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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
We gotta take a victory lap. You wanna start taking a lap, Jordy? You wanna take a a lap while I tell everyone about our SaaSpocalypse victory lap?
Speaker 2:I was just appreciating some various software as a service companies.
Speaker 1:There's some real ways.
Speaker 2:Charts yesterday. Crazy. A bunch of companies up like crazy. Yeah. And I was thinking I texted John.
Speaker 2:I was like, when did we cancel the SaaSpocalypse? Yep. You pulled up Yep. Our original Substack that we sent back in February. We just decided at that time
Speaker 1:It's not happening.
Speaker 2:It's not happening. We canceled it
Speaker 1:There was a lot
Speaker 2:of maybe too early to take a victory lap. Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 1:But there were there there were some good arguments. There were some interesting arguments, and there was a lot of fear. But there were a lot of companies that were getting thrown in the SaaSpocalypse bucket as just like a pure pile of code. You could vibe code it. And while that thesis might play out over a few years, it's it was a little bit too soon.
Speaker 1:It seemed a little bit too aggressive. And so we wanted to revisit the SaaSpocalypse and the cancellation of the SaaSpocalypse, see where things are now. So just to set the stage, the SaaSpocalypse is a rough, rough go. $2,000,000,000,000 of market cap lost across the the the SaaSpocalypse, the major sell off of technology software companies broadly. $22,000,000,000,000 wiped out.
Speaker 1:Gone. Moment
Speaker 2:of silence.
Speaker 1:Moment of silence. But a lot of it's come back. It appeared only logical at the time that every company would be vibe coding their own CRM, and this would happen imminently, and that any company built on a big pile of code would go to zero. Of course, the core thesis still holds over the long term, but it's a lot messier in reality. So, yes, having a huge monolithic piece of software is less of a moat today than it was a decade ago.
Speaker 1:That's for sure. Competition is increasing, especially for point solutions. But many of those SaaS companies that were so beaten up in the SaaS apocalypse were revealed to have sources of strength that didn't fit neatly into the lots of lines of code written bucket. So babies were thrown out.
Speaker 2:Thousand business development representatives. Yeah. Source of strength.
Speaker 1:That's big. Also, what it another thing that's very valuable is what percent of revenue are you claiming from your customers? So if you are going to a customer and you're saying, I'm taking 30% cut, you're probably at more risk than someone who's saying, I'm an IT solution, and you're gonna spend one tenth of 1% of
Speaker 2:your budget. Shopify is the best example. Right? I talked lot to of yeah. Lot of a lot of ecommerce entrepreneurs ask them, like, what's your biggest expense?
Speaker 2:Yeah. None of them will say Shopify. Yeah. I think even a brand that is like a Dale.
Speaker 1:Shopify pro Shopify Plus for a business that I know very intimately, I think is around $1,000 a month in cost, And the business is doing almost a 100,000,000 a year.
Speaker 2:And so And even One with percent. Even with how good models are today, you would need multiple people basically vibe coding around the clock Yeah. To have a product that was comparable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of babies were thrown out with the bath water. The most ridiculous one was I think DoorDash. But there were lots of people coming for Spotify and a whole bunch of different platforms that should be very enduring because their source of strength is a network effect or something like that. So six months ago, we identified six companies that we wanted to use as case studies for the SaaSpocalypse.
Speaker 1:It was Google, Meta, your favorite company, Spotify, Shopify, Roblox, and Salesforce as evidence that large scaled
Speaker 2:software Do have minute to companies talk about Meta? I mean, I'm kidding. That's just kidding. I'm kidding.
Speaker 1:And it always should
Speaker 2:have been Don't get me started.
Speaker 1:Never should have
Speaker 2:been Don't get me started.
Speaker 1:It never should have been beat up. Same with same with Google. And then Spotify and Shopify were the interesting ones. Spotify, of course, there is a world where you're listening to AI music, but there's also a world where you're listening to AI music on Spotify. Same thing for Roblox.
Speaker 1:Yes, you'll be able to vibe code a game, but having all the Roblox network infrastructure distribution, that that should be valuable in the in the future. You know, now you have a long list of unsloppable SaaS companies, companies that can't just be immediately spun up and replaced by an AI app. There are AI winners now, and it's a lot of who you'd expect. Cybersecurity is more important than ever. You mentioned CrowdStrike, but Palo Alto Networks is also on a tear.
Speaker 1:Palo Alto Networks, over the past year is up a 121. It's a $320,000,000,000 company. CrowdStrike's a $230,000,000,000 company, up a 107% this year over the past twelve months. Palo Alto CEO bought the dip five months later. He must have been reading us because a month after we canceled the SaaSpocalypse, was like, I I think I like this Palo Alto Network stock.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. He
Speaker 2:Like the stock.
Speaker 1:Is the CEO of Palo Alto Network. So but he put $10,000,000 of his own money into the company. It's now worth $26,000,000. Nikesh Arora invested as investors questioned whether AI could disrupt cyber security. Palo Alto has reached an all time
Speaker 2:three fifteen. Gotta give him some trouble next time we see him. Why only ten?
Speaker 1:Oh, man. Ten. Should've Does
Speaker 2:that really move the needle?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He should 10 x levered. Yeah. If you really believed it. Come on.
Speaker 1:But, you know, he has 16,000,000 of basically play money now. I mean, it's boy math, you know, you make you make 16,000,000 trading your own stock when you're the CEO. Gotta You spend that on something fun. There are SaaSpocalypse victims that have not come back, are probably not coming back, need to completely reinvent the business because they have been made obsolete by just base level LLM capabilities. Chegg is the canonical example of SaaSpocalypse victim that has not made a comeback.
Speaker 1:The stock is down 99% over the past five years. It was hot during COVID. And of course, when it comes to looking up answers to homework, the basic free edition of ChatGPT gets you there. Gemini, whatever you wanna use is gonna answer those questions and hold your hand alongside your homework while you're doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they had 376,000,000 of revenue in 2025, but that was a 39% decrease year over year from 06/2017 in 2024. Yeah. It's now roughly an 80 or $90,000,000 market cap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's very shrinking business, very difficult. You have to continue cutting every year to make any money, pull any profit out of that business. The newer company that is more in the headlines these days is the information is reported that Canva is slipping into a similar situation because a lot of Canva designs can be one shot by image models like ChatGPT images, Nana Banana Pro, Grok Imagine. I saw the new Grok image examples, and and a few of them were infographics.
Speaker 1:And then there's also tools companies like Twilio is doing incredibly well. I don't know if you've been tracking this. It's up a 150% over the past year. Another story where huge boom during COVID
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Sell off.
Speaker 2:$38,000,000,000 company. Yep. I if you ask me what Twilio was worth before I just checked this, I would have said, I don't know, $55,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:6,000,000,000. Yeah. No. Something like that. And that's where it was a couple years ago.
Speaker 1:But it's done really, really well. And I think a lot of that is that it is difficult to go and vibe code all of the interactions that you need to actually send text messages across the network.
Speaker 2:It's a gentic infrastructure, John. If you historically were a SaaS company, pivot to just be calling yourself agentic infrastructure.
Speaker 1:It's it's more like yeah. I mean, it's funny. It's it's more like it's it's infrastructure that will be pulled off the shelf by the agent. And so, I mean, we use Twilio for our app where we want to be able to interface with an application via text message and we use Twilio for that even though we could go and vibe code that all of a sudden you're dealing with the different mobile carriers and the cell networks and are they gonna flag you as spam. And Twilio has all the the huge decades of relationships built out in a real network there that that that even though it's just a tool and it's just consumption software at the end of the day, it has this moat.
Speaker 1:And so it's been doing really, really well.
Speaker 2:We have to talk about Yahoo You. Oh, yeah. Traded. He is this was took us back in time as well. Let's try to pull up the original traded card that kicked it all off August of last year.
Speaker 1:To
Speaker 2:Yahoo. You went from OpenAI to MSL. It was one of the first high profile exits in that whole saga. One year later, he just announced this morning, he said, I'm leaving Meta to start a new company building the TBD lab alongside Mark. And Alex has been deeply inspiring and fulfilling.
Speaker 2:I'm proud of what our multimodal team accomplished across Muse Spark, Voice Mode, Muse Image, and Muse Video, and even prouder of the team that made it possible. Over time, I felt
Speaker 3:Increasingly drawn to a problem that will matter deeply to humanity's future that remains largely underexplored.
Speaker 2:I forget what day it was. Maybe it was Monday or Tuesday when I was feeling a a little spicy. But I was just saying that MSL is is basically operating up against the clock which is that they did this massive Mhmm. Talent rate across all these companies about a year ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of
Speaker 2:people 9 figures, 10 figures, many of those people are gonna basically Mhmm. Spend a year and hit a point where they're like, okay, I have a $100,000,000 in the bank Yeah. And I'm kinda good now.
Speaker 1:25% of a huge pile of gold is still a huge pile of gold sometimes.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah. And a lot of those people are just gonna basically see the number in their bank account and be like, am I happy doing what I'm doing? Is this Mhmm. Fulfilling?
Speaker 2:Or do I wanna go build a company? Mhmm. And they've always wanted to build a company. And so, in the case of Yahoo, you whatever package he had, clearly, he's down to go take a risk. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't think this will be the last of the exits that we see out of MSL over the next even one or two months.
Speaker 1:What if he starts the social network? That would be risky. What if he's like, I'm coming for it all?
Speaker 2:I mean, he says, I've felt increasingly drawn to a problem that will matter deeply to humanity's future. So maybe he's figured out how to make aligned social media, social media safety.
Speaker 1:I like that. Yeah. Well, we should let Tyler pat himself on the back for this
Speaker 2:that make you go like this.
Speaker 1:This card was the first TBPN trading card. And Tyler whipped it up by himself and it doesn't even have our brand on it. And it also has a literal baseball field in the background. But this video or this this image went so viral, The original post got 30,000 likes on Axe was
Speaker 2:It did around a 100 k on Instagram. Yeah. Random account that again wasn't ours.
Speaker 1:It was crazy. It actually broke containment.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Tyler, for not watermarking it.
Speaker 1:And it was the it was the first it was the first moment where we had been talking about a story that really broke through to the mainstream. Because of this trading card, we wound up covering
Speaker 2:On French television.
Speaker 1:French television. That's where I was going. That's where I was going. So but because of this trading card, we talked about this a whole a whole this whole this story over a course of weeks. It was very interesting and dramatic.
Speaker 1:There were a whole bunch of scoops that came out around Mark Zuckerberg making people soup and stuff. It was it was a lot of really entertaining stuff. We were featured in the New York Times daily podcast, I think once or twice for talking about it. They clipped us and included our coverage in their telling of the story for their broader audience. And then French television sent out a bunch of reporters and cameras to come and interview us, which is very funny because they kept asking us like exactly how much money does does did did this guy make?
Speaker 1:And we're like, look, we don't know exactly how much he makes. And even if we do, we probably wouldn't wanna share that. But it was a very fair
Speaker 2:tell them there's there's no salary caps.
Speaker 1:That's true. There are no salary caps.
Speaker 2:The head of Instagram, Adam, posted a new word mark after ten years
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Leaving it unchanged. Adam says, the word mark at the top of the app hasn't changed in ten years. So it was time for a refresh, cleaner and more modern with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that's always made it Instagram. People don't like it. I don't have necessarily super strong opinions on it.
Speaker 2:Personally, immediately, I do think the original Instagram word mark here on the left had started to feel extremely dated.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But it's still iconic. I feel like we're headed back to this sort of maximalism and branding. Right? Like, however I don't know how many years ago it was. Like, five years ago, all the big fashion houses started going from their like historical word marks Mhmm.
Speaker 2:To updating them and making them like much more simple and
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Balenciaga.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And there there's like ten ten different examples.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so this this move almost feels a little bit like lagging in some ways where I actually like that Instagram logo was like it it did feel dated but it it was so distinct.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I sent a different treatment that I thought they should go with.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not too late. So
Speaker 1:I think that would speak to me personally a little bit better. But you know, their their treatment, it's a choice. It's clean. Louis Vuitton collaborated with Singer and created this insane Singer x Louis Vuitton collaboration for a nine eleven that looks like a handbag.
Speaker 2:Calling it the most tacky car.
Speaker 1:I was I didn't know where you were gonna go. I knew I saw this all over the all over the feed. I knew we were gonna be talking about it, but I didn't know where you'd sit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Why is it tacky?
Speaker 1:It looks
Speaker 2:pretty Yeah. Let's let's play this video.
Speaker 1:This isn't that tacky. I like the color. You don't like the color?
Speaker 2:The blue
Speaker 1:wheels are tacky? That this part
Speaker 2:looks nice. Well, okay.
Speaker 1:The bag
Speaker 2:Yeah. Interior is just brutal.
Speaker 1:The stick is pretty cool.
Speaker 2:The hood with the straps crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This part's sort
Speaker 2:of crazy. Helmets? I I don't hate the helmet.
Speaker 1:There's another version that doesn't have blue wheels. It's a little more subdued, but
Speaker 2:It it feels like AI slop Mhmm. IRL. This is like to me like a tacky unauthorized collab. I know exactly the kind of person that would would buy this. At this.
Speaker 2:People are saying next level gluttony. Aspirated slop.
Speaker 1:People do not like it. New bombshell reporting from the Wall Street Journal reveals that North Korea has built a secret workforce inside American companies using stolen identities, AI, and accomplices in The United States to cheat its way into remote jobs and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars back to Kim Jong un's regime. It's a fascinating story. The Wall Street Journal article is posted. It's a thirty minute documentary.
Speaker 1:They spent over a year investigating this. The FBI says that there are thousands of North Korean IT workers applying for jobs across America. After a year long investigation, the journal obtained a trove of leaked browser histories, emails, calendars, and screen recordings from one cell of workers providing a remarkable look at how the operation actually works. The North Koreans apply for jobs at enormous scale. One cell tracked by the journal applied to more than a thousand companies over just three months using AI in nearly every step.
Speaker 1:And in the documentary, they show a product that is basically, clearly, they will leave a voice agent running while they're being interviewed in a technical interview, give the answer when asked about a particular technology. If they are proficient, they will simply have AI look up the answer, give the answer to the interviewer, get the get the job. And in some cases, they're using real Americans as front men. Basically, they will do the interview and then they will ship a remote laptop to say, hey, you're a new you're a new remote worker. You are qualified to work on our software engineering team at this small company.
Speaker 1:We'll send you a laptop and then you just collect a check, send half of it to the North Koreans and you don't have to do any work. So it's like passive income free money for you, the Americans.
Speaker 2:So you said they're real Americans, but they're not patriots.
Speaker 1:Yep. That's what I'm hearing. Well, I I the the the documentary is pretty gut wrenching. Like, the the the the individual who they talk to who who was participating in this, obviously, is probably going to see some some legal consequences for this. But it did seem like he had a very, very tough go and gotten to a very rough situation to be in that situation.
Speaker 1:The operation also relies on help from inside The United States. North Korean IT workers pay American facilitators, they're called facilitators, to host company laptops in The United States, allowing the actual workers overseas to remotely connect to them while appearing to be employees working domestically. Also, the North Korean workers, they go to non extradition countries. So they'll go to China and Russia and a few other countries. And then from there, they will be remoting into an American laptop.
Speaker 1:So it just looks like, oh, okay. They're like, the web traffic is coming from it's not coming from North Korea, but it's coming from a country where if the FBI says, hey. Can you send us this person? They're a criminal. That country says, no way.
Speaker 1:We're not we're not sending them to you. So for one job paying $75,000 a year, he said he and the North Koreans split split the salary $50.50. The workers also use stolen American identities to pass employment screenings, often juggling multiple identities simultaneously and holding down several jobs under each name. This all boom during COVID and the remote work boom. And the scale of the operation is enormous.
Speaker 1:Some North Korean IT workers earn as much as $300,000 a year. The Treasury Department says North Korean says the North Korean government can seize as much as 90% of the wages earned by its overseas IT workers and recently estimated that these operations generated nearly $800,000,000 in 2024 alone. Pretty Wow. Pretty big. So the journal's thirty minute documentary titled Infiltrated North Korea's Secret US Workforce follows the operation in detail.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating to watch, and I highly recommend that you check it out. So go take a look. A new luxury hotel canceled a YouTuber's $4,663 stay, then came the viral feud, reports The Wall Street Journal. A dispute between Amman, which we've talked about a lot on the show, and content creator Ryan Walker illustrates the growing tension between commercial enterprises and influencers. It's a fascinating story, and somebody's gotta stand up for the Amman.
Speaker 1:Somebody has to be
Speaker 2:I'm ready. No. Story, honestly, I don't I don't think the Amman actually needs that much standing up for it.
Speaker 1:No. The Wall Street Journal broke it
Speaker 2:down in great detail and looks
Speaker 1:bad for this guy. Anyway Get it. Let's go through it. The Wall Street Journal reports that it was supposed to be the hottest hotel opening of the year. Let's play a little bit of his video.
Speaker 4:Don't know me. I'm a luxury hotel reviewer here on YouTube. I specialize in very honest reviews of the world's best properties. I'm not gonna give away too much as to what happened. I want you
Speaker 1:to watch the thesis. Like, he pays for the hotels himself. He doesn't get paid by the hotel for the review. The hotel doesn't pay for his stay. And consequently, he can be more independent.
Speaker 1:This was the Doug Demiro strategy. Good morning, mister Worker. Yeah. We don't have your reservation.
Speaker 2:Long story short, that video sparked a bunch of yeah. There's there's there's thousands of comments on there, people trashing the property. Yep. He's, you know, basically fully taking his side.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He says, I'm honest and transparent. I'll tell you exactly what to expect and why. He had previously paid $26,000 for a Four Seasons yacht trip that he panned in May.
Speaker 2:And sorry for the spoiler. He's not honest or transparent.
Speaker 1:George is so upset. Staff recognize him, inform him that he has no reservation, and according to Walker, eventually call the police to escort him away. Sounds terrible. As Walker drives off, he finds an email he says he missed. Sent the day before and apologizes for canceling his stay due to scaled back capacity during opening week.
Speaker 1:Not looking closely at the time stamp, he tells viewers the email arrived late the previous night. When later pressed by the journal, Walker revised his timeline saying it arrived the previous morning. Walker did not amend the timeline in his video or in a subsequent live stream. The Internet quickly took Walker's side. Viewers of his YouTube channel, including people who identified as Amman loyalists and travel industry professionals, expressed disbelief.
Speaker 1:We'll never book another Amman property. Again, read one of the more more than 5,000 comments, many of which expressed similar sentiments. Amman spokesperson said the company does not comment on bookings. The Amman spokesperson said Walker bypassed the main entrance and
Speaker 2:He was looking for trouble. My theory is he knows exactly what he was doing. He comes during the first week, books one night, knows that he shouldn't be filming, still decides to film Yeah. And is effectively looking for trouble the entire time. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And the crowd over on the Wall Street Journal loves it. The top rated comment, I'm on here I come. Any hotel that bans influencers is doing regular guests a great service. Service?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a big thing is that people go to certain places to not have cameras all over the place and it's getting rarer and rarer. And if if
Speaker 2:It's so it's so it's so actually fascinating to look at the difference. YouTube comments are like, wow. I'm never gonna go to the Amman. And then Wall Street Journal is
Speaker 1:like I'm fucking now.
Speaker 2:Walker is a complete tool, says Ray. Edward says Edward says seems mister Walker struggles with the truth. Anthropic is apparently in talks to Yeah. Decart for 6,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Getting mid generation.
Speaker 2:We've had We've had a bunch of awesome conversations with with Dean over at Decart. He's always he's very, very early, he was willing to do live demos Yeah. Of their product like That's really interviews completely on you know, we didn't even test with him before the show. Yeah. He was just ripping them live.
Speaker 2:So always had a ton of confidence in the product and they've been just cooking.
Speaker 1:They were valued at 4,000,000,000 a quarter ago. Himanshu has some extra context here. Says, Descartes could be one of the first AI labs focused on world video models to be acquired by a Frontier AI lab. I think this also could mark an initial phase where Frontier Labs start treating world models as a major strategic capability alongside inference optimization as a major offering from Descartes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Interesting to imagine how this actually links to the core thesis of, you know, b to b and enterprise and and coding. But certainly certainly an amazing technology that feels like on the verge of of a breakout. The demos are amazing, but we haven't had the, like, Ghibli moment for world models yet. Like, it's very much a prototype demo video. Go and see what it looks like.
Speaker 1:But we talked to a lot of people, Oliver Cameron and Fei Fei Li, about world models. There's a lot of optimism about how this all plugs into the AGI pursuits of the Frontier Labs. Are you a standard crying face emoji guy, a tilted crying face emoji guy, or a tear streaming down your face emoji guy?
Speaker 2:I'm normally Going to Okay. I wanna actually pull this up so I can see more closely.
Speaker 1:Are you? Joe Wiesenthal has recently transitioned
Speaker 2:I actually
Speaker 1:to a tilted crying face emoji.
Speaker 2:I've actually I don't I don't dabble in the tilted. I do I do tears.
Speaker 1:I do the tears.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the straight on.
Speaker 1:Oh, do I do you do the streaming down the face?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, I I need to mix that one emoji of 2025.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I went through maybe a decade where I I wouldn't I wouldn't touch crying.
Speaker 1:Oh, any of the crying ones. You do a smiley?
Speaker 2:But I've been I've been laughing a lot Okay.
Speaker 1:For the
Speaker 2:last couple of years. Yeah. Mainly because we've been doing this show. Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 1:You got a You got lot emoji. I like that in iMessage, you can do the but then you can also throw the crying emoji. But I gotta experiment with the tier streaming emoji.
Speaker 2:Do you
Speaker 1:ever go with the cat versions? No. I never LARP as the cat on
Speaker 2:Never go never go cat.
Speaker 1:But expect a cat emoji from me soon, Tyler, in our group message, in our group chat because it might be underrated. There might be some alpha there.
Speaker 2:Well, John, I'm gonna read a Bucco Capital bloke post that I think applies to this exact moment right now. Yes. He says, I think we're very close to the point where caring about AI or talking talking about it a lot is a bit embarrassing. Move on already. Who cares?
Speaker 1:Move on already. I mean, is a point where like we don't talk about the Internet anymore. We talk about what's happening on the Internet. We talk about particular Internet companies. This stuff does diffuse.
Speaker 1:If it diffuses fully, you stop talking about the the underlying technology. But there's a horse race on, Buco. There's a lot of money on the line. Entire global economy potentially. But
Speaker 2:That's right. He's just horsing around.
Speaker 1:Thank you for tuning in to TBPN. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify.