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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.
Yeah. This weekend, every time I would refresh, it would be, you can see everything takes. Everyone had all these different opinions and takes. The one that stuck out to me was that there's this... There's a little bit of a, like, you you watch the movie and most people came away thinking more positively of Elizabeth Holmes being like, oh, maybe she wasn't...
Speaker 1:Maybe she's not that bad. Maybe there's more to the story. Maybe manipulated. She seems to be manipulated multiple times potentially. Like, maybe maybe she's more of a...
Speaker 2:Some people might be like, she's bad, but may... She'd probably be nice to me if I interacted with her.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. A little bit of that. There's, like, there's some sort of, like, suspicion that I feel some people in Silicon Valley are having where it's like, oh, it's just like the fake it till you make it thing. It's, you know, it's not that big of a deal.
Speaker 1:I just can't stop thinking about, like, it seems like she's just a bad founder. Like, put aside the fraud. Like, it just seems like like total slop in terms of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos two point o.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:And the whole time, I was, like, almost yelling at the movie screen because she taught the way she describes Theranos is like this box and, like, it's in the cloud. It's just like it's it's so it's so unaware of the medical device industry, which is so frustrating to me because she she's making this point where it's like, we've been... We have an invention, and our invention allows you to test blood for things. And, like, we test all this stuff. And she's making it sound like it's, like, magical science.
Speaker 1:And it's like, I looked it up. There have been 60 plus companies since Theranos started that sold for over a $100,000,000 in that category. It's like it's like someone coming to you and being like, I have a magical... I... We we invented something.
Speaker 1:It takes information and stores it on a database that you can access through a website. It's like... So you make a SaaS product. Literally, hundreds of people make those. And there are thousands of people that work in the medical device industry, and they've made boxes that look kind of like a Theranos box, and it runs a test.
Speaker 1:And then And
Speaker 2:they don't go to prison for ten years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They don't go to prison. And she never just says, like, look. This stuff happens all the time. It's not crazy that I'm gonna be able to build a box that tests for something.
Speaker 1:Like, this happens all the time. Instead, it's like it's like, I'm the only one that could possibly do this, which is so weird. It's such a bad frame to not to not just admit what's what's really happening on the field, which is that box... Diagnostic boxes get built and sold every few years for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You could just do that. But instead, it has to be this pie in the sky nonsense, and it really, really frustrates me, as you can probably tell. Nikita Beer broke down a little bit of this concept. He said one of the things that hasn't been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes, she was created in the era of the TED Talk entrepreneur, and this is exactly what I was picking up on. So, 2011 and 2015, after the release of The Social Network, there was an entire apparatus built around child prodigies, college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations.
Speaker 1:I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as faking it till you make it, but Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED Talk era came to an end, when people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook. And in the most scrutinized field, there is medical technology.
Speaker 1:When people ask how far she got so far, it is largely explained by the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up. And so, there's other things, which is that this is strictly regulated by the FDA. So, if you're a founder of a medical device company, like, what you are going for is FDA authorization. That's marketing authorization.
Speaker 1:That's literally the ability to sell the product. It's not illegal to build a medical device. It's illegal to sell it, to market it. And so that also includes, like, you can't... You typically can't go on podcasts and and media and say, oh, yes.
Speaker 1:We have this thing that does this thing. We have to say, oh, we're working on this progress. Like, we can't say that it actually works because we haven't been approved to say that by the FDA. Spoiler alert. Don't wanna hear spoilers.
Speaker 1:Just turn... Leave the stream going, but just turn the audio down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we'll just Yeah. Talk away.
Speaker 1:What spoiler do you wanna talk about?
Speaker 2:So Billy does this side deal
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To get a cut of profit on the back end of the movie. You would probably know what what that's exactly called. Yeah. Points on the
Speaker 1:back end.
Speaker 2:Points on the back end. So he does this thing.
Speaker 1:Incredibly good.
Speaker 2:And then and then later, after the movie's totally been Yeah. Like, he decides, oh, it's gonna look pretty bad. Backs out. Yep. Right?
Speaker 2:Damage has already been done. Right? Totally. Like, he looks he looks... Yeah.
Speaker 2:He doesn't look great.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Elizabeth is trying to say, like, oh, I didn't I don't really know much about the details. So one thing, like, damage was already done and now the movie is a massive hit and it's gonna be... Continue to be a massive hit. It seems like it'll be like a a a cult classic. And I I I can't imagine being 60 years old being like, I'm gonna turn on some Nathan Fielder.
Speaker 2:Just Yeah. Take me back to the good old days. But the funny thing is, do you think that Billy... Do you think it made sense for him to do the side deal because she has... She claimed in the show she has hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution to pay.
Speaker 2:So, of course, she wouldn't wanna make... Even if she she wanted to make money on it, she wouldn't get any benefit of it. So she would wanna route it through Billy.
Speaker 1:It's a good question. There's some ambiguity over whether or not they're married. I couldn't get to the bottom of this, but I think they might not be legally married. In which case, it would make sense for him to get those profits and then use that for their kids and their family, but then it doesn't flow to her bank account, which immediately gets grabbed by the investors.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying. I think
Speaker 1:you're... I I I think you might be onto something there.
Speaker 2:She gets a lot of the benefit in that sort of funding.
Speaker 1:Yes. And and and so is your point that if she's in on the deal sitting there being like, want to get paid, but just pay to Billie's account, don't pay to... That's more tricky from a restitution perspective?
Speaker 2:Totally. I imagine I imagine a judge would
Speaker 1:be That's an interesting wrinkle. I hadn't thought of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Judge would be like, yeah. You're earning money. I don't care. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They don't care
Speaker 2:that you did it. Billie has to, like, go behind her back and make it really public that she's...
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That he's going behind her back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good point. Good point. So, I mean, the the the the wildest part about the whole you can see everything Theranos thing is that, one, I've talked to Billy on the phone about the Twitter that he was running and all that stuff, answered all those questions. Nothing that really was different than what you saw in the movie, but he sort of gave me the pitch for Theranos two point o.
Speaker 1:And I was, like, pushing back, being like, so you should go for, like, a specific diagnostic. Go for... Like, do this. Like, I have a buddy who ran this exact playbook, made $400,000,000 in a very short amount of time. Like, this is tractable.
Speaker 1:And then he was like Wait.
Speaker 2:When did you have this conversation?
Speaker 1:I talked to him, like, last year. And so my pitch was... I said, look. If we're gonna take this Elizabeth Holmes redemption arc seriously, I wanna see some great calls about biotech because this is sort of what's happened with other individuals who have been rehabilitated. From a branding perspective, my point that I posted about was like, I want to see Elizabeth Holmes give an incredible take about peptides and how that market will evolve and then watch that happen and be like, oh, wow.
Speaker 1:She was early. I want her to be a good biotech analyst. I want her to be smart on the science. I want her to
Speaker 2:talk about that. Movie, though, I can't remember a single point where she was locked in on anything science related.
Speaker 1:I completely agree.
Speaker 2:It was she was just... It was Billy
Speaker 1:That's the point.
Speaker 2:Learning about mitochondria.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's my point. Like like, if if if a genius scientist goes to jail wrongfully, I would assume that they continue reading science literature and that they come up with interesting theses around
Speaker 2:simple trick that the medical industry hates.
Speaker 1:You can actually do that. That happens. And and I want to... I want Elizabeth Holmes to throw down, give me your biotech 2027. Give me your AI 2027 thesis.
Speaker 1:Let's watch it play out if you're right.
Speaker 2:At the very least, a market map.
Speaker 1:At the very least, a market map.
Speaker 2:Give us...
Speaker 1:Show me that you understand what Roche offers to list.
Speaker 2:A tier A
Speaker 1:A tier list of of of biotech acquisitions in the medical device space. Yeah. Show me you're a student of the industry you're operating in. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Watching watching Nathan have that light bulb moment where they're pitching him Theranos two point o
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And them not realizing that people have been using the phrase Theranos two point o to describe, like, massive Yeah. Like Yeah. Things that they perceive might be massive Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great. I... Yeah. I I I just also...
Speaker 1:When I when I got to YC in 2018, my visiting partner was Diego Ray, cofounder of GeneWeave, who actually built and sold a real diagnostics box, a a medical device, and it was basically just a lab testing machine, Previously, size of a dishwasher at a lab down the street. You shrink it down to the size of a box, and you put it at the actual hospital, and then the hospital can test for a specific thing. They were testing for antibiotic resistant bacteria. They developed a a chemistry. It's not rocket science.
Speaker 1:Like, it is hard science, but, like, it's not magic. It's not future sci fi magic. And if you can get that data in an hour as opposed to two days, everything in the hospital is just going to move a little bit smoother, and people are going to be a little bit healthier. And you're going sell your company for $425,000,000 which is exactly what happened. They raised $25,000,000 It was a great outcome for founders, employees.
Speaker 1:Roche eventually got the product approved by FDA. And so in 2019, it got authorized for the COBOS VivoDx MRSA test, which is, like, not gonna be on the stage at TED anytime soon, but it should be. It's, like, real science, and it actually moved the needle forward.
Speaker 2:That being said, I came away from the movie, right, feeling like, okay, Sunny had done some side deal and got No. Way No. No. Sunny Balwani, the other co founder. I...
Speaker 2:My impression was that he was getting way less jail time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Elizabeth...
Speaker 2:It's been like...... Jail for, like, eleven years. Yeah. It it seemed like Sunny... They were positioning it as, like, they...
Speaker 2:Sunny was able to pin it on her. Yeah. He got out. Yeah. Or at least he got a a reduced sentence.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whatever. And you told me afterwards, Sunny is in prison for, like, twelve years or he had Yeah. A
Speaker 1:It's about a year long.
Speaker 2:Twelve years, eleven months was was his sentencing. Elizabeth got a ten year sentence
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Reduced originally from eleven years and three months. Yeah. According to the Internet, Sonny didn't sell secondary either.
Speaker 1:I know. That's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:No. None of them... They both go down with the ship. They both don't make money.
Speaker 1:Dropping moment for me. I was, like, least shrewd person in the world potentially. No secondary selling. 11,000,000,000? Doing
Speaker 2:fraud purely for the
Speaker 1:love of
Speaker 2:game. Game?
Speaker 1:What are you doing? What are you doing? And it's not like I came away being like, it wasn't a fraud. Like, it was. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was very clear that, like, everyone there, Sunny, her, they knew it didn't work.
Speaker 2:They knew that they
Speaker 1:didn't have the revenue, the profits.
Speaker 2:That's really the good Ted entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That goes
Speaker 2:to prison For the love of the game. For the love of the game.
Speaker 1:Insane.
Speaker 2:Just just just for the vision.
Speaker 1:If you do wanna sell secondary, we... There's one one neat trick. One neat trick. This is a new thing. So if you're a founder and you wanna sell 10,000,000 a secondary, $100,000,000 a secondary, you don't want it to be a negative signal.
Speaker 1:Here's what you do. Before... So you've you've you've grown your company to the point where you're valued in the billions. You don't wanna sell secondary because everyone will be like, oh, he's, like, selling out. She's selling out.
Speaker 1:Like, that's not good. That's not a good sign. So what you do is you take out an immense amount of debt. So you get, like, a $100,000,000 of debt. Yep.
Speaker 1:Then you sell the secondary, sell another 100,000,000 of secondary, pay off the debt, and then you can tell everyone, look, I just sold secondary to pay off my debt, my personal debt.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And everyone assumes it's like, oh,
Speaker 1:if need credit card. Like, yeah. Yeah. They think it's credit card debt. They don't realize that it was a equity backed $100,000,000 line of credit from a major financial institution.
Speaker 1:You don't need to clarify that part, but you can still get away with a 100 mil out of the gate. It's possible.
Speaker 2:I wonder if anyone is
Speaker 1:doing that. It might be happening. Who knows? Who knows? Anyway,
Speaker 2:what's semiannual? Raised its 2027 data center capacity forecast from 43 to gigawatts.
Speaker 1:50 gigawatts. Wow. 50 gigawatts. 50 gigawatts. That's a lot.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of a lot of compute. And people are going back and forth on this. Right? Did Gerstner say it was too much? Something like that?
Speaker 1:It seems like semi analysis has the data and has been pulling together a whole bunch of a whole bunch of
Speaker 2:The semi analysis said stop. So we looked at the data.
Speaker 1:They looked at the satellite photos. I mean, a lot of these things, like, they were papered a long
Speaker 2:time ago. Even
Speaker 1:if the market's, like, having a hiccup right now, that's not gonna stop people from actually pulling out of
Speaker 2:the bill. Sent you this I sent you this What'd send? This morning
Speaker 1:What'd you send?
Speaker 2:From RevCap Okay. Which is semi analysis saying if you're worried about demand Yeah. ARR, don't be, because there's gonna be even more supply than you realize. Of course, semi analysis is also saying that that, they have some of the most bullish forecasts for the labs, But it's funny that in the midst of, like, everyone being worried about ARR growth Yep. Over the last two weeks, that semi analysis is coming out and saying, don't worry.
Speaker 2:There's an obscene amount of supply coming online within the next twelve months.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I believe them on supply. That seems very cut and dry.
Speaker 1:I don't think anyone has a stronger read on what's actually getting built than them. I think if you look at the satellite photos and you look at the deals that have already been inked, that even though, oh, the NASDAQ sold off 5% last week, like that's not enough to be like, okay, pack up the dump trucks, we're not building this thing. Like maybe in months, if things continue to get bad and the rates go up, some projects will be delayed or stalled or deals will get unwound. But right now, it's not that it's full speed ahead, it's just like it's a train. You can't slow it down that quickly.
Speaker 1:It's just going to keep going. On the demand side, I feel like the agentic stuff, the personal agentic stuff is going to be high demand for compute. I'm less clear on what the willingness to pay will be. How many people will be willing to pay the equivalent of $1,000 a year for inference related to their semi personal prosumer life shopping and all the little agentic features? Now, think the tech is incredible.
Speaker 1:I've been using Dot a ton, and I think having an agent that just runs in the background and just tries to go find little opportunities for you is amazing. It just catches things in my email that I never would have gone through or taken the time to do, and it just sends me a little message being like, hey. Like, you asked for this and you should follow-up because, like, they they said that they would do it.
Speaker 2:You said to cancel your roadster order too. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just like little little things like that. It it...
Speaker 1:It's it's just a better interface. Like, I love I love interacting with the open web through an LLM. It's amazing. No cookie pop ups. No ads.
Speaker 1:Like, it's truly, like, the best consumer experience. There's a lot of controversial stuff downstream of that. But, like, in turn, as a consumer, if I'm trying to learn about something, instead of having, like, 25 tabs open where I have to accept cookies 25 times, make sure I'm logged into 25 different things and, like, scroll, find the fact, it's so much better to just have it, oh, put it all together with the exact quotes. I can click out to the link if I need to. And that's starting to happen in the personal agent space.
Speaker 1:The question is like, how do you get the money from people? Is it the ads? Is it the interchange? Like, there's that sort of bearish take that even that the agentic commerce market, if you assign all these take rates, it's like a $40,000,000,000 market or something like that. It's, not big enough to justify.
Speaker 2:No. I think what needs to happen is something closer to going from automating tasks to automating certain roles or or extending the capabilities of people. Right? Because we're in this era of of... Obviously, there's a a viral clip going on over the last twenty four hours talking about somebody's having a twenty six hour day
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because they need to stay up. She's changing a manipulating time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because they need to be online and available to keep their agents
Speaker 1:Are you saying productive? Are you saying she's crazy?
Speaker 2:I'm I'm not saying.
Speaker 1:Because she's not crazy.
Speaker 2:You're crazy.
Speaker 1:You're crazy for thinking that it takes twenty four hours to complete a full day.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And not twenty six.
Speaker 2:But, anyways, it's like the next leg up will probably be
Speaker 1:She's a special case. She's an entrepreneur. Yeah. The question is, like, for the 90% of Americans that aren't in
Speaker 2:But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing that one... We're seeing that a very, very small number of companies are driving all of the adoption. And so there's probably, not all the adoption, but but a massive amount of it. And so there's another leg up there just in...
Speaker 2:With the capabilities increase. Mhmm. And then what you're saying is, like, the other 99% of businesses, how are they gonna be... How is their spending gonna ramp? Will it ramp beyond Yeah.
Speaker 2:The, you $20,102 $100 a month subscription?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the business side, like, Jensen take of, like, a software engineer who makes 300 k should also get 300 k in tokens or something. Like, that seems to be happening, basically. It's like, yeah, a software engineer can deploy AI very efficiently and at a high ROI.
Speaker 1:It is less clear for a marketer or for a salesperson. It's like, okay, what should your actual token, your inference budget be if you gave a sales rep $50,000 a month in in inference? Like, is there something that they could do with the best models to actually get... Generate a $100,000 in value that they wouldn't have otherwise? Like like, those are the economic equations that happen across the business.
Speaker 1:I'm talking more on the personal side, the consumer side. Like, people are using the LLMs
Speaker 2:that No. And I'm I'm just saying we don't pay for all this cap. Like, the CapEx is not gonna be paid for
Speaker 1:consumers. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. So you're saying that's not...
Speaker 1:That that is not the leg up that needs to happen. It has to be diffusion into the enterprise and b to b beyond what it is. It has to it has to 10 x. So so, like, the the small company that has, know, basically everyone on a $200 a month plan, and they're maybe spending a $100,000 on maybe 10 mil top line, they need to go to a million dollars in France a year even though they're at a... Even though they're a $10,000,000 business.
Speaker 1:Maybe they go to 15,000,000 of of top line.
Speaker 2:Speaking of $1,000,000 budgets
Speaker 1:Which... What we got?
Speaker 2:Brett Adcock launched Hark, which is something like a Muse or an Instinct or or a Dots. And they gave away or tried to give away a million dollars of pizza. I I believe it was on Friday. Mhmm. You just had to download an order from the Hark app.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I don't know that it went well. I think
Speaker 1:The the the summary we have here is an app called Hark tried to do a pizza giveaway, but it quickly turned into a PR disaster. That's the story.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean, clearly, they got a ton of people to download the app. Like, I think it wasn't working.
Speaker 1:People just don't wanna give them the data because it needs
Speaker 2:to be able We're giving them the data. You have to give them
Speaker 1:Google Drive files? Yes. In order to get this pizza, I will need to edit your tax return.
Speaker 2:See, edit, download, and permanently See, delete all of edit, create, and delete all of your Google Sheets spreadsheets. See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access. Read, compose, and send emails from your Gmail account. Yeah. So that's download your organization's workplace directory.
Speaker 2:I don't know if all these were were required.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sometimes you can just not check those and still get access. It's when you download an app on the iOS app store, you can just say, like, no thanks. I don't want any notifications.
Speaker 2:Armand tried to get a free pizza and had some issues and so used the app to submit a formal complaint to the FTC. Dude, actually... That's annoying. And I just tried again with no luck. I can file with the FTC, but a giveaway that's been flaky for a few minutes on launch night isn't something they'll act on.
Speaker 2:I'd rather report it straight to Hark's team now with all the details so they can fix it. Want me to send that? No. File a complaint with the federal government. It submits FTC complaint about a Hark pizza promotion.
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 2:great. On 10/16/2026, Hark publicly advertised a $1,000,000 free pizza giveaway promoted on x and stated users could claim it by typing order a free pizza in the in the Hark app. Crazy. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm so curious why why Brett didn't just do Hark as part of figure because the whole, like,
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:It it it doesn't make any sense to me other than you wanted a fresh cap table that could raise...
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, like, Elon kinda created the playbook. Right? X AI was a separate thing. You raise fresh funds.
Speaker 1:You get... It's a way... It it... It's... It would be hard for SpaceX to go to a top AI scientist and say, we're gonna give you $5,000,000,000 of equity.
Speaker 1:Now Zuck has kind of broken that glass and, like, been like, I'm just gonna do it. But but the way you get the way you get, you know, the multi billion dollar outcome is you give a cofounder role of a new company and then you acquire them in. Like... So I think I think it's probably that. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there another...
Speaker 2:The only thing is Elon had, you know, sold a lot of cars and launched a lot of rockets Totally. Prior to to doing that. And so I think it's the kind of thing that that makes more sense
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In the fullness of time.
Speaker 1:Traffic staff expect AI to do 75% of their work by 2030 and GDP growth to reach 17.1%. Now, did they specify if this is real GDP growth? Because they just said GDP growth because what if inflation is at, like, 40%? That would be the equivalent of negative 23% real GDP growth. You've got to clarify these things if you're going to be asking the tough questions.
Speaker 1:But let's assume they went with real GDP growth. You think that's low? You think that's high? There's someone at Anthropic who said it would be 28%. I like that.
Speaker 1:The lowest was 6%. Basically, no one there thinks that GDP growth is going to be at normal levels. Everyone is expecting a boom within the building. Agree? Disagree?
Speaker 2:Bullish. Bullish. Drinking the Kool Aid.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Just out of the FOMC. The FOMC, of course, thinks GDP growth will be 2%. That's the government suit. Anthropic staff are obviously like the most bullish.
Speaker 1:Like, they are at 17.1% GDP growth. Reminder, America grows 2%, typically. They're saying 17%. Huge economic explosion, unlike anything we've ever seen in America. Absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 1:If we grow at 17%, like, it is so positive sum. There's so much to go around. You can do everything, basically. You can build new roads. You can give people health care.
Speaker 1:Like, you you... Like, everything just solves itself because a rising tide lifts all boats.
Speaker 2:Where would you really put it, though?
Speaker 1:I'd want... I I... I'd put it at at 200% GDP growth.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I wanna be tripling every year. Yeah. Predict what you want to happen. Manifesting. This is manifestation.
Speaker 1:I wanna manifest it. Site visitors said 12.5. Again, staggeringly high. But interesting, US adults predict 5.4% just broadly, which is, again, way above where we've been. So, like, everyone is bullish.
Speaker 2:The American mind must be said.
Speaker 1:Spore doesn't buy it. Spore says this is borderline mental illness. I'm sorry. But 20% GDP growth in 2030 is a common belief in anthropic. What are these people smoking?
Speaker 1:How does one get so divorced from now?
Speaker 2:They're smoking cigarettes. Because Smoking cigarettes. Lung cancer will be solved.
Speaker 1:Will be solved. That was reported from... We talked about this a little bit, but that was reported from Trumpsankar and has not been widely confirmed beyond his anecdote that he shared, I believe, on Bloomberg or CNBC. But...
Speaker 2:I don't think this is I don't think this is unique to anthropic. Yeah. I think it... Like, clearly, the average American is already insanely bullish.
Speaker 1:You're looking... It's
Speaker 2:already more than 2,005 go to the labs, anybody who, like, really truly believes in this current revolution, and and that probably is, like, an average Yeah. Yeah. Across the field.
Speaker 1:There was a funny there was a funny exchange, in the Tyler Cowen, Dorekesh Patel interview on Interesting Times. He was guest hosting for the the now departed... Not passed away, but he'll... Ross Douthat laugh for, I think, CBS and the free press or something like that. But Tyler Cowen and Dwarkash Patel were going back and forth about AI.
Speaker 1:And Tyler asks Dwarkash, like, when when do you think I'll walk into a Walmart and see a product that is the product of artificial intelligence? And Duarkesh is like, oh, it's really hard to say. Like, I think that there will be a real effect on the economy soon, 2028. I'm very I'm very bullish on this change in the economy, but I I I I just... I can't predict how it'll be.
Speaker 1:And I was like, there's already AI slop beach towels in Walmart. Like, you can go into Walmart and get AI products now. Like, there's so many, like, pool floaty that looks like a tank that was sold on TikTok via, like, you know, AI video slop.
Speaker 2:We have signs. Happening. We have signs of signs.
Speaker 1:Yes. Have signs of signs. Like like, the AI slop economy is thriving right now. But the but the AI slop is being sold. And, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, the the San Francisco tech people, they need to touch grass.
Speaker 1:I think if they wanna get in touch, they need to touch the gas pedal of a Lamborghini Countach or Lamborghini Huracan in Miami. You got to get into the mind of the the core seller, the drop shipper to understand how AI is changing the real economy because that crew is selling AI slop. It's happening. Like, there is definitely AI, AI instantiated products up and down the stack all over Facebook, Instagram reels, TikTok. This stuff's flying off the shelf.
Speaker 2:And Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, says the games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they've cost several times more to make than they'd earn back, will soon become possible as will the game the game's developers wanted to build, but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like that he is taking the the the the white pill on AI. Three blue one brown also put out a big... He's a math YouTuber. Does these incredible video explainers, these motion graphic explainers of difficult math concepts.
Speaker 1:And he put out a video saying, like, it is the best time to go into math, very, very optimistic about it. And so, obviously, very divided organizations, but I love that Tim Sweeney went went back and forth. And as I saw another I saw another post by him talking about, like, look. I had to migrate from c to c plus plus from two d to three d. Like, I've I've been through so many tech migrations.
Speaker 1:This is another one. I'm very excited for it. And he'll he'll he'll just adapt. He'll improvise, adapt, overcome. If people are are rolling their own, you know, Fortnite clone in a web browser decompiled or whatever, I'm sure he's gonna find a way to participate in the upside in some way because he is innovative and flexible.
Speaker 1:What about this Poppi deal? Have you have you seen this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's really quite funny because everyone's trying to use it as an opportunity to try to dunk when it's like they sold their company for 1,900,000,000. Yeah. And... So wait.
Speaker 2:Here.
Speaker 1:Let let let set the table. So Poppi is a beverage brand. It's a soda... Probiotic soda company sold to Pepsi for $2,200,000,000. 300,000,000 of that 2,200,000,000 was an earn out.
Speaker 1:So they got 1,900,000,000 on the day the deal closed and then 300,000,000 waiting for milestones. Now Pepsi announced that instead of paying 300,000,000 based on the performance of the brand, they will only be paying 12,000,000. And the dunk is like, oh, that stings. They didn't get their earn out. But, yeah, they got $1.9120000000 dollars.
Speaker 1:Like, it's still an incredible amount of money. And people are like, yeah. Like, here's how you negotiate an earn out. It's like, they seem like they already negotiated it. Like, they negotiated it really well.
Speaker 1:The the the disaster would have been if the numbers were reversed. 300,000,000 for the for the company and 1.9 in earn out. And if they didn't get that or not, it would be... It would seriously change the economics. But it seems like they got 90% of the deal value.
Speaker 1:Still, pretty good outcome for the founders of Poppi.
Speaker 2:Amazing outcome. But,
Speaker 1:yeah, Sean Frank chimes in and says, a quarter is what you should expect in an earnout most of the time right off that second that second bite to zero. You shouldn't go into one of these deals expecting to get the full earnout because companies have lots of resources. They control the budget, the distribution, all the the success or failure. You're no longer in charge. You're no longer the master of your own destiny.
Speaker 1:And so, if you put all the chips with them, they might they might bet them differently than you would expect to. Thank you for tuning in to TBPN. Leave us
Speaker 2:five stars on Apple.
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Speaker 2:Time to close out.
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