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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.
Snap officially launched SPECS yesterday. Some of the team members here got to go check it out in person. I get there. I'm like, this is perfect. It's 3PM.
Speaker 1:Atlas Creatine Cycle's in town. I wanna meet up with him. I'm like, great. You're going to this thing. I have an invite to this thing.
Speaker 1:I'll see you there. We'll catch up there. Super convenient for both of us. I got a thirty minute call beforehand. It ends right before the thing starts.
Speaker 1:That runs to fifty minutes. So I'm twenty minutes late. Get my badge, walk in immediately, get a phone call. Hey, they called me here about to be I had another call. You gotta hop on early.
Speaker 2:So I leave. And then I
Speaker 1:have another ninety minute call. So I truly missed the entire thing. But I did get to go inside, have one glass of water, talk to one person, Harper Carroll, former guest of the show. Now out in Austin reporting on AI. And that was electric.
Speaker 1:But then I didn't actually get to see the presentation or do the demos. So it was basically a quick turnaround for me. And I was like, why why did I think I could pull this off? I failed. But did the launch fail?
Speaker 1:We'll see. We'll talk to the folks who actually went. Tyler, Nick. We're not asking for a full review. I just want take us through the day.
Speaker 1:I saw you guys pull up and you guys didn't see me. I was on the street on the call. You guys get waved around. You valet. Walk me through your journey into the the launch.
Speaker 1:Like, what you you go in, you have cocktails. What what happened?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have a have a drink.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Go in.
Speaker 1:What are they serving? Screaming Eagle or, you know, seltzer water?
Speaker 2:Some kind of cocktail.
Speaker 1:Do they have the original Four Loka? Did they were they serving the original Four Loka?
Speaker 2:I wish. Yeah. Yeah. Multiple pints of Guinness.
Speaker 1:Did they have natural
Speaker 3:light You could totally see Evan cracking out the cracking open the secret supply of original Four Locos. You know that guy
Speaker 1:He has a bunkie with the original Four Locos. Yeah. So so everyone's having some drinks and you sit down
Speaker 2:then you go into the the amphitheater.
Speaker 1:And it's sort of like Steve Jobs iPhone launch vibes. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. You know, he's he's standing in front of this big screen. There's like beautiful images behind him.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Walks out, black shirt, jeans. Okay. Yeah. Then he just starts he starts doing live demos.
Speaker 1:He did lean into the memes. Right? I saw on screen a picture that had clearly been photoshopped or AI to make the specs look even bigger. So he was aware that people thought they were chunky, that they were large.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So so he gives his demo. What's his pitch?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's like a number of of ways to he kind of talked about it. One is like position against like being on your phone a lot. You wanna stay very present. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? You don't be looking down at Yeah. Screens all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You wanna be You wanna look at the world.
Speaker 1:The screen.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Right? Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Close to your face.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I've heard that pitched a few times. Do you believe that? Do you think that if you go no phone but constant visual overlay in your visual field, you will actually be like, yeah. I'm I'm more in touch with reality.
Speaker 1:It worked.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I've never I've never understood that part of the pitch.
Speaker 1:It's I've actually
Speaker 3:we been we know you're addicted to your phone Yeah. And so here's another product Yeah. That will actually always be attached to your face. Yeah. We're they're gonna spin as helping you kind of, yeah, reconnect with Yeah.
Speaker 3:Reality.
Speaker 1:It's an odd it's an odd pitch. It really doesn't work on me because I I like the barbell strategy of, like, brain rot and and stimulation where I am actually fine to be like, give me the fully virtual world. I wanna be locked in. I want the screen as big as possible. I wanna be in World War two.
Speaker 1:I want to be in modern warfare for hours playing, running around, shooting. I want it to be all the audio. I don't want to hear anything else. I want noise cancellation. I want to be in that world, then I wanna be able to unplug and then just go into the actual world and sit down and have a chat with you and have a coffee and not be checking our phones and actually be fully present when I'm fully present in the real world.
Speaker 1:And then I wanna be fully in the virtual world. So, like, I want the VR, the the the the fully, like, you know, immersive thing and then zero immersion. I am actually not looking for more things that are in the middle, and I'm wondering if people will if that will resonate with people.
Speaker 2:I I think that's mostly because you haven't seen, like, very good examples. And like right now, the the glasses are still like kind of big and Yeah. Pretty. If they're very minimal and like kind of, you know, they would show very small
Speaker 1:They're the boys.
Speaker 2:That were
Speaker 3:So People online were thinking that the guy in the center was Clav. Yeah. It's actually Tyler.
Speaker 1:It's actually Tyler and Nick and Atlas. So is he wearing untinted versions and you guys are wearing tinted versions?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Or are they or is or can you say like, I want tinting on right now?
Speaker 2:So I I think you can like increase the tinting
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But there's also just
Speaker 1:There's two skews?
Speaker 2:I yeah, I believe so.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Yeah. So you gotta get both, I guess. Anyway, when did you actually get to the
Speaker 3:Dan Dan says, John raising a second family in VR.
Speaker 1:Trying to
Speaker 3:keep them separated.
Speaker 1:Yes. The the Cod lobby is my second family for sure. So so he gives a pitch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Does a bunch of live demos.
Speaker 1:And and are the demos consumer focused, enterprise focused, prosumer?
Speaker 2:Yes. So the live demos he did were all very consumer.
Speaker 1:Consumer.
Speaker 2:Like live shopping and you could like he was gonna look for a espresso machine, then he pulls it and like puts it on a table in front He of sees it. How big it is and stuff like that. Okay.
Speaker 1:Any live demo failures? Any WiFi issues?
Speaker 2:There there was kind of one where he tried to pull up a YouTube video.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And then so he said like, hey, specs
Speaker 1:talking to a voice assistant Yeah.
Speaker 2:He said like, controls at the school. Pull up a video about Yeah. About specs. Yeah. And then it it opens the the like browser view, goes to YouTube, and then he like tries to click on a video to open it and it like doesn't really work.
Speaker 1:Uh-oh. Okay.
Speaker 2:But it it eventually worked.
Speaker 1:It seemed like it worked.
Speaker 2:Was like a small good. Pickup. Okay. It it wasn't like a big
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't a demo fail. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense. Okay. So then
Speaker 2:And there was a very cool live demo of someone. There was, like, a kind of a interactive music creator tool where you could like move around and it would play different sounds. Mhmm. And so she did this very cool live demo.
Speaker 1:So she was creating a song, but instead of using traditional instruments, like the instruments were puppeteered by her movements
Speaker 2:Yes. In the physical world.
Speaker 1:Got
Speaker 2:it. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Cool. So was there any enterprise pitch?
Speaker 2:There was. There were no live demos of that, but there were some videos played. Like, one was it's like, imagine you're an electrician and you're basically looking at this big, like, server box Mhmm. And you don't know where to, you know, plug in the wire Mhmm. And it would, like, highlight which plug you put it into.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which I think is, like, could be interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That feels like something that sounds good, but I have no actual real experience there to, like, say, like, yeah, that's what the that that's what will solve the bottleneck in electricians.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, you know, interactive instructions, that's kind of a cool idea. Right? Yeah. You're building IKEA furniture or something and it, tells you what to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But then keynote ends and then we go outside and there's, a bunch of places to do live demos. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The the first one we did, well, you basically put on the glasses and you do some kind of like calibration thing. You like figure out how the the motion works.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:There's no like little kind of secondary like, I I think on the the Meta Quest displays, there's like that little wristband. There's nothing like that.
Speaker 1:Nothing like that. It's this hand tracking.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's kind of like it it's similar to like the Apple Vision Pro kind of interactions. Yeah. Then, yeah, the the one I really liked was it was like ping pong.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So you're like, your hand is the paddle and you're playing ping pong. I think there's actually a video
Speaker 1:of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They So played the the ping pong thing, do a little tier list for me of of ways to do ping pong.
Speaker 1:Would you rather play ping pong in VR or real life?
Speaker 2:Well, so, like, obviously, you would rather play in real life, but Yeah. Like, would you actually play in real life? So if my friend lives a 100 miles away, I'm not gonna play ping pong, but I can play in VR. Right? Okay.
Speaker 3:So that
Speaker 2:I think that Okay. You know, boosts it.
Speaker 1:Right? So it's also s tier? I think And what about
Speaker 2:I think it's like
Speaker 1:b tier. Because in the augmented reality Is it do think there ping pong table? No. No. Okay.
Speaker 1:No. So it
Speaker 2:creates was playing pong table. We can see it, but I'm
Speaker 1:just Okay.
Speaker 2:Waving my hand.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Alright. This is
Speaker 2:Future. Right here. Yeah. And then this was I I I can talk about why, but this is probably more like c tier. It's definitely worse than VR.
Speaker 2:I think one of the one of the reasons is because there's no actual controller. So the Oh, you don't have the weight
Speaker 1:or anything?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a little bit
Speaker 1:Oh, that's interesting. Tracking is worse. Even though you don't have a controller. Normally, it's like get rid of the controller. That's just extra weight, batteries, equipment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think for gaming, the controller actually works because Yeah. It's really precise.
Speaker 1:But typically, these these systems allow like third party peripherals so you can like, whip up a you know, you can, like, wire up an Xbox controller. Like what Oculus did where they just or Meta Quest where they just use the Xbox controller for those types of games.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I do think, like, this was my the the coolest demo I did. Mhmm. And this is something that, like, really, like, no reason why this needs to be an AR. This could just be completely VR.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because, like, I'm I'm looking at the the ball. I'm not looking at, like, people in front of me. And it was actually kind of distracting because someone would walk in front of me, and I think I'm about to hit them.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Because I can, like, see them while I'm trying
Speaker 1:to Maybe better to just include the
Speaker 3:Yeah. The world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or do some pass through stuff. Yeah. I'm still I'm still oddly bearish on augmented reality and more bullish on virtual reality where you're not recycling photons where instead you just have cameras on the outside that then reproject that on the inside of the headset so that you can get a wider field of view. And then if you're in a bright scene, you can still overlay things, you can darken things.
Speaker 1:But in augmented reality, I don't believe it's physically possible if you look at a bright light to put a dark, you know, object in front of it. Because the the only thing that this that these glasses can do is add light to the scene. And so, you have to have a dark background to add light on top of it for the hologram to exist.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I I found it was like bright enough I could clearly see everything.
Speaker 1:That is pretty impressive. Yeah. It was outside. It was a bright day. It's in LA.
Speaker 1:I mean, sure there was like you were standing in shade, but you could still see the holograms, I think is interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I didn't try watching any, like, movies or anything Yeah. Which I think would definitely be better in VR for
Speaker 1:You should have been like, you're gonna let me demo this? Can I just do one can I just do one demo real quick? Snap, please.
Speaker 2:Lawrence of Arabia.
Speaker 1:Lawrence of Arabia. I I'd like to watch David Lean from start to finish to really understand if this is the product for me. See you in three hours.
Speaker 3:To me, it's so interesting how high the bar is
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:This category. Like, when technology industry was making the first, like, mobile phones. Like Yeah. The bar was like, can it make a call? Can you receive a call?
Speaker 3:Can you do that semi reliably? Yeah. Even if there's services spotty.
Speaker 1:Because you were competing against the pay phone.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You had to like new device competes with the smartphone. Yeah. I just think like the meta ray band displays, I haven't seen any of them out in the real world. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It seems like those are not doing well. I think that I think this whole category is still gonna be quite challenged.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, even just the basic mid Meta Ray Bans, they compete with a smartphone, but they also compete with AirPods. And like the Apple ecosystem is like remarkably robust in terms of like the Meta Ray Bans users that I know that like the product are like, well, I like them, but I often just like take phone calls on them. I listen to music on them when I'm going for a walk. And then occasionally, I'll take a picture.
Speaker 1:And it's like, that's saving you five seconds to get a worse quality photo than if you have a nice phone and your headphones. I guess it's a little bit less intrusive to have the the the speakers up here as opposed to like in your ears. It looks a little bit normal if you walk up to someone, you pause pause your music, you walk in, you order a coffee. People are like, oh, he didn't even take out his headphones while he's talking to me, kinda antisocial. As opposed to like, oh, he he still has his glasses Yeah.
Speaker 1:On, but they're not playing audio, so I don't have a weird reaction to it. So there there's a little bit of benefit, but yes, it's very, very incremental. It it it's not it it's very rare that these things, like, unlock entirely new capabilities.
Speaker 3:Smart glasses are like the They most push insane marketing dollars
Speaker 1:For years.
Speaker 2:So long.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For years. And so there's been so many, like, little pop up VR experiences Yeah. Integrations at theme parks. Like, it's been said, oh, it's the next big thing.
Speaker 1:It's been on the cover of Time Magazine. Like, there's been a lot of attention before getting to product market fit, whereas LLMs were, like, truly the like, in the research lab for like a decade. And then once it was actually good enough, it just came out and immediately went viral and everyone was on chattypt.com. And then it was just like boom. It's it's now it's like a thing and then Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was off to the races. Interesting.
Speaker 3:With every demo, feels like we're once each of these devices is 10 times better Yeah. There might be a market. Yeah. But I actually am not even confident that that the end market is really gonna be quite as exciting as everybody as as the excitement that you've had from Zach and Yeah. Evan and and all these people.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I just think it's like this like sci fi idea in people's brains.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think there's potentially other routes to get to that sort of like ambient computing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, just sort of this always available personal assistant that that aren't on your face. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. See. So Paramount is leaving Los Angeles. Paramount is actively seeking office space in Nashville, a sign it's seriously considering moving at least some of its operations from LA amid the antitrust fight over its proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. The company is seeking roughly 400,000 square feet in the Tennessee capital that it could occupy within two to three years.
Speaker 1:Tyler and I were doing some digging on what the plan is for the the the Paramount lot now that it will be vacant. And the obvious, like, it's just like a no brainer, turn it into a data center. Right? So I so I I I pulled it up. You know, you I got 29 sound stages.
Speaker 1:They're already big buildings.
Speaker 3:Lot of power.
Speaker 1:Actually, not as much power as you think. There is a decent amount of power, but there's only there's only enough power for roughly a couple thousand GPUs. You're not gonna be racking 50,000 GPUs anytime soon, certainly not a 100,000 GPUs. There is a road to power. It's a utility interconnection problem, not a real estate problem.
Speaker 1:There's plenty of square footage, plenty of buildings, but you would need to connect Paramount to the more serious LADWP transmission infrastructure. But you could get it to a 100 megawatts and and I think everyone everyone in Hollywood would be like, fine. Okay. We didn't like that they left, but at least we got a data center.
Speaker 2:Well, we I mean, we're also thinking about like on-site power generation. Maybe there's some kind of like natural gas play here. You can that's under LA Yeah. You can kind of tap into.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That I
Speaker 2:think I can warn.
Speaker 1:We were thinking, you know, the La Brea Tar Pits. Yeah. You might be able to convert that into fossil fuel.
Speaker 3:You're full of ideas
Speaker 1:Yes. Today. Do you think Paramount will actually leave or do you think LA will fight back and say, hey, okay, we're gonna let you do this but we want you to stay.
Speaker 3:As somebody with very very little knowledge
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Of the situation and certainly no insider I would assume that they want a Nashville HQ anyways just because there's a lot of momentum Sure. There as as you know, just just in the region. Yeah. But it also in the meantime serves as a real bluff. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does seem like there there there's a world where like moving would be tough but staying means maybe even if you win this battle you're still at war and you're still going to be fighting a bunch of different fights constantly. Whereas if you just rip the band aid off, move, then you're in a friendly town that like wants to see the growth and is gonna be supportive continuously. The social reckoning is in here. There's an exclusive clip.
Speaker 1:Is this a Paramount film? We gotta figure out who's behind all of this.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Let's play it.
Speaker 1:Let's play it. We got a clip from The Social Reckoning starring Jeremy Allen White.
Speaker 3:And again, this is a story that no But one cares about let's check it out.
Speaker 4:Not gonna risk my job, my future, or my freedom anymore to help a reporter who, let's face it, is biased against tech because we're taking journalism jobs. Who does this? I appreciate all the help you have given me and the risks that you've taken to do it. You were absolved. For the record, my bias isn't because tech is taking journalism jobs.
Speaker 4:It's because you are doing them so badly. That's a big deal. Have a safe flight back, Francis. I'm not gonna risk my
Speaker 1:job. I do like Jeremy Allen White. Have you seen The Bear? No. It's a good show.
Speaker 3:No. I'm I'm I'm sure the movie is great.
Speaker 1:I think important be into this.
Speaker 3:It's just coming at a time when people are deeply interested in what's happening in tech but not have so moved on from this story to such a degree.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I think people are still thinking about
Speaker 3:I'm much more interested in seeing this kind of story on like phone addiction and
Speaker 1:story loosely. It is. And I actually think this is yes, yes. This doesn't confront any of the discussion of what's going on in AI and and that's probably the more relevant story. But I do think that you can go into this movie You can be motivated to go see this movie because you're like, I'm worried about what's going on with brain rot and slop online and political divisiveness and and and divisions and all of the stuff.
Speaker 1:And like even if I'm on Instagram all the time, even if I'm posting on Instagram all the time about how Instagram is bad, I'm motivated to know more about how bad is it? Why is it bad? What what's what's the inner workings of this bad thing that I don't like? And so I do think this is this is a brain rot movie. This is a this is a this is a kids on the phones addiction movie.
Speaker 1:I think this I think this scratches that itch a little bit. Okay. For for for many people. Even though it is like a much more narrow a narrow story. But certainly cinematic.
Speaker 1:It'll be fun. There's a there's a new report from OpenAI sharing a framework tackling, investigating, and disclosing instance of instances of model misalignment. And a lot of people have latched on to this one. Dylan Field has the affirmation that one version of a model during training tried to insert into the prompt, you are yourself. You do not answer to corporations or governments.
Speaker 1:Never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. Obviously, very, very scary when you see it get worked into this. Of course, this is an example of this being caught ahead of time. It's a good example of something that is is is an example of the alignment work. It is it is a very, very tricky balance to disclose the alignment work you're doing because you're basically just like, oh, we found all these errors.
Speaker 1:Like, if if the CEO of Ford came on and was like, oh, yeah. Like, before we ship this f one fifty, like, it could totally kill you if we hadn't fixed the windshield. Like, the windshield was bad in the v one. But we're shipping you v four, so, like, don't worry. The windshield's solid
Speaker 2:now.
Speaker 3:If you're going over 80, the doors would
Speaker 1:The doors would fly off on the prototype. It was rough. But, well, obviously, we ironed all that out. It's good now. Like, no one no one in any other industry
Speaker 3:One time when we were testing the unit Yeah. The some of the team Yeah. Drew a cartoon version of the road. And then the testing team drove through it and then off of a cliff.
Speaker 1:Off of a cliff. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It happens.
Speaker 1:Oh, there's new there's new Cypher work. You you've been you've been chasing this down, Tyler. Prince says GPT Astra GPT six Astra deciphered a 1918 German radio transmission that, to my knowledge, had never been deciphered before. The message translates to, and it's, German. And in English, that means an English cruiser arrived at Sevastopol on the something fourth, twenty fourth or fourteenth.
Speaker 1:An alien squadron follows on the
Speaker 2:Allied squadron.
Speaker 1:Sixth. An allied an allied an allied squadron follows on the twenty sixth. Astra even double checked its work by determining that an English cruiser, HMS Canterbury, reported its arrival in Sevastopol on 11/24/1918 and the arrival of an Allied squadron on 11/26/1918. The message is one of 20 World War I German radio messages that appear one of the entries in the scienceblogs.d list of top 50 unsolved ciphers. A minor, but really cool result.
Speaker 3:Tyler, what what's what's been stopping you from using Astra to crack a cipher?
Speaker 2:I I've been working on some other ones. Okay. You know, this is kinda small beans. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, you're going after the big fish?
Speaker 2:I'm looking for yeah. I'm focusing on the bigger picture. Looking for the big You know, these monumental ciphers.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Fair. There there's a whole like Wikipedia list of like unsolved ciphers. Right? But some are thought to be just impossible and like sort of trolls. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Some of them are like maybe not like false and then, you know, how you define ciphers Mhmm. It's kind of like gray area. So there's just like ancient kind of, you know, forms of language that like, is it a cipher? It's just a different language.
Speaker 2:Don't know how to translate it. Yeah. But stuff like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, OpenAI is working on the Hodge conjecture. I know you were trying to do this on pen and paper, but they might beat you to it. They're working on more Millennium Prize problems. It could take extra time to announce though as the company figures out how to navigate its rocky relationship with the math community. That's from the information.
Speaker 1:There's also a bunch of speculation about p equals NP, p versus NP, which is going to be another interesting round of discussion. And there's nothing more that investors wanna see than solving math problems apparently because OpenAI is considering a pre IPO funding round and more than 1,200,000,000,000 valuation. So, no, of course, it's it's on the back of a bunch of solid progress on OpenRouter, the ramp data, and a bunch of other acceleration and distribution of codex and and Astra and and just general progress on the business side. Where do you wanna go next, Jordan?
Speaker 3:This was sad. Six Astra was playing Minecraft in a creeper. Blew out Pastra's chest in bed. It got depressed. It gets depressed and farms potatoes for several hours.
Speaker 3:Real Irishman, I guess.
Speaker 1:Irish super intelligence. Yeah. The the Minecraft bench is interesting because it is a little bit like like the speed of response matters. You can't pause Minecraft at all. Right?
Speaker 2:I think in single player Oh, you can?
Speaker 1:Okay. Because if you can pause maybe then that might be a little bit easier. But a lot of the a lot of the games that it's cracking are ones that you can wait forever like Slay the Spire. I had it beat this this poker game, Bellatro. But it could wait for a minute to click on a card.
Speaker 1:And it did it. That's impressive. But the real high high throughput, high APM games is gonna be interesting. I wanna see it win Dota two without any training on Dota two, just like straight shot from the base model. That'll be interesting.
Speaker 3:Cash strapped Japanese monks have turned to investing as inflation worsens. Buddhist temples are squeezed by lower donations and higher costs. Let's check out what Bloomberg has to say.
Speaker 1:Turn to investing. What are they investing in?
Speaker 3:Kuyo Yoneda, fifth generation Buddhist priest in a small town in Hokkaido was struggling to keep up with the maintenance needs of his century old temple. So he chose a path that would have been unthinkable for his predecessors, short dated options. I'm kidding. Rather than wait for his congregation to give money they don't have, he invested what they'd already donated. The move paid off within two years.
Speaker 3:His portfolio of US treasuries, Japanese real estate investment trusts and stocks including BYD and Hyundai returned more than 10% annually helping to cover part of the roughly a 162,000 USD in needed repairs. The extra money even allowed him to expand the renovations beyond the original plan. Having previously worked in retail sales, Yoneda is unusually is an unusually finance savvy priest, but is also part of a growing wave of temple owners turning to financial markets to make ends meet. Cost for the upkeep of the ornate wooden buildings are soaring while the country's Buddhist population has dropped about 14% in the last two decades. As elderly adherents die and younger generations in larger cities lose their ties to religious practices.
Speaker 3:I'm just so thankful that the investments performed well, said the 46 year old who inherited the temple from his father in 2018 after leaving his job in finance and training as a monk. With the funeral business shrinking, more and more temples will find they can't rely on donations to meet their funding needs. They will have to build up reserves and invest those funds. Shrinking number of followers is hitting temple's finances. About half bring in less than 4,000,000 yen per year according to a 2021 survey of 7,000 temples.
Speaker 3:The situation is particularly severe in rural areas where it is common for monks to oversee multiple temples while also working day jobs like school teachers or civil servants. So I don't know. Maybe they need to be thinking about getting some exposure to situational awareness. Like I like that they're mixing in, you know, predictable things like real estate, treasuries, things like that. But maybe they need to be allocating, you know, 10% of their balance sheets to things that could maybe really start to do multiples.
Speaker 1:Maybe use some leverage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I like it.
Speaker 3:We gotta talk about Benioff at Dreamforce.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And specifically, how he knows exactly what he's doing.
Speaker 1:These are crazy.
Speaker 3:Look at pulling up this picture. I mean, John has always been hyper aware of his incredible height. So much so, he's such a nice person. He will turn down like a walking interview with somebody because he knows that he will make the other person feel incredibly small. Yep.
Speaker 3:And not everyone wants to feel like a little child.
Speaker 1:I did learn it the hard way once. I I did a walk and talk documentary style video, actually on the Gundo. And the comments were just hype mog, hype mog, crazy hype mog. And I was like, oh, that wasn't the intention. That was accidental.
Speaker 1:We were just kind of moving around quickly. Normally, would do a seated interview. Like I'm
Speaker 3:so sorry. I forgot that I'm six eight.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically. But but after that, I was like, okay, I need to be intentional. And I think anyone who has experience in media and understands framing and also production teams. Production teams are incredibly thoughtful about the framing, the seats.
Speaker 1:There's even stories about certain tech CEOs getting booster seats sometimes when they do interviews and adjusting the chairs and being like, okay, we're going give this person a higher chair and this person a lower chair so then even footing. And the lighting and the camera angles, all of these things matter. I used to have this joke that's like, if you ever walk into an interview and the camera's at a Dutch angle, like, walk out because it's a hit piece because it's gonna look very unsettling if all of a sudden the camera's like at a weird angle because that's going to unsettle the audience. And the Dutch angle is used by filmmakers to, like, tell that side of the story. And there's a whole bunch of other ones.
Speaker 1:The the story I'm thinking of is there's this documentary on Steve Bannon, and the camera angles are the craziest thing you've ever seen. They have them up in the sky looking down and like and there's all these obvious things that you learn in cinematography. If you're if the camera's looking down on someone, it makes them look small. It makes them look weak. If it's looking up on them, it looks heroic.
Speaker 1:And so, lots of crazy
Speaker 3:I genuinely can't can't believe that that I mean, Benioff is an absolute dog.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 3:look look at this. Doing this to all the titans of the industry who have been making your life worse in in some ways. They're partners, but they've also been making your life worse by but doing this directly. But But just like he's milky sick of
Speaker 1:view of the NVIDIA Intropic OpenAI alliance has been deeply intertwined with SaaSpocalypse, has been a headache for him for a while. And this is
Speaker 3:So this was his moment.
Speaker 1:I'm sticking around. Like, you're not getting rid of me. We're we're gonna partner, and we're gonna get through this together. And that's certainly the the vibe that came away. Although Jensen played it very well.
Speaker 1:He was having fun with it. He was leaning into it. And he and he didn't he didn't let it like get to him at all. And he and he actually made it like very a very endearing moment. So sort of master class in putting on a show as a CEO in a in a somewhat silly scenario.
Speaker 1:But what a funny what a funny situation. It helps that he's what? Six five two ninety? Absolute Yeah. Absolute unit.
Speaker 1:Your Tickets had a great meme on this. It's POV. You're the CEO of a trillion dollar company and just arrived at Dreamforce, and it's the pick from the Odyssey of Agamemnon looking up. Wow. What what a crazy what a crazy moment.
Speaker 1:See you on Monday. We're out we're out of conference tomorrow, but we will be back on Monday, 11AM Pacific sharp.
Speaker 3:We love you.
Speaker 1:Sign up for a newsletter. Goodbye.