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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.
Is something big happening? This is the big question. I think it's a good essay. I don't love the COVID comparison for a few reasons. It's good it's good in the macro, but I think when you dig into, you know, how much is AI and fast takeoff and the advancement of these models really like COVID, I have trouble with that analogy in particular.
Speaker 1:So back in February 2020, everyone in tech was aware of how quickly a virus could compound because everyone in tech had followed exponential curves. We all knew Moore's Law. There's that funny quote, the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. But everyone in tech is obsessed with exponential growth, exponential charts, you know, everything is about exponential. So seeing an exponential curve and maybe studying math or something like that just made people much more aware that if COVID got out of control and wasn't contained, you would just see rapid, rapid explosion in the number of cases.
Speaker 1:And that, of course, held for most of COVID, but it wasn't a true exponential, and I've said this before. There are very few true exponentials in the real world because, of course, things cap out. They turn into logistic curves. So instead of going up and to the right indefinitely, they go up and to the right and then they plateau. Now, will AI plateau?
Speaker 1:There's been a series of plateaus. There's been a series of S curves. That's the story of technology. Really, as you zoom out, you see smooth exponential growth. But in the moment, you see a number of S curves.
Speaker 1:You see the desktop, the mainframe, then mobile, then the Internet and cloud. You see these different curves. AI is certainly one of those. You could put LLMs, reasoning, agents, a whole bunch of technologies that have if they didn't happen, there would have been a plateau, but then we get the next thing. The math around the COVID exponential always bothered me because it was exponential growth for a while, but you can't keep growing indefinitely exponentially because there's only 8,000,000,000 people on Earth.
Speaker 1:Something like one billion people got reported COVID cases, but you just can't 100x from there. Like it's impossible. There's not 100,000,000,000 people to infect. So eventually the growth rate has to slow down. Back to AI.
Speaker 1:If you model the power of artificial intelligence just purely as a function of energy, we have plenty of room for exponential growth. We're truly very far away. Humanity is around 13 orders of magnitude away from Kardashev type two, like full Dyson sphere capturing 100% of the energy that's produced by the sun. Even just in terms of how much energy we're using on AI that we have, the power that we generate on Earth, we're less than 1%. So we can grow that significantly, and that's why it feels exponential now.
Speaker 1:But there will be a whole bunch of bottlenecks all over the place. It takes time to adjust. There are certain industries that are sticky. And so I like the framing of it's time to talk to your friends outside of the tech world about AI, but it doesn't feel exactly like COVID because COVID affected people, older people, people who were not online reading biology, Srinivasan's post about COVID, studying exponentials, modeling the R0s. So it was very advantageous to go to people who were not aware of what was coming and telling them like, hey, like you are going to need to stay inside for a little bit because it's going get rough out there.
Speaker 1:You have an extremely fast. And a lot of people, when they think about AI, they have very antiquated views. They still think like, oh, the images of six fingers. And they don't notice that they just watched five AI generated reels that they couldn't detect. Or they talk about hallucinated facts and LLM responses, something that's basically been solved by research and reasoning models.
Speaker 1:Knowledge cutoffs, like, oh, it can't tell me what happened today. Like, no, it can actually tell you the weather today. It can go and look that up on the internet, no problem. And so many people still use these reference points, and maybe they dip their toe in, but it's definitely time for them to dip their toe in again. So this is good.
Speaker 1:I love that. At the same time, the coding models, as remarkable as they are, they'll reshuffle the economics of tech. We're seeing this with the SaaSpocalypse. Certain companies will be stronger beneficiaries of AI. Others will be damaged because maybe their only moat was that they had a complex software system that was hard to migrate off of.
Speaker 1:All of a sudden, an agent can just do it for you. When I think about telling my friends outside of tech about the coming wave, I'm just not entirely sure how helpful and understanding of coding agents will be for them. I was thinking about like some of my real world friends. Like, I'm friends with a surgeon. Like, he has a SaaS product that helps him book clients.
Speaker 1:He should probably renegotiate that. I don't I would not recommend him vibe coding his own payment system. But like the humanoid robot that can operate on a patient in a surgical context and has the trust of the patient, like it's coming, but it's a ways away. I would definitely talk to any software engineers in your world about what's happening, how the level of abstraction. Mean, just yesterday, Roon posted something where he was like, whatever level of abstraction you're giving to the AI agents, you should probably be delegating one level above that.
Speaker 1:That's a good frame of mind. And so if there's someone out there that says, look, my company for some reason hasn't been really on the forefront of AI adoption. I don't really have access to the models or they're not approved. It's like, yeah, you should probably be using these in your free time a lot to get up to speed to know how to actually use the new tools as effectively as possible because that's clearly where the future role is going. Yes, it will change over the next decade.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm not AI bear here. I'm just saying, like, I don't know that February 2026 will be the month that, like, surgeons change. The software only singularity is super real. The singularity broadly, I still believe in the Kurzweil timelines. But I don't know that February is the month where like everyone is changed, whether you're like a car mechanic or like I have a friend who operates a bunch of gas stations.
Speaker 1:Like one of the things he had to do was like kick someone out who was trying to steal stuff. Like there's a crazy video of him like jumping over the counter and like the humanoids will change a lot. That's not quite here yet. We're still like in this like slow takeoff, in my opinion. It is remarkable.
Speaker 1:And it's a lot of fun to talk about. So I do think the recommendation of, like, talk to your friends about advances in AI is awesome because you can just say, hey, like, look at this personal website. Let's build you this. Oh, you have a wedding coming up? Like, here, vibe code your wedding website.
Speaker 1:Like, what do you want to do? Like, there's a whole bunch of different things you can do. But for most people, it won't be like COVID where one hundred percent of people were somehow affected by it. Even five years ago, there was
Speaker 2:kind of a running joke where it felt like a lot of office jobs were just fake. And even when people kind of like started, that became part of the zeitgeist and people were talking about it. It didn't mean all the jobs went away. Some jobs have gone away. But again, head counts at even a lot of these companies have stayed relatively stable.
Speaker 2:We had a good jobs report, surprisingly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, economists expected 65,000 jobs. The number came in at more than double at 130,000 jobs. We'll see where it lands in terms of
Speaker 2:But yeah, the question is like, Okay, the jobs have always been some email jobs. A lot of email jobs have been pretty fake. What happens if agents can do a lot of these jobs? Do the fake jobs remain? I was joking.
Speaker 2:I responded to the article. And I said, TLDR, freak TF out and sell all your money immediately. People were asking, what do you sell your money for? That's the point. Was joking I thought Jeffrey said, it's suppressing how widely shared and read this is.
Speaker 2:It's AI generated word salad posted by someone with vested interest in spreading AI hype. AI is big, I guess, but its effect will be much more complicated than this quote unquote essay implies. On. Really going hard. But again, felt like something like send this to 10 friends or you will be in the permanent underclass forever.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Like kind of like high school.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was a little bit of like a throwback to the the permanent underclass. Tyler, what was your interpretation of it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think my main critique is like with COVID, it's like very destructive. Right? Yeah. You maybe you lose your job, like the very least, like, you should you might get sick.
Speaker 3:Everything is like bad. Yeah. With AI, it's like this article is like, yeah, people are like gonna lose their jobs. That's like kind of what the gist is like. You should be aware that like your job might get automated.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But like AI is like fundamentally, it's like a productive tool. Right? I imagine like it's not gonna cause a recession. GDP is not gonna go down.
Speaker 3:It's gonna go up. And so I think my base case is like jobs actually get like way more fake generally. I mean, there's probably like hundreds of people on x and their entire job like their salary is just posting fake AI news And they get paid by, it's not even like sponsored deals. Like they're just getting paid by X directly. That's like completely fake job.
Speaker 3:But like that's going to go up. There's going be more of a
Speaker 2:I'm exhausted by the OMG, this changes everything AI posts. For this godforsaken site that I'm planning to take my doom scrolling talents back to Instagram. I believe in AI. I use it every day for increasingly nontrivial tasks. My team spends a massive amount of money on it vendors, tokens, acquisition.
Speaker 2:And I have pitched AI products that we built on stage. I believe things are changing fast. I don't care to hear some sweaty, overly online dudes breathless panting over the latest model anymore. I don't need to know what's changed in the last forty five seconds in AI. I don't need some dork with a weird haircut writing condescending posts like he was the first person to get the last Harry Potter book and wants to drop edgy hints about how Dumbledore dies at that.
Speaker 2:I'd rather miss the latest AI news than just be poor. Tell me when the singularity is done so I can pause Inferno and I'll tune back into x then. Nelson says, okay, but this one really changes anything, everything. Please, I promise. Please.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People are having fun. Feels like an Anon can just tweet. Just vibe coded Databricks with a screenshot and the SaaS market will follow. 5%.
Speaker 2:Cephalopod. Yeah. I mean, if your job is building a wrap around ChatGPT like this guy, then it's not surprising that AI can automate that. Iron shots. What
Speaker 1:did Joe Weisenthal have to say?
Speaker 3:Joe, with a funny post. He says, seeing a lot
Speaker 2:of posts from software engineers that are like AI is devouring my job and soon it will happen to everyone. And it's like, maybe, but just because you have an easy job doesn't mean everyone else.
Speaker 1:So it's
Speaker 3:a big bait.
Speaker 2:Incredible bait.
Speaker 1:Master. Incredible. Solid bait.
Speaker 2:If anyone falls for this, you really deserve it. Brutko Capital USA. Said a great comment from a friend who's coding with these AI tools around the clock. For the hype you read online, it's just really difficult to tell the difference between a genuine breakthrough propaganda to justify valuations and LLM psychosis. Yeah, Matt Schumer's article must go incredibly hard if you have LLM psychosis.
Speaker 1:I was thinking more about Claude with Ads, the vibe coded drop we launched on the Super Bowl. That was an idea that we had Friday morning. And after the show on Friday, we sat down, we talked about it with Tyler, and said like, is this feasible? Can we get a functional website up? It's a clone of the of the Claude app interface, same color, style guides, fonts, all this stuff.
Speaker 1:Like, coding that by hand feels like a week long project. I don't know how long it would take normally, but like and it was clearly accelerated. And I was thinking about like, if we didn't have coding agents, what would we have done? Like we could have paid a dev shop 10 to build something like that, But we probably just wouldn't have done it at all. Disagree.
Speaker 1:Okay. What do you think? How would I it play
Speaker 2:doing kind of drops Yeah. Stunts like that before coding agents And were a you could just work hard and do that.
Speaker 1:Just grind.
Speaker 2:Dylan and I, we did one back in the day with Party Round called Helpful VC. This was, I think, like May or June 2021. So it was before the crazy NFT boom had really started. But CryptoPunks were popular. And we made a collection of 400 NFTs of various VCs.
Speaker 2:And we just put them on a website and said, if you don't repost this site in the next four hours, we're going to auction off your NFT. And so you had like 400 VCs reposted it very quickly. And that was an example of a funny idea like Claude with Ads, where we just had the idea. We worked on it for a few days, shipped it, and that was it. So How
Speaker 1:long was it? A couple days?
Speaker 2:It was definitely no more than five business days.
Speaker 1:We got this done in, like, one day.
Speaker 2:It's Friday to Sunday. Tyler Yeah. Was still
Speaker 3:Yeah. Do you Like, obviously, like, I'm extremely bullish on these tools, they're, like, incredible. But it's still, like, I was spent, like, most like, almost all my Saturday, like, building that. Yeah. It's not like it's like, yeah, like, they're accelerating our You took one for the team.
Speaker 2:You you you sacrificed your weekend.
Speaker 3:No. Feel like like these tools are, like,
Speaker 2:accelerating Employee of the month. Employee of the month. Get it. You still I still You deserve it.
Speaker 3:They're not so incredible that, like, it can't, like, literally one shot it in in five minutes. You can't just tell Cloud Code build Yeah. Zach Replica. Yeah. And it it's not it can't actually, like, do that yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Without you, it would not have happened. Delicious Tacos, favorite account, says moratorium on AI CEOs using AI to write long winded articles on how scared they are of AI. Very true. There's a lot.
Speaker 1:But I wonder, this didn't trigger my this is AI slop vibes. Maybe there was AI involved somehow, but it felt like it was sort of just, I don't know, very readable. It didn't throw me off. I want to talk about Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez.
Speaker 1:The retail revival Vow burned investors. Wall Street Journal has a has a deep dive on Tai Lopez. He pitched RadioShack Pier one turnarounds. Now the SEC alleges a Ponzi scheme. Tai Lopez was living proof of the the American dream was still attainable for young men willing to bet on themselves.
Speaker 4:I'm hiring. I need high ticket closers. You can work from home. You can work from anywhere. I have literally tens of thousands of leads.
Speaker 4:Okay? What I need is people that have high energy. They're sharp at sales, and, they're hungry. I get crazy lead flow.
Speaker 1:The entrepreneur hosted parties at a mansion in Beverly Hills and boasted about the black Lamborghini in his garage. The college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich quick advice and self help courses. He was one of the first people to really understand the economics of YouTube ads. When he went live with his YouTube ad campaign, he had the LTV to CAC so dialed that he was able to spin it up and just spend millions and millions of dollars on YouTube ads. And I don't know if he owned the Ferraris or rented them, but like it clearly worked.
Speaker 1:It was like the first real breakout, not influencer campaign, but direct YouTube ad network campaign. He urged his followers to invest in a new company he had started that was scooping up distressed retailers on the cheap RadioShack, Pier one Imports, Dress Barn, Modell Sporting Goods and Linens and Things with a promise to turn them into e commerce winners. That was always a weird, It's a crazy weird, weird
Speaker 2:pitch.
Speaker 1:So Sean Murphy is an example of someone here. He saw Lopez's posts on his Facebook and Instagram feeds and was drawn in by the brand names and the promise of 20% returns. Always odd to pitch a promised return.
Speaker 3:Think
Speaker 2:this Yeah. Not And this is called first kind of major error. Having a bad business idea, like buying old retailers and trying to revive them Yes. Is not illegal. Yes.
Speaker 2:But general solicitation Yes. Very, very is a no no.
Speaker 1:Sean Murphy invested $175,000 into the company called Retail Commerce Ventures e commerce ventures, R E V. Lopez raised more than $230,000,000 from hundreds of mostly small investors. We we we talk about these big funding rounds, and we're like, oh, like, how did this person get this much money? And we hear about the SPVs and the layered SPVs and all the all the bringing retail into the private markets, but like he really did it. So Murphy is another example.
Speaker 1:He's an Illinois grandfather. He got a $10,000 Pier one gift card and monthly checks of about $1,000 for two years. What he didn't know was that his payouts allegedly were funded mostly by other investors.
Speaker 2:Second mistake.
Speaker 1:Second mistake. These guys lied. He said they conspired. They led people on. Poor Murphy here.
Speaker 1:The payments stopped abruptly in late twenty twenty two, and the struggling retailers were then taken over by some of the company's creditors.
Speaker 2:So he had the $230,000,000 of equity and then he also levered
Speaker 1:debt. Yeah. Last September, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Lopez and his partners accusing them of running a Ponzi scheme, misleading investors and misappropriating $16,100,000. The FBI has been contacting investors as part of a criminal investigation into what happened. Lopez and his lawyer, Marty Reddy, didn't respond to request for comment.
Speaker 1:Lopez, who's 48 years old now, hasn't addressed the company's collapse and the heavy losses incurred by his investors. The day the SEC filed suit, he posted on X, never doom. No matter how horrible the situation, don't ever think you're doomed unless you are dead. All defeat is psychological. Is he talking to himself there?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess Staying in character. I just can't believe how much the check sizes for some of the people that he was bringing in. Apparently, Nelson Rowe says Lopez seemed credible, an 82 year old retired real estate broker who invested $300,000 The story sounded so good. You can imagine somebody like this goes offline for ten years and then just logs onto the internet and is like, wait, this guy has RadioShack, beer one imports linens and goods?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Linens and
Speaker 2:things. Linens and things. I mean, this seems like a winner. So yeah, quick Google search could have helped to avoid this. Tai Lopez's greatest contribution, I would say, is not very great, is he inspired tens of thousands of young people to try to make their money in info products, which is still perpetuating itself.
Speaker 2:Because it's kind of like a virus. Somebody starts doing it. They get people down their funnel. The people get down their funnel. They realize, hey, this guy's actually making money with courses.
Speaker 2:I should learn from him how to do courses. And it just kind of creates this web of people selling info products and flaunting a bunch of their lifestyle.
Speaker 1:There's so many layers. The course that teaches you e commerce or drop shipping, and then the course that teaches you to sell courses on e commerce. And we need to do the final boss. The course that teaches you how to sell courses, about how to sell courses, about sell courses, about how to sell e commerce or something like that. Let's go into the shopping spree.
Speaker 2:Did you ever buy a course Yes. That actually changed your life?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes, I did. I bought a course on Houdini, a motion graphics tool used in Hollywood. If you've watched Game of Thrones and you see horses galloping thing.
Speaker 2:What was the course title? Was it like How to Get Rich Quick
Speaker 1:with No. Was like like using Houdini in advanced VFX pipelines.
Speaker 2:So you weren't the course creator was not driving a Lamborghini.
Speaker 1:No. No, the course creator was like, I worked on Westworld. You want to learn how they did Westworld graphics? And I'm like, absolutely. I would love
Speaker 3:to pay you $1,000 to teach me how to do that.
Speaker 2:You paid to learn how to fish. Yes. And now you're feeding yourself for a lifetime.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Because, I mean, too many courses good if it's a narrow scale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I definitely bought at least one workout course when I was probably like 18 or 19, even though it was like effectively advertising a bro split. Yeah, yeah, So you could just learn from any Arnold video, any quick Google search certainly can get it from ChatGPT. It was opinionated and I just followed it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it was well worth the money. Yeah. Even though the information was like there there's something about if you pay for something, you're much more likely to take it seriously and actually try to follow it. Yeah. And so I won't say even though we're kind of poking fun here, I don't think all all information products are bad.
Speaker 2:No, I completely P90X.
Speaker 1:That was the workout course that was going viral when I was in college.
Speaker 2:I've been watching sports. Really, ones I do think really, really bad are when they advertise trading courses to younger audiences. Because it's like, Okay, you have $300 in your bank account. I'm sorry. You're not to going to change your life.
Speaker 2:You should learn And anything
Speaker 1:the crazy thing is that there is a reasonable trading course, which would be like buy ETFs. There is good financial advice that you could give someone to trade. And it would be basically like, don't trade, like buy and hold.
Speaker 2:Lopez teamed up with Alex Mehr, a mechanical engineer who had co founded an online dating app that sold for $255,000,000 Not bad. In 2019, they formed Miami based retail e commerce ventures to snap up distressed retail brands. Lopez was CEO and mayor of president. Lopez's younger cousin was chief operating officer. According to the SEC complaint, she had previously worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a radio station promoter, and as an assistant to the online educational company that Lopez had started.
Speaker 2:In one peer one pitch deck, investors were told they would receive $200,000 after their first year if they invested $1,000,000 which again is 20% return, which is insane. Sort of guarantee
Speaker 1:return is usually a huge red flag.
Speaker 2:Getting into the jobs report. Jobs report.
Speaker 1:130,000 jobs economists expected, 65,000 jobs and a 4.4% unemployment rate. Traders pushed Fed rate cut expectations to July and revisions trimmed The US twenty twenty five payroll gain to 181,000.
Speaker 2:There were kind of delays with the report, right? Everyone was expecting this to be absolutely abysmal. And now I think the reaction is, can we trust the data?
Speaker 1:I was debating with a friend about he was sending me some economic data, he was saying AI is the only thing holding up the economy. And I was like, I don't know that that's the right phrase. I almost prefer AI is holding up the stock market, but healthcare is holding up the economy because that's where we're seeing job gains and and that's where like the real economy like there's always this disconnect between what's happening in the markets that's very forward looking. And then there's like the on the ground like do people have jobs or not? And the question of like do people have jobs or not is much more in the health care and services sector.
Speaker 1:There's going to be some debate over how real is this, will it be revised down. But there are other economic statistics that we can look at. We're having Harley from Shopify on the show, and we'll ask him about the health of the consumer because he sees a lot of commerce data. And if people are even just worried about losing their jobs, usually they're pulling back on spending,
Speaker 2:discretionary Revisions came out today as well, showed job growth was almost 900,000 lower in the twelve months through March 2025 than initially reported. So again, we announced these big numbers. And then we kind of move on and then revise them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Employers added 130,000 jobs last month. And the unemployment rate declined to 4.3 according to the BLS. I mean, there is this interesting tension, right, between even if the job numbers are inflated, that puts pressure on the Fed to not cut rates, which is another stated objective of the administration. So you have these like two things.
Speaker 1:Like if you're pushing for, hey, let's count every possible job that could potentially fit in this category, that will then it's going be harder to make the case that you should cut rates. In leaving rates unchanged last month, chair Jerome Powell cited signs of steadying in the job market. So Jerome Powell saw this as well. Coming off a hiring recession in 2026, this is welcome news. The labor market appears to be stabilizing.
Speaker 2:Well, you know what is real? What? ByteDance, C Dance Yes. Two point o. The model's very good.
Speaker 2:This is a nature documentary about an otter flying an airplane, which, if you ask me, is worth the 2,000,000,000,000 of capex.
Speaker 1:Is photo real?
Speaker 3:In the
Speaker 5:world of marvels, some creatures defy all expectations. This is the incredible story of the pilot otter.
Speaker 1:That's cute.
Speaker 2:I like that. Lucas is firing shots at actors. Okay. But we can pull this up.
Speaker 1:You killed Jeffrey Epstein, you animal. He was a good man. He knew
Speaker 3:too much about our Russia operations. He had to die, and now you die too.
Speaker 2:Insane insane audio, but but the video, I I can't. You've watched a handful of movies
Speaker 1:I have.
Speaker 2:More than me. Does this look like it could be in a film?
Speaker 1:It's close. It's pretty close.
Speaker 2:What are you missing?
Speaker 1:I mean, just the length of the shot, it's not fully modern the way Hollywood shoots an action scene like this. It's either way more cuts and just way more detail shots cutting in and out. Or they'll try and turn it into more of a cinematic set piece and have a drone shot or a sweeping shot. It's very rare that you're just sort of sitting there watching that in most of like the most
Speaker 2:modern movies. It's But terms of like, they're prompting and splicing it For together from different angles sure. You could.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think I I do wonder if there's like an interesting comparison to the the kind of Cloudbot stuff where like, I think one of my main takeaways from the Cloudbot thing was that it's gonna be hard for big labs to kind of replicate that just because of like, you can't get the WhatsApp integration, stuff like this. Where I think with the Chinese models, the image models, the video models, they're very clearly like training on stuff they're not supposed to be training on. Like the the otter flying, like that's David Attenborough's voice. Right?
Speaker 3:Like you're not supposed to be able to to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Where like can Sora can open eye release Sora with with that exact voice? Probably not. Maybe they can try to do it. But they're clearly going to face some legal repercussions where China can actually just kind of do it because they don't really have those
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of the American labs, it feels like they've been launching very aggressively and sort of making a fair use claim and probably engaging with lawyers from the big IP holders immediately and just sort of saying like, look, yes, like we know you can prompt Disney characters. We are happy to pull that out. But also, you want to talk to our business development team?
Speaker 3:Yeah, with OpenEye, you saw them actually do like a Disney deal where
Speaker 1:Very quickly.
Speaker 3:China is not like I'm pretty sure that you can go and see dance
Speaker 1:Yeah, see
Speaker 3:dance, and just prompt like Mickey Mouse doing a little dance or whatever.
Speaker 1:Will Smith fighting a spaghetti monster. Epic action film scene. Different cuts.
Speaker 2:You go, John.
Speaker 3:You wanted
Speaker 1:This is good.
Speaker 2:All you had to do was ask. This is pretty real.
Speaker 1:I like that Will Smith is just the benchmark forever.
Speaker 2:And I have the old Will Smith Spaghetti AI ready to go after this. Okay. Alright. So this is February 2026. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is Let's go back in time.
Speaker 1:That is a great shot. That's something you need to do in Houdini. No longer.
Speaker 2:Pull up this next one we got going back to 2023.
Speaker 1:China can one shot AI crime. Wow. This is the progression or there
Speaker 2:was this remember just I remember getting better. Supposed to this exact same thing and be like, this is going to change everything.
Speaker 1:And it did.
Speaker 2:And they were right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were right.
Speaker 2:But it's still funny.
Speaker 1:And now, it's just sitting there enjoying spaghetti, I suppose.
Speaker 2:We got to talk about Mistral. Mistral's cooking.
Speaker 1:They're cooking.
Speaker 2:And they're investing $1,400,000,000 to build out AI infrastructure in Sweden.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Let's head over to Bloomberg. French AI startup Mistral is investing $1,400,000,000 US to build AI infrastructure in Sweden as it pushes to become the go to AI supplier for governments and enterprises in Europe. The data center will be located in a place that I cannot pronounce, Bordland. The facility will house the advanced computing power to train and run Mistral's AI models and is scheduled to be operational from 2027. This is Mistral's first data center investment outside of France and the company is bill billing the build out as a move to strengthen European tech sovereignty As political ties with Washington fray, governments in the region are increasingly wary of relying on Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, which dominate AI infrastructure, data storage, and cloud computing.
Speaker 2:Mistral, which develops AI models and hopes to be Europe's answer to OpenAI, says it can offer customers a fully European AI stack. This investment is a concrete step toward building independent capabilities in Europe dedicated to AI.
Speaker 1:Their last round was led by ASML. Dollars 1,300,000,000.0 from the Dutch chipmaker. That's a good deal.
Speaker 2:They're cooking. They're cooking. This is the kind of thing that Macron should be highlighting. And they're announcing in the Financial Times that their revenue is now similar to Grok Really? Over $400,000,000
Speaker 1:Interesting. Dollars 400,000,000 as Europe seeks AI independence.
Speaker 2:Jordy discusses dissing Macron caused domino effect. Missed Rollins. That's one point. You manifested it. I did it.
Speaker 2:I inspired them to grind harder. Ackman makes $2,000,000,000 bet on Meta. Bill Ackman's Pershing Square revealed a major new stake in Meta, making up 10% of its portfolio or about $2,000,000,000 The firm sees Meta as a top beneficiary of AI, boosting ads content in future products like wearables and digital assistants. I saw somebody had wired up I don't think we got to it in the show, but they wired up OpenClaw with their Meta headset. Okay.
Speaker 2:But effectively saying like, hey, buy this product. It would go to Amazon and buy the product. Wow. And that is the vision we've been talking about. That is the opportunity.
Speaker 2:Zuck wants you to be able to just be in the world Yep.
Speaker 1:Meta has tried to get into commerce so many times. There's been a lot of back and forth about should you be able to just click and check out directly on Meta properties. It's never fully developed. And you have to imagine that they have all the biz dev horsepower in the world to try and go and do that. But for some reason, that has continued to live in the domain of brands in Amazon, on Shopify sites, etcetera.
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