They own everything. But really, the new photonics

• 15:08John Coogan?

  division is focused on making high-speed optical networking equipment for AI data centers, which of course is like controversial now. And now Markiplier has to answer for all of the AI community probably and has to deal with this. But.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he apparently said in the stream, he is anti data center and AI.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  And is upset with the timing of all this.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, because I think he really just liked this new camera and was like, I think GoPro can make a run at like the next generation Hollywood filmmaker, which is being born on YouTube. That's his core community. Let's stay focused on that. And then Starman comes in and says, oh, we're actually doing something completely different. So weird scenario that he just got sort of roped into. It looks like what actually happened is that Markiplier got excited about GoPro, bought the stock, then did a sponsored video to promote their new camera, then got blindsided by the acquisition and now has to grapple with some confusion about the corporate structure and potential AI baggage. But for Starman, it's an interesting flow because they get this solid brand that fits nicely within their portfolio. And maybe even more importantly, they get a public listing on the NASDAQ. So they're keeping

• 16:11John Coogan?

  the listing, which effectively gives them access to the public markets in a more streamlined way. It's kind of like a SPAC or like a reverse merger. It's not technically like that, but because they're merging in a sub-company. But in general, they now have a NASDAQ ticker. And so that's something that you can do and is a little bit like the SPAC.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, originally I was confused as to why it was still trading if it was.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  They're planning to keep it trading forever.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Because it will be the ticker for the holding company.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  And of course, stock is on a tear today, up 30%, 33%.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Let's go through some random timeline posts because we didn't get to much yesterday. We didn't get to much the day before even. It was busy news day. But what, where do you want to start the timeline? An idiot in motion will go farther than a genius at rest. That just feels like good wisdom. I don't know. The importance of just like

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  Golden Retriever.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  volition. Yeah, Golden Retriever mode to some, to some degree. New quote for board members just dropped. I train like I've never won and I compete like I've never lost. On purpose with Jay Shetty? I don't know. What else? The, you want to go through this, this NFL wide receiver, Dejounte Love?

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  This was my favorite post out of the whole Dejounte Love cycle. Andrew Reid saying, wearing the Allen Company, Allen and Company Sun Valley jacket I found on eBay.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  What actually happened in this story?

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  So, so the thing that's been missed is that I think this is a, is an AI story. Because part of how he was proving that he was a player outside of just basically LARPing was he had somehow the Google AI overviews had picked up that he was saying that he was a 49ers player.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  And so it was just assuming that that was the truth.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  I saw him post a screenshot of the Google AI overview.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  In a video, he'd be like, and that's Google. That's not me.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  That's Google saying that.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I, I thought he had doctored the Google AI overview and was just sharing the screenshot.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  That's possible too.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Well, what does this guy actually do? In case you missed the story, it's just insane. Feds say a 35-year-old man faked being a 49ers player and allegedly scammed 26, 26 women out of more than 1.3 million through romance and investment schemes. He reportedly used fake 49ers career, fake Instagram, fake bank statements, luxury cars, dating apps. His IG even had free agency year one and Super Bowl highlights. He was arrested in an airport with an alleged accomplice. Barrow really created an entire NFL career. Yeah, walking around with a helmet everywhere is very, very funny. Going shopping. And I think the, aren't the real NFL players now like memeing this a little bit? Like they'll just go shopping with their actual helmets to like.

• 19:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Everyone's having fun with it. I think, I think the funny thing is how much video evidence he created of, of himself like lying, right? And they were, and they were extremely egregious. Like he had a more, he, he was saying that he had like the kind of real estate portfolio that you would only have if you were like a Hall of Fame level player, right? It wasn't just like, oh, you have a nice house.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Well, wasn't he also creating a fake backstory about saying like his parents were from Switzerland and wealthy and they owned Gucci stores on Saks Fifth Avenue, which is a store, not a location. And there were a bunch of other like sort of red flags where I think he said his family owns, they're the majority shareholder in individual Gucci stores, which is not how that works at all. But, you know.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  Sounded, sounded good.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  It sounds pretty good. Sounds pretty good.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The question is how quickly, I saw something recently, Netflix is doing these like Insta docs, I was calling them, where they'll, they'll make a documentary like incredibly quickly about a.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Like a news story?

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  About a news story?

• 20:09John Coogan?

  I mean YouTube.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  And the question is like, there's so much footage here.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  I bet you, like, a documentary will be made from this.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Why, why can't it be fast?

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Why can't it be on a YouTube sort of like time scale?

• 20:21John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. A lot of like, what goes into, uh, what goes into documentary production, because I've done it, is just like scheduling some sit down interviews. You bring a team, you get the lighting right, the Netflix lighting.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so one of the, one of the Insta docs they made is about the decoy plane.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  I don't know anything about that.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  Details of a secret plane switch used during a presidential trip from a NATO.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Oh, that just happened.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  In Turkey. Yeah.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  That was the whole like.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  Coming out, this is coming out, uh, on Friday.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Right? So, story from last month.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Getting released now.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you don't even need AI for a lot of this production. It's just being really, I mean, of course, AI can help like with transcriptions. Like, there's a lot of like, you go and do the sit down interview and then you just need to reorganize all the different sound bites and having a perfect transcription, being able to go through and highlight, okay, this is where the person talked about the thing that happened in act one. Let's put it in the right side.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  Bobby Chipman says, yo, that route running was elite, though. A lot of people were, were clocking, no, no.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  They were, they were clocking it, uh, they were saying like, how could you believe this was a professional athlete? Because he was, he was certainly running routes. I don't, uh, in one of the routes he posted, he almost fell over too.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think he did at least practice or something. I don't know.

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  Interesting news out of Arowan. Arowan, uh, is, uh, on their 18th location is over in Thousand Oaks. And that 20, federal law will force them to start posting calorie information. Leo says, we are two Arowans away from mass rioting across Southern California. Uh, let's head over to billionaire John Morgan, who was on the Ice Coffee Hour.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  Morgan and Morgan.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  Um, seemingly.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Flexing.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Like throwing some shots at, at.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  Papa John.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  AI, AI founders who, who say they're billionaires, but, uh, not necessarily a billionaire in his book. Let's see, let's see what he has to say.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  What's his definition?

• 22:11Speaker 03

  I don't consider anybody a billionaire that doesn't have a real billion in the bank. Guess how many people have a real billion liquid?

• 22:17Speaker 04

  I have, how many? Oh, weird. Yeah, I don't know how many.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Maybe 20?

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Papa John was one of them.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  He doesn't have, no.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  He said he put a billion dollars, he sold for 1.2, and he said he put a billion in dividends. Dividend stocks running 5%. That's what he told us. I think it's on, it's on the record. It's on video.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Him saying there's only, only 20 people that have a billion dollars of equity.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  My financial statements got every dollar.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  I think, I, I do think saying like, you actually have to have it in cash.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Cash is a different thing.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  Like, it can't be earning a meaning, you, you, you can't have it invested at all.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, if you just look at public company founders who still own shares that are liquid. I mean, maybe there's regulations about when they can sell and he doesn't count that as liquid, because if you have to file a certain form with the SEC and sell on a schedule, like, you know, I don't know, like Benioff sells on a, on a regular basis.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  Daily, right?

• 23:13John Coogan?

  I think daily.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  Lot of commentary on, uh, the new pay packages over at Apple. Chase said, get a degree, get an office job, climb the corporate ladder, retire at 65. Congratulations, Tim. You did exactly what the system told you to do, instead of starting your own business.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  He is 65. Ah, yeah.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, his new pay package as executive chairman feels a lot better to me.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Than his CEO pay package.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  A lot more flexibility.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  Forty seven million a year.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully less work. He deserves a little, little, little time away from the action.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  But Turner's making less.

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  Turner's making less. I found there's 35 professional athletes that, like roughly, that are going to be making more than John Turner's next year.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, anyways, I, I, I feel like it's a fair place for him to start. I hope he can climb, I hope he can 10x it and then maybe 10x it again. Personally, um, a couple more orders of magnitude would be great, but he's got to prove himself.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Elon is making power turbine components and the Wall Street Journal's skeptical. They say it won't be easy. Uh.

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  Every, everything.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Has he ever done anything easy? The guy, like, he chews glass daily. That's his whole shtick, is, is just doing things that seem impossible. Uh, stocks of blade and vein manufacturers fell in response, but the threat to them is still remote. So let's see what the Wall Street Journal had to say. Only a few companies make the crucial components for power turbines that AI data centers are so desperate to get. Elon Musk wants to go ahead and make his own. That has unnerved investors in this prized oligopoly. Okay, we're going to learn about the, the power turbine market for a minute. Uh, over the weekend, Musk confirmed on X that SpaceX will start making blades and veins that go into natural gas power turbines.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  I think Big Turbine wrote this article.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, you think it's a little, uh, uh, coordinated counter, counter messaging?

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. They were enjoying their oligopoly.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe. Uh, by doing in-house casting at SpaceX, we can accelerate natural gas turbines coming along, coming online by up to 18 months, which is a profound game changer. He wrote in his post, uh, responding to a report from the information. Uh, interesting. In mid-August, Morgan Stanley published a report saying that SpaceX was planning such a foundry in Bastrop, Texas, based on the company's job postings. Shares of Howmet Aerospace fell more than 7% Monday before partially rebounding on Tuesday. Howmet and Berkshire Hathaway's precision cast parts are the two biggest players in the market for these parts, which also include blades and veins for the aerospace and defense sectors. Smaller players, DPC's shares were also hit. Uh, it is premature to scout, to count SpaceX as a threat, the

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Wall Street Journal says, but shares of Howmet Aerospace and DPC might have been due for a breather. They are among the priciest artificial intelligence picks and shovels plays at 42 times and 44, 45 times forward earnings respectively. Uh, turbine makers, GE Vernova and Caterpillar fetched 33 times and 26 times earnings for perspective. Uh, and there's a nice chart there to show you the price to earnings, price to forward earnings ratios for some of the AI bottleneck plays and, uh, and the, the blade and vein manufacturers are up in the upper echelon. DPC is the most vulnerable to disruption in this space. It

• 26:43John Coogan?

  is small and about 40% of the revenue comes from natural gas-fired turbines. While Howmet holds about half the global market share of components used in natural gas turbines, it is diversified across aerospace and defense with only 11% coming from gas turbines. SpaceX will face barriers to entry. One reason there are so few companies in this sector is that it's technically challenging to make the blades, which must withstand extreme temperatures and rapid rotations. That feels like SpaceX's bread and butter, though. The casting process makes a, uh, involves making a new wax mold from scratch each time. Making these parts requires the blade to be grown in a vacuum furnace as a single crystal of nickel super

• 27:25John Coogan?

  alloy, according to Nigel Chung, an analyst at Semi Analysis. Oh, Semi Analysis getting a shout out in the Wall Street Journal. Even a stray grain or hairline defect means the part has to be scrapped, he added. A new manufacturing line could scrap over half of its production for a long period, so yield will be difficult to get up. Uh, it is also a highly secretive process. Once the parts are produced, the ceramic cores and wax used to make them are destroyed, Howmet's chief executive, John Plant, said at an investor meeting earlier this year. He says, we're not getting distilled. Don't worry about it. We're good. We destroy every evidence that would lead someone to be able to copy us. That prevents competitors from reverse engineering them. Uh, so Howmet Aerospace's

• 28:08John Coogan?

  annual revenue from industrial gas turbines is up and to the right with incredible forecasts. And you can see the chart taking off. They're going exponential right now. Um, a high scrap rate might make, might matter less if SpaceX is making parts for its own use. Morgan Stanley's report noted that we would not expect SpaceX to be a material supplier of blades and veins for supply outside of SpaceX use. So they're gonna, uh, use everything internally. Speaking of industrials, we got to talk about, uh, rotor sails. So there was news in the Financial Times that, uh, that Maersk is going to put a wind sail on their container ship. And

• 28:53John Coogan?

  there's a very interesting, it's a very interesting design, because I see the image for the ship and I'm like.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Looks like a smokestack.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Where's the sail? Yeah, it looks like a smokestack. Uh, and I'm like, okay, does the sail come out of that big round thing? And no, it doesn't. That is what's called a rotor sail, which actually produces wind force and, and accelerates the vehicle, uh, without any traditional sails. What do you think? So there's an explainer video from Norse Power, who makes these, that we should watch a little bit of. Uh, we can, we can kick this off. Uh, it's a one-minute video, but we, we can watch a little bit of this YouTube video, uh, on Norse Power rotor sails, because it's a fascinating world I didn't know existed.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  And you need to know this.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  How do Norse Power rotor sails work?

• 29:39Speaker 05

  You might be familiar with curveballs in sports.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  But what exactly causes the ball's path to curve? A spinning ball compresses air on one side and thins it on the other. The pressure difference causes a powerful thrust that curves the path.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  If you work at Norse Power, this drops.

• 29:58Speaker 05

  The Norse Power rotor sail is a large cylindrical sail. A common misconception is that wind spins it. Instead, it is rotated actively by an electric motor. The spinning sail compresses air on the backside and thins it on the front.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm from the founding town in Denmark. Don't believe in the sail, though.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Taking shots.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  Thrust is created in the same way for the football and the ship.

• 30:30Speaker 05

  In good conditions, Norse Power rotor sails can actually produce more thrust than the main engine. Norse Power, saving fuel and the planet.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  And lastly, there's a photo of a rotary sail on a small catamaran that we think is a steal. I don't know how much this thing would sell for.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Tyler was looking at picking this up because he's been exploring the marinas in the area.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Wants to potentially, uh, live on a boat.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. We will see you tomorrow at 11 AM.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for tuning in, folks.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Sharp. Have a great rest of your day and goodbye.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.