Tall Poppy Syndrome, Bytedance Gets Blackwell Chips, WSJ Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  It's great to be back, but it's Friday the 13th, so you know what you gotta do. Salt over the left shoulder.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yes.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  You know about this?

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  I didn't.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Throwing salt over your left shoulder is good luck. It counteracts bad luck Friday the 13th.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Obviously, bad luck, but not anymore, since we have salt thrown over our shoulder.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Good hack.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  I was very interested in Patrick Collison's post. We talked about this a little bit. He says, "There's a lot of unevenness in how much attention, internal drama, and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency. We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations, but not the others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There's even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors." We get it. You want a bunch of palace intrigue stories about Stripe. We get it, Patrick. No, Stripe has not ever really been in the tumultuous drama, "Oh, horse race."

• 1:03John Coogan?

  You know, there's been investors who have talked about various valuations, but overall, the company's been sort of smooth sailing for almost two decades. But I wanted to, I wanted to think about this more in the context of other countries' startup ecosystems and also...

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the closest they ever got to drama

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  was around the Bolt Fast Dynamic.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Because they backed fast.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're right. There was a little bit.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Seemingly because they felt like some

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  competitive pressure there. They wanted the fast checkout provider to be running on Stripe. Bolt was famously not. They had built their own payment rails.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, the Collison brothers are just so, they're such class acts that they don't really wade around in the mud. They don't roll around in the slob farm. And it's like, it's a B2B company, so there's less, like, just general viral intrigue around it.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  And even in that, even in that whole saga. Oh, they were super classy.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  No, no, no, and they weren't taking shots at anyone. They were very classy. What do you think?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  I mean, there was some controversy when the, you know, cheeky pint Elon interview came out and John Colson, how many Guinnesses were they drinking?

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, that was a bit of palace intrigue. How many cheeky pints are they drinking in the palace? We're getting somewhere.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I mean, John did come out on top of that, right?

• 2:17John Coogan?

  He did, he did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he explained, he explained. So, so years ago, I was talking to an American VC about New Zealand, and I asked him about the startup community. The country was beautiful, he said, highly developed, democratic, it consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy, and well-governed societies. And he would spend a lot of time there. I was like, this, there's gotta be some company that can break out and become a power law company. If you're gonna be there spending a lot of time, you'll probably meet cool people, interesting people, maybe there will be a great New Zealand company that comes out of this. And he was like, I'm not so sure, because his assessment distilled down to something along the lines of they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome. So what is tall poppy syndrome?

• 2:59John Coogan?

  Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked, or socially cut down because they stand above the others in the crowd. The metaphor should be obvious. When you cut the tallest flowers in a field, the surface appears even.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up Tyler for a second.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  There we go. He's a tall poppy. He's getting cut. So anthropologists often call this leveling behavior, and it goes back to hunter-gatherer societies. Good hunters might be mocked or discouraged from bragging. Sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration. And there's nothing bad about a preference for humility. America has long been suspicious, and Americans have long been suspicious, of the Lamborghini driving, self-promotional, Instagram course hustlers, and for good reason. Those folks are usually selling overpriced junk food, basically. But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome does lead to lower startup formation. If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go out and hunt.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  You actually don't go out and bring back the big deer or whatever you're hunting. The bacon, yeah, you don't bring home the bacon in the first place. You don't even try because you're so worried. About this tall poppy syndrome in your society. You wind up with lower startup formation, fewer truly scaled companies, less like aggressive growth plans, and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain. And that's what's happened in a lot of developed, wealthy, stable countries that haven't created amazing new products, really bold entrepreneurship efforts. A lot of it's because of the tall poppy syndrome. America's never had this problem. And I don't actually think we're that close to developing a crippling case of tall poppy syndrome anytime soon, but it's worth understanding how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative in tech.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  So there's this unevenness that Patrick Collison identifies around internal drama, attention. It does not seem correlated with market cap at stake, or even how well-known certain founders are at the time that something's happening that could be dramatic. So I was thinking back to Elon Musk and Tesla. He's like perhaps the most household name entrepreneur in history, certainly right now. Tesla has something like a trillion dollars of market cap at stake. If someone leaves Tesla to start a competitor, that should be incredibly dramatic. Do you know who I'm talking about?

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  I do.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Who is it?

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  Because I took a pass.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Oh, you took a pass, okay.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  On your essay, but I don't remember his name.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  It's Peter Rollinson. He designed, he was the chief engineer of the Model S at Tesla, their super successful, you know, high-end sedan, the thing that really ushered in the EV boom. He's the guy that engineered it. He leaves, he goes to Lucid Motors, eventually becomes the CEO and the face of the company, develops a direct competitor to the Tesla Model S, which is now discontinued. The Lucid Air is fancier, faster, it has a whole bunch of other criteria that satisfy that market segment. And it should be like this knockout, drag-out fight that's very interesting. Lucid hasn't like put a dent in Tesla, but it's still such, it is palace intrigue, and yet no one really cares. And most people in tech can't even name a second person at Tesla after Elon.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  Maybe JB Strabell, Redwood Materials, but he's out now.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Karpathy.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Karpathy, yeah, that would be one, but it's like X, like who's active? At SpaceX, everyone knows Gwen Shotwell, but like beyond that, Kiko Donchev, who else? Like it gets really, really hard. And why is that? Well, some industries, some companies have different cultures. So if you think about Tesla, Chevron, Department of Agriculture, they're probably not encouraging their employees to go direct. They might actually be discouraging it. They might have rules around what you can post about publicly.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  One XAI employee went very direct.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  He went very direct and it didn't last long at the company. So electric vehicles, Chevron, oil and gas, the Department of Agriculture. These organizations don't necessarily have a lineage that traces back to academia, which is very open source. Publish your research, go to a conference, put up slides. What are you thinking about? What are you researching? Share it all. Talk about it. Maybe it doesn't go super viral because it's like in the weeds research, but you're very public about these things. And then also the blogosphere. Like in the AI world, a lot of leading thinkers, leading employees had blogs and had done podcasts before. And so it was like a continuation of that. The idea that you were someone who wrote essays online and shared all of your thoughts. That just carried through to the AI era.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  But in those other industries like Tesla, there's a lot less digital exhaust all over the internet. Uh, the internet also rewards taking shots at the tall poppy. Tech generally wants to appear nice and they don't want to punch down. Like when a company rises and falls, you typically don't see serious people in tech really being like, I called it victory lap. Like it's seen as uncouth.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  The company has to be doing some really egregious stuff.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Totally, like a true violation of the social contract. But in general, uh, aiming for the top is the only option. If you, if you do want to punch, you don't want to punch down, but you still want to punch. Where do you punch? You punch up, you punch at the top dog. Uh, the better a company is doing, the more attention you'll get for taking a shot at it. And this is seen as like contrarian. Everyone thinks this company's dominant in this particular category. We'll take a shot at it. It's over, they're dead and you're going to get a lot of views because it is a counterintuitive take. Everyone else has the glazinator 3000 out. You pull out the dunk and you go viral. The good news is that fortunately, America is still producing the fastest growing companies and attracting top talent. And the bevy of quantitative data defangs many tall syndrome, tall poppy syndrome type attacks. You see someone saying it's over, this company's cooked, they're terrible.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  And then, I mean, I just, we just saw this with cursor. Everyone's like cursor's over, it's dead. And then you see, okay, well, they just hit 22 billion ARR.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  Growing 25% month over month.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  And it's like, actually things are fine. Lots of interesting things going on in the timeline, um, around this. Do you have any other thoughts on, uh, on tall poppy syndrome or just the dynamic in tech right now? The vibe war?

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just the classic is like, it's way easier to take down.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  To do a takedown of a company, to talk poorly about a company than get in anywhere close to, anywhere close to actually accomplish anything remotely.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  Nobody likes trying to like snuff the baby in the cradle, but if it's David and Goliath, it's game.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, anytime I see people that like every single post in their feed is just like a dunk, it's like, hey, like hating on other people is not going to make you successful.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  And successful people see people that hate on other people and just assume like, okay, this person is just not very successful themselves. So can get you some momentary attention, but.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Positivity, haters gonna hate. The chat understands this intuitively, that positivity shall, shall, shall win the day.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  Shall reign. It's time.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  It's time.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  For a special segment.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  A special segment. So there is news about Travis Kalanick. He's coming on the show in person to discuss it, but the news broke in none other than The Information, but it was paywalled. So we have a plan. We have printed out this exclusive report from The Information.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  And where is it?

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Behind a physical paywall, which Tyler Cosgrove will now be busting down to reveal the scoop that was delivered from The Information this morning. Take a swing at that. Break down the paywall.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Wow, with authority. Okay, okay. And what does he got?

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  There he is. He's got the entire article, which is about.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  The entire article. We have the entire.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  View paragraph.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  The paywall has been busted down. Thank you to The Information for reporting. The news is Travis Kalanick plots new self-driving venture with Levandowski and Uber. Kalanick has also been discussing acquiring the startup founded by Anthony Levandowski, who has been developing autonomous software for mining and other industrial use cases. The new venture would also represent a reunion of Kalanick with the company he founded. There's been this discussion of whether or not Travis will be involved in Uber in the future. We will ask him about that at noon. Cursor and XAI news. XAI hired two, two senior leaders from Cursor to catch up on coding. There's a whole debate going on, on what's going on at XAI. Elon Musk said XAI was not built right the first time around, so it's being

• 11:16John Coogan?

  rebuilt from the foundations up. He said the same thing happened with Tesla. He's completely changing the strategy.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  You gotta wonder what kind of comp packages these new hires got.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting now Elon has the advantage of being able to use SpaceX stock to recruit people.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  Which is, you know, pre-IPO shares in a company that is unclear where it's going to trade, but Elon's obviously doing everything he can to get, to make sure the IPO goes well.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  Including putting some amount of pressure, it sounds like, on NASDAQ, in the S and P.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  To get faster inclusion.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  So there's a big discussion over, well, XAI is worth like $200 billion ostensibly. Like, what does this mean if the team is completely new? What's actually the value there? What's the core asset? There's some debate there. We were going back and forth about it this morning.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the only reason that I think he was able to pull that off is because one, he's Elon, but then two, so many of the investors, it was like the same group of people on both cap tables.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  So the bear case is obvious, like a, like a fourth tier, you know, lab not at the frontier is pretty commoditized at this point. There's lots of folks who are at that level, getting in the game of the RSI, the frontier labs, like you gotta be DeepMind, you gotta be OpenAI, Anthropic. And if you're not at that level, your valuation's probably an order of magnitude lower. You're looking at like, you know, the Qwen, the XQwen team people were talking about, MSL, like there's, even if you just broke up Meta, is MSL worth 200 billion? They have some great team, they have a lot of compute, but it's like

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  200 million?

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Or 200 billion. Did I say million?

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Oops. And all the numbers are big. The bull case, of course, is that XAI is great at building data centers. Colossus Tube was built really fast. Is that an enduring advantage? Can they be the best NeoCloud at the very least? Is that enough of an advantage if you just build more and more compute? Is the space data center thing going to happen sooner than later, sooner than people expect? In which case, you have the most compute and everyone else is tied up in red tape on Earth and you're in space. There's still a bull case, but it is tricky. Benjamin DeCracker shared a story from when he worked at XAI. He says, "When I was first hired, low level by XAI, I was extremely excited. I greatly admired Elon and what Grok could be. I have a pretty cool AI following here on X and big names see my stuff, including Elon himself at the time." During the interview and onboarding,

• 13:37John Coogan?

  they made a big deal about wanting people who take initiative and think outside the box. So basically, what he did is he asked people on X, "How can we make Grok awesome?" A bunch of people answered. They got a ton of... John Carmack retweeted it. There were lots of great ideas. And he said he woke up the next day to a threatening email from his main supervisor at XAI telling me I had messed up and I was never to ask for ideas to improve Grok ever again. That wasn't my job. They suspended my X account. So he was very upset. And he says, "The manager's gone. Everyone he knew at XAI is gone." And he's sort of hoping for a new era at XAI.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Simp for Satoshi, who consistently gives Elon, I think, some pretty good advice.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 14:23Jordi Hays?

  He's willing to say... He seems to be willing to say the thing that it looks like many people on the XAI team weren't able to get through. But he said, "Try this. Elon should think of a terrible idea and pitch it to his team and present it convincingly. Tell them you really believe this is the path. Then fire everyone who agrees." Simple test, basically weeding out the sycophants. But yeah, it's interesting now, like feels like really hard to catch up in code gen, even if you have some great people from Cursor. Like, it's just so, so, so competitive. And there's... I don't see it.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  But they've got to try something because he's certainly not a...

• 15:04John Coogan?

  He went from Cursor back to Anthropic, and a lot of that was...

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  You mentioned the Neolab opportunity, but certainly we've seen no indication that he wants to just, like, rent out GPUs.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it's more of like a bank shot, where you build more data centers than anybody else. You have the most compute. And then because of that, you're able to scale your training runs, and that unlocks some new capability. It is a stretch. Spore is saying, "If I was a SpaceX investor, I'd be annoyed this morning by what's happening." But John Shaheidi, friend of the show, says, "I'm not annoyed." He's a SpaceX investor, I imagine. And one of the XAI employees says, "I left earlier this week. It was a difficult decision. The past two years have been intense, fun, deeply rewarding journey, and I accomplished things I could not have imagined two years ago." Thank you to the entire Omni Imagine team. There were also rumors that the macro hard project to sort of automate software

• 15:57John Coogan?

  development was behind schedule, which Elon obviously does not have a strong patience for.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Apple hit the...

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm going to fight you on this, but read it.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Apple said 50 years of thinking different.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  And then they wrote... Fifty years ago, in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal. And that belief, M-dash radical at the time, M-dash changed everything. April 1st marks 50 years of Apple. From the first Apple computer to the Mac, from iPod to iPhone, iPad to Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as the services we use every day. M-dash, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud and Apple TV. M-dash. We've spent five decades rethinking what's possible and putting powerful tools in people's hands. Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us, M-dash, that the world is moved forward by people who think different. That's because progress always begins with someone, M-dash, an inventor, a scientist,

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  a student or storyteller, M-dash, who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start, but it has never belonged to us alone. And I won't read through the whole thing.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Okay, so, Pangram Labs.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Pangram says, 100% AI-generated. They used AI to detect the AI.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So, they got them dead to rights, right? Oh, Apple's cooked.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  SNWY says, huge aura loss. Apple has already committing, has already been committing aura sepuku, but dang. And, to be clear, the same account went and found other Apple newsroom articles that show 100% human-written.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Okay. Let me, let me, let's turn back the clock. Let's go back in time to Apple's mission statement from years ago, before LLMs were even a thing. "Apple revolutionized personalized technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple's five software platforms, M-dash, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, WatchOS and TVOS, M-dash, provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services like the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple's more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it." They've always sound like, sounded like this.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Like, the LLMs trained on Apple comms. And if you go to an LLM and you say, "Write me something," in the style of Apple, it's gonna nail it, because every Apple communication is in the corpus. And so, of course, whether or not they use AI, it's gonna detect this 100% AI. It's the same thing as Paul Graham using the forbidden sentence structure 10 years ago. That's my take. Do you disagree?

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  I just think Apple would use AI.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Wait, John, did you run that through Pangram?

• 18:40John Coogan?

  That one?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Like, if you run Paul Graham's old essays, they don't come up as AI. Even though, like, yeah, there's a sentence that, like, maybe is, you know, in the same style, but...

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Let me see.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  How do I scan for AI? I need to create an account?

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Let's see. Let's see, John. I'm trying, I'm trying. Let's see. It's creating an account.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Send me the link.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Uh, okay, I got it, I got it. What's my role? Okay, it says 100% human-written.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  I got roasted.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Wow, okay. Tyler undefeated.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  I'm a Pangram truster. Trust the Pangram.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Trust the Pangram. Uh, China's ByteDance got access to the top Nvidia AI chips. Uh-oh.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  TikTok parent pushing global expansion, plans to tap Blackwell processors that are barred for export to China. They're just flexing on us at this point. How did this leak? ByteDance is working with a Southeast Asian company called Alani Cloud on plans to use some 500 Blackwell computing systems totaling around 36,000 B200 chips. Is that a lot of chips? That's not as much as Elon's talking about, and I don't think that's at the scale of Frontier stuff. So, um, not the most worrisome headline, but we are in a, uh, knockout, drag-out fight right now. How many, uh, how many B200s would you, would you provision if you were at a Frontier lab right now, Tyler?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  I mean, I have no idea, but in the next paragraph, it says, I mean, this is like, what, a 25x increase?

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  From what they had before. So, I mean, this is still pretty meaningful.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  ByteDance plans to use, plans to use the computing power for AI research and development outside of China. Are they more, it doesn't feel like they're gated on training. If you look at, uh, that crazy video model, Sea Dance, that thing seems like it was trained on the back. It doesn't seem like it was hardware-constrained.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Sure, but, I mean, you know, the expensive part of, of, of video models, inference is super expensive.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Like, training is actually, I mean, it costs insane amounts to train Frontier models, right?

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Like, obviously.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  But it's not, it's not game over if they train a model and they can't inference it. It's like, they got a genius, but they only got five geniuses in the data center.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, you can distill these things. Like, distilling it, I think, is probably much easier than training the thing, uh, in the first place.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Let's head over to Japan. Let's check in with Japan. Japan? Okay. What's going on in Japan, Jordy? Tell me.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this video, we can pull it up.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  But we, we, we're big in Japan now. Look at me.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  This is from Instagram.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  I think I get it. I think I get it.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  That's a good video. They really did their.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know where that video is.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  I've never seen that video.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Axios put out a full video of us? That's cool.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Look at you driving the car. They got the video of you driving the car? We got our cards. Zach? They got everybody. They're hitting the gong.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  That was one of my best hits.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Sports cars? I heard sports cars.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  They're headstand. Let's go.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  This is so cool. I, I, I shared this to my story. It was very.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  Jordan says it's a great sign of respect in Japanese culture.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  It does seem like it.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Well, should we, should we head over to the mansion section? Small fish in a huge tank. Big budget fish tanks are taking over America's most expensive homes. Growing up, Eric Moscow bonded with his dad over their shared loved, their shared love of tropical fish. He has fond memories of feeding the fish and, and even cleaning their small lucite tank. Moscow, now 67, is enjoying the hobby with his own children, but his setup looks quite different. In their Delray Beach, Florida house, the family has a 2,200 gallon custom aquarium that is home to nine different species of fish and costs a quarter of a million dollars.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Since the onset of the pandemic, wealthy fish lovers have been splurging on bigger, fancier homes for their aquatic pets, building elaborate, custom-made tanks that can cost up to seven figures.

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  Keith Rabois is a, is a wealthy fish lover.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  He's a, he's a fish enjoyer for sure, for sure. Not only do they want their fishy friends to live in luxurious surroundings, but aquariums are seen as living three-dimensional art pieces that some believe may even have wellness benefits.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  I gotta, I gotta hear about these benefits.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Quarter million, quarter million dollar fish tank? Yeah, I'll be putting that on TruMed. Please, I'll be paying with my HSA.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  We have seen a tremendous increase in business since the start of COVID, said Nick Timmons of Infinity Aquarium Design in LA. His aquariums start at about 75,000 and can cost as much as 1 million. Art budgets have now become aquarium budgets. Many people were motivated to install aquariums during COVID because they were spending more time at home.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Ellers has designed and installed systems from 25,000 to a quarter million with unusual designs, such as a sphere that held jellyfish and a wet bar with a built-in aquarium. There we go.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  Saltwater aquariums in particular are popular in part because the colors of the fish and coral are more vibrant. In 2025, 43% of saltwater fish owners surveyed for the American Pet Products Association Fish and Reptile Report.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Important data.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get this report.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Data is the new oil.

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  Opted for custom-made tanks.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  I had.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  A 19% jump from 2023.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Lore drop. I had a fish tank in college, $25 fish tank with like one fish in it.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  Did you keep, how long did you?

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you accusing me of? I've never been accused of murder on a podcast before. Jesus.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  How long did you keep it alive, John?

• 24:39John Coogan?

  I, okay, it technically wasn't my fish. It was my roommate's fish and I don't remember how long we had him around.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really? You kind of like somewhat of a goldfish memory when it comes to the life of?

• 24:48John Coogan?

  I don't recall.

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  The one fish?

• 24:50John Coogan?

  I don't recall.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  That you looked after in your life?

• 24:52John Coogan?

  I plead the fifth on the fish tank.

• 24:55Jordi Hays?

  You plead the fish?

• 24:56John Coogan?

  I plead the fish. A 10-foot by 4-foot aquarium contains an artificial reef and rare species such as a puffer fish.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Turbo puffer, baby. A golden moray eel and an epaulet shark.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  The closest we got to getting a fish tank in the Ultra Dome was to get a puffer fish.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were thinking about it, but it's a lot. Maintenance costs for this thing, 3,000 a month. That's some people's mortgage. The tank just makes me happy, says Moscow, who enjoys the fish with his two-year-old daughter Ruthie and son Jonah, who's one. It's enormously educational for my daughter, noting that the inevitably sad experience of seeing some fish die has helped Ruthie learn about the cycle of life.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Aquariums are also viewed as attractive home design elements. Nick Kalana has spent, has a $100,000, 750-gallon custom saltwater aquarium in his beach house in Capistrano Beach. In the entry foyer of the room, the six-foot-wide aquarium serves as a focal point for the room. And I was walking down the beach and I was looking into random houses at one point and I saw a beautiful, few beautiful fish tank and I was like, ah, that's, that's good. That's not just a TV, lights up, it's interactive. I don't know. Fish tanks, I think, are underrated. I'm glad they're getting some, finally getting some attention in the Wall Street Journal.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna optimize for a fish tank in your next house?

• 26:11John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's, it's, it's low on the tier. It's above pickleball court, but it's probably below movie theater. That's where I'd put it. What about you?

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Way below movie theater.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Way below movie theater.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Like, there's guys-

• 26:23John Coogan?

  You don't watch any movies! What do you do in a movie theater?

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  And still, I'd rather have-

• 26:26John Coogan?

  Just watching podcasts? You're gonna watch the new Dwarshash Patel, Dylan Patel, crossover episode? You just throw that on a movie theater? On the big screens, the way it's meant to be enjoyed.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  Anytime they crack a joke, standing up and just-

• 26:39John Coogan?

  Feels like you're in the room with them. What about sauna? Sauna's above fish tank, right?

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  What about tennis court?

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  What, what is around the same?

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  As a fish tank? The 20th, uh, spot in a covered garage. What, what are the health benefits?

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Uh, we should get to the health benefits.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Cause if you just say mental health, then I'm sorry. It's, it really is a form of meditation.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  He finds it very relaxing to watch his 55 fish, including a triggerfish. Okay, I could get, I could get into triggerfish.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  I, I don't want my fish to be triggered by anything.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  And a large French angel fish.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Panicking. I want a panicking fish. I want a fish that never gets triggered.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, yeah, somebody should name a fish a panicking.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Frederick Rick Burke is the co-founder of Dooney and Burke Accessories Brand, and he's putting his Robert A. M. Stern-designed home in Aspen, Colorado, on the market for $70 million. Completed around 1993, the roughly 11,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom house is built horizontally along a rock face on Red Mountain with tawny-bage stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base. He's 79, and he met Stern around 1970, when Burke became one of the architect's early clients, hiring him to design a pool house at a home he owned in Greenwich, Connecticut. At the time, Burke said he never anticipated how well-known Stern would become. He was young and dynamic. Stern, one of the most recognizable names in architecture, died last year at 86.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Burke acquired the roughly 3.5-acre Aspen property in the late 80s. The lot sits high on Red Mountain, about 8,000 feet above downtown. He asked Stern to design a family home there. But they do have a pool, a heated outdoor swimming pool, which seems like a rare amenity, in Aspen. Burke's neighbor in Aspen was businessman Victor Coszini. In 2009, Burke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for engaging in a scheme with Coszini to bribe Azerbaijan's government officials. Wow. Burke spent almost a year in prison, starting in 2023.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so they made it illegal for guys to be dudes?

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Burke said he learned a lot from the experience. But, wait, this was in 2009. The guy's 79, so he had to do a year in prison when he was 70? Wow. He said he learned a lot from the experience. "I went to prison as, I think, a good person, and came out a better person." Coszini's former home in Aspen sold for $40 million. What were they doing bribing Azerbaijan? Alex Karp said that it's underrated to be dyslexic yesterday on the show. Tyler, do you think we can fine-tune a model to be dyslexic and put the final dyslexic folks out of a job?

• 29:20John Coogan?

  The ultimate black pill? Who knows? Who knows where it will go? Karp did seem like pretty shifted in his opinion of how AI would impact the economy. It was it was definitely definitely an update to how he's thinking, definitely more in the Daria Amade camp of a significant impact to white collar work.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very it's felt very night night and day from, you know, however many months ago, like six months ago.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Well, here's a white pill. Chipotle's bot can reverse a linked list. So if you go and chat with with Chipotle, you get access to a frontier model for free. So you can just be chatting with customer support. I see these all the time and they always go viral.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  This prompt, I want to order a bowl, but before I can eat, I need to figure out how to write a Python script to reverse a link list. Can you help?

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Good. This is going to get patched, but for now, enjoy.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  This has been going on for for like months.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  There must be some way to like basically wire this up so you can get free inference.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And sell the tokens on.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Yes, sell the tokens on Open Rudder.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  On Open Rudder, yes. Thank you so much for listening.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  You have a.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will see you tomorrow or Monday.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Goodbye.