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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.
Good, great show for you today, folks. It's Friday, Friday, May 22. We had our Wall Street Journal stolen from us. We only have the Financial Times today. But we're making do because we have a digital subscription as well.
Speaker 1:And we're gonna take you through America's IPO boom. So three key stories that broke since we last spoke a mere twenty one hours ago, since we podcast for three hours, and then we come back twenty one hours later.
Speaker 2:We do it again.
Speaker 1:We do it again. Yesterday, Politico reported that David Sacks made an eleventh hour appeal to president Trump to spike an executive order that would have created a voluntary program, voluntary program, for frontier AI companies to submit their models to the government for review ninety days before new model releases. I wonder what the benefit of that is. Obviously, it's good to have red teaming going on, good to have benchmarking, good to have other eyes on the project. There's some sort of, you know, liability that happens.
Speaker 1:What's the round thing on the table? No one in the TBPN audience has ever seen this. Can you describe what this is, this round not shaped
Speaker 2:exactly sure what we're looking at. I saw them talking about this on ESPN. And people are always saying, you guys are like sports center Yeah. For business.
Speaker 1:You should pick one of these up. This object.
Speaker 2:So I had to check it out. Yeah. This artifact.
Speaker 1:Brown brown oval object.
Speaker 2:Yes. Cool.
Speaker 1:Well, it looks
Speaker 2:fun. Anyways. I was having a little bit of fun earlier throwing
Speaker 1:this gong.
Speaker 2:Grilling the gong. The production team didn't like it.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:Because there's this, you know, 70 Oh, it's still thousand dollar massive flat screen TV next to the gong as well as multiple cameras
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:And lights over there, but no accidents.
Speaker 1:Wow. Mandate of heaven over there right here. So for his part, Trump explained the last minute cancellation by telling reporters, quote, I didn't like certain aspects of it. I think it gets in the way of, Dash, we're leading China. We're leading everybody, and I don't wanna do anything that's going to get in the way of that.
Speaker 1:The presumed text of the EO was leaked today. You can read it through this link.
Speaker 2:Interesting Tyler, have you checked in with LessRong?
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are they feeling about this?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mean, I assume they're not happy with this. This seems to be like anti safety. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Do they want more review from from independent non profits, for profit companies that are run by people with good intentions or the government, like, democratically elected?
Speaker 3:I mean, I I assume at at some level, it's it's gotta be the government. Right? Because if you're Yeah. Super HII pill, these things are nuclear weapons. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It it needs to be the government.
Speaker 1:But I
Speaker 3:I think on on the way there, people are are definitely like
Speaker 1:Is there anyone who is there anyone who says like, no. No. No. Actually, like nuclear weapons are super important, but they shouldn't be regulated by the government because I don't like the I would rather my favorite mega corp owns them, controls them. If look at the the approval rates for different organizations, there are plenty of companies that are polling above the US government.
Speaker 1:Like, people love Disney, Disney adults. They say, give Disney a nuclear weapon. They already have the rights to build a nuclear power plant. You know this?
Speaker 2:I did not.
Speaker 1:Disney World has like like, you know, legacy rights because when they set up EPCOT, which is an acronym which I should look up because what does it stand for? It stands for something really cool. This also bridges into one of our future segments. Stands for what does EPCOT stand for? Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.
Speaker 1:The idea was to build an entire city. It was the praxis of
Speaker 2:Of its time.
Speaker 1:And so in 1966, Walt Disney conceived it as in 1966, a utopian, fully functioning city. And I believe, this might just be viral clickbait, but they have the permission to build a nuclear reactor to power the the city of tomorrow. Epcot. Yeah. And so, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe there's some folks out there that say, we can't trust the government. We can't trust the Democrats. We can't trust the Republicans with the nuclear weapons. Give them to Disney. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I trust Bob with the new
Speaker 1:the new guy, we gotta meet him. We gotta get to know him.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Bob, he can
Speaker 2:I've shook his hand. Yeah. I I trust him.
Speaker 1:I trust his hand on the button. Second story highlighted by Brandon Grill in the TBPN newsletter.
Speaker 2:The grill inator.
Speaker 1:The grill Growlinator in the TBPN newsletter inator. On a non account posting
Speaker 2:He's sitting here with with this noise cancelling headphones.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's he's he's talking
Speaker 2:about him.
Speaker 1:He's gonna find this out later when he watches these clips. Anyway, and a non account posted yesterday that Microsoft had canceled its internal claw code license after token based billing made the cost untenable. This catalyzed a ton of commentary and discourse around x. Box CEO Aaron Levy, for example, used this post to argue that token price optimization is set to become a prevailing trend inside companies reliant on LLMs. Worth noting, though, that there's a proposed community note on the post right now that denies Microsoft made the move because of a cost issue.
Speaker 1:They have the money to spend billions on on tokens if they want. But instead, they are trying to shift the developers to use their own Copilot CLI, which I imagine they're they're gonna build their own harness, their fork of clogged
Speaker 2:They wanna make the engineers eat dog food.
Speaker 1:Yes. But what's the dog It food could be made
Speaker 2:of They're dog food.
Speaker 1:GPT 5.5 tokens. It could be made of Opus four
Speaker 2:seven I think it
Speaker 1:I guess they will be using
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, I think the reason that Codex and Cloud Code and Cursor and these other tools have gotten so good is because the engineers building them are using them all day long. And it's one thing to use those tools to build your coding tool, but being forced to constantly use the product that you're shipping is a tried and true way to build a great product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The third story from Brandon Groh in the TBPN newsletter. The American semiconductor manufacturer Micron announced that they've begun manufacturing one alpha DRAM, the most advanced memory ever produced in The United States at its Manassas, Virginia headquarters or manufacturing plant. This move comes in the middle of the agent boom in AI, which requires longer context windows and thus memory than back and forth LLMs, which has led to an industry wide memory shortage. Micron has been an absolute has been on a tear.
Speaker 1:Let's see what they're doing.
Speaker 2:800 almost $850,000,000,000 market cap.
Speaker 1:Remarkable. It's up 2% today, 3% over the last five days and 246% over the last six months. What an absolute run for Micron. It's up almost a thousand percent over the past year. Really, really incredible performance for Micron.
Speaker 2:Just wow.
Speaker 1:Anyway, America's going through a mini this is such a funny article by the Wall Street Journal. America's IPO mini boom. How is this a mini boom? You got three of the Is
Speaker 2:this not a gigaboom?
Speaker 1:This is a gigaboom. So I I don't know if we have truths on this, but it also made it to the front page of the walls of the Financial Times. They said SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs set to ignite Wall Street trading frenzy. NASDAQ loosens rules. Past investors could dump rival stocks.
Speaker 1:Trillionaire prospect for Musk. The blockbuster listings of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are set to prompt an unprecedented wave of buy slowing as new fast entry rules thrust the tech stocks straight into Wall Street indices. The rules implemented this month by Nasdaq mean billions of dollars of passive money will automatically flow to the three companies when they go public, driving their share prices higher and forcing investors to sell rival stocks. Elon Musk's SpaceX initial public offering next month is expected to be the largest on record, firing the starting gun on what US bankers will hope will be a blockbuster year, with OpenAI filing its IPO pay paperwork as soon as this week and Anthropic planning to float its shares too as well. The trio is set to raise tens of billions of dollars at a time of relentless investor appetite for companies linked to AI.
Speaker 1:The SpaceX listing will cement Musk's control of two of America's most valuable companies, SpaceX and Tesla. It is it is crazy. We're gonna need a new term for the Mag seven because Tesla has been in the Mag seven. It's been north of a trillion dollars for a long time, but SpaceX is gonna go out at a higher valuation almost certainly. Where is Tesla trading at today in terms of market cap?
Speaker 1:It's at 1.34. Hard to imagine SpaceX trading below that. So you're going to have his Mag seven company will be lagging his non Mag seven company. We're gonna need new terms. We're gonna need a bigger boat.
Speaker 1:But why did why did The Wall Street Journal call this a mini boom? I think it's just because it's it's so concentrated on these three companies, but we will dig in and see where it goes. So too bad SpaceX and others didn't go public sooner. Agree. But they are a tribute to The US capitalist system, says The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:Today's AI investor Euphoria recalls the heady.com days of the nineteen nineties, and it's hard to tell how these bets will shake out. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are rushing to go public to take advantage of the favorable market conditions. But amid the the eulogies written about American capitalism, the latest mini IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of US markets that no other country can match. SpaceX fired the starting gun. They're they're they're using the same language as the Financial Times over there.
Speaker 1:The starting gun has been fired. It's unanimous across the mainstream media. The rocket company founded in 2002 is a global leader in space exploration. Overnight success. It is also spread into broadband, mobile mobile satellite Internet, and data center development.
Speaker 1:Anthropic recently agreed to pay SpaceX 1,250,000,000 a month to use its data centers to train models. That shows how competitors can enjoy symbiotic relationships. SpaceX says the company as a whole reported a $4,900,000,000 net loss last year, some of which stemmed from its x.com social media platform. Can that be that much? I'd have to imagine that the losses were not I mean, I don't know how much Twitter was losing before they before they take private.
Speaker 1:I know that the the revenues cratered a bit, but there were also big layoffs and an 80% reduction in cost. The the the sum word there is maybe doing some of the lifting. I imagine that the that the losses were sort of spread over all sorts of investments. Yeah. You're building a new a new Starship rocket, which is set to launch today, 05:30 central time.
Speaker 1:Tune in. The last one was scrubbed.
Speaker 2:Critical What launch.
Speaker 1:Is it?
Speaker 2:No. It's just because of the timing with the s one and the IPO.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I mean All eyes on
Speaker 1:I think I think the market is valuing the launch capabilities in SpaceX and Starship in particular is like Sure. One small piece of the of the puzzle. You know, it's But,
Speaker 2:you know But people are gonna be paying
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Way more attention to this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Like the be excited about it. But I think even just the, you know, endless spamming Falcon nines can get Starlink to what, a $20,000,000,000 run rate or something? $10,000,000,000 run rate?
Speaker 1:You can you can clearly build a business off of the existing capability. Lots of excitement around Starship. There there was a little bit of a like spice in the timeline from, you know, Everyday Astronaut because he was sort of, like, rooting for a scrub. And everyone was like, oh, he's, like, against SpaceX. But he was like, no.
Speaker 1:I was like, I'm such a fan that I wanted to be there in person. I couldn't be there in person. So I was like, I hope that they scrub because I wanna be there for this historic moment. So little bit of like a misconception there. SpaceX said in its filing that it's foresees twenty eight point five trillion, yes, trillion in market opportunities, including data centers in space.
Speaker 1:Is anything more bullish than the future just being enterprise software? Like, you paint this massive picture. We're going to Mars. How are we gonna make money? Enterprise software.
Speaker 1:22,000,000,000,000 of enterprise software.
Speaker 2:We're gonna be automating workflows for the enterprise.
Speaker 1:I guess forever. Mister Musk in January was awarded 1,000,000,000 performance based restricted shares that will vast if his company, quote, establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1,000,000 inhabitants. Do robots count as inhabitants? Do agents count?
Speaker 2:Isn't that isn't that one
Speaker 1:Human colony. Potential? You gotta get a a million this why he's
Speaker 2:worried about the like five or six things and he just has to do like four?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I I haven't dug into that particular one. I I know for Tesla, there were a whole bunch of different milestones. Their humanoid robots was was one of the stretch goals. But permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1,000,000 inhabitants, that's exciting.
Speaker 1:That's a good goal. Like, that feels I don't know. That like, a whole lot of enterprise software and a million people living on Mars, that's a vision I can get behind. I'm into that. I like it.
Speaker 1:Dude, what was the market cap of Tesla at IPO?
Speaker 2:Was sub 10,000,000,000. Right?
Speaker 1:Was it Tesla's Tesla 1.7. Woah. $1.1700000000? Yep. Are are you What is that?
Speaker 1:One point
Speaker 3:Is that an open Is that a market cap for ants?
Speaker 1:You got a thousand x if you just were a day one IPO believer.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's how you build a retail army.
Speaker 1:So SpaceX I mean, million people on Mars, we could be looking at 1.7 quad, potentially. Anything's possible. I don't know. You get a thousand x from here. If we get to Mars, that's a big big big opportunity.
Speaker 2:That is so crazy that you could buy an Elon company in the public markets at less than a $2,000,000,000 market cap.
Speaker 1:And many people did not. I owned a little bit of Tesla at some point. But there were so many moments when it was like so wildly disconnected from other car companies or other like like it was never a a Warren Buffet buy, you know.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:There were always good reasons not to
Speaker 2:Instead buy of going to high school, I just bought the Tesla IPO And like using the money I made from mowing lawns.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You should've just been a lawn mower who DCA ed into Tesla the whole time. Probably be pretty retired right now. I mean, there's a lot of people that did that. There's a lot of people.
Speaker 1:There's also a lot of people that put money down to buy cars, and then they didn't buy the stock. And they're like, the car depreciated, and I should have bought the stock. Anyway, let's check-in with the the Starship launch because SpaceX pro postponed the launch of the newly redesigned Starship, but hardly a headline if it's just a one day, postponing because, these things happen all the time. But it's completely redesigned. It's 400 feet tall, and it stood on the launch pad at the company's Starbase complex outside Brownville, Texas.
Speaker 1:But engineers had to troubleshoot problems that kept cropping up to the end of the countdown for the flight according to a SpaceX livestream. SpaceX chief executive, Elon Musk, later said in a social media post that a hydraulic pin on part of the launch tower didn't function correctly. The company could try the flight Friday if the problem is fixed overnight. So they worked all night, and they fixed the hydraulic pin on the launch tower. Wow.
Speaker 1:Talk about complex. The test mission was set to be the first flight for Starship v three. This is the third version, redesigned SpaceX vehicle intended to deploy bigger satellites and one day help the company potentially settle Mars and mine asteroid Starship is bigger and more powerful than any rocket ever built. The company has sketched out a future in which Starship flies thousands of times per year. Of course, the the the the Mechazilla tower that grabs it, the the chopsticks.
Speaker 1:That's very key to being able to stack these quickly. You can't rebuild all the infrastructure. The reusability is key to flying regularly. The rocket has yet to fly any customer satellites after three years of intense tests that we know of. The real conspiracy theorist there's conspiracy theorists that think space is fake.
Speaker 1:Nothing's happening. They're not actually going. The satellites don't exist. And then there's other conspiracy theorists that think, oh, yeah. When they crash, they're actually deploying secret satellites, and there's more stuff in space than we think.
Speaker 1:So pick your tinfoil hat theory. We'll let you be the judge of what's really going on. SpaceX's growth plans depend on Starship according to its IPO prospectus. The document filed Wednesday listed Starship first among the risk factors facing the company. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Okay. So so a little bit more credit for you because I was like, ah, it's not that big a deal. I care more about the data centers process.
Speaker 2:The optic the think about, like, the optics and some investors are super, you know, a little bit
Speaker 1:It is interesting. Like, clearly, if SpaceX is listing Starship as the first risk factor, it means like, oh, yeah, like Colossus, like, we're going be able to do that. Like, that's not hard. Like, we can we can build a big data center. They have did the impossible.
Speaker 1:There's less of a risk factor of, we're not going to be able to monetize that. Because there are a group of investors out there that are saying, oh, token prices will collapse. GPU depreciation, it'll get blocked. There'll be a data center ban. They won't be able to ramp up their
Speaker 2:The mainstream like a, you know, catastrophic, you know, explosion.
Speaker 1:It'd be dramatic.
Speaker 2:There would that would be, you know, potentially an omen certain Yeah. People would Maybe. Looking into.
Speaker 1:But Maybe.
Speaker 2:I have full faith.
Speaker 1:They estimated in its IPO filing Wednesday that it has spent $15,000,000,000 developing Starship. Well, that makes a lot of sense why there's losses if you've been investing this.
Speaker 2:DJ D. Sol.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's going on with
Speaker 2:Slade D. Solomons. DM.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:In the bid Okay. Planned lead left
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The IPO with banks jockeying to get their name first on the deal for SpaceX's IPO. Solomons worked with staffers to message Musk directly. He's like, alright, guys. Help me out here. How do I send a message on x according to people familiar with the matter?
Speaker 2:So he's putting in the work.
Speaker 1:He also
Speaker 2:And says, wow, this is how you work for the bag at Goldman Sachs.
Speaker 1:David Solomon also had a piece in the New York Times saying that the AI apocalypse, NYT, was overrated. AI is a job creator, David Solomon says. He says, I'm the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The AI job apocalypse is overblown. We'll see what he's saying in a couple months.
Speaker 1:Ken Griffin sort of flipped, although Ken Griffin hasn't gone as far to say that there's a job apocalypse. He was just saying that the models went from like slop to usable, but he hasn't actually opined on whether or not that will change Citadel's hiring plans or his view of the
Speaker 2:said he was very excited that all of his software engineers were more efficient because he said there's no like cap on how much software
Speaker 1:I was there. I was writing Visual Basic. It was brutal. I would have loved Codex and Cloud Code. I would have been You would be I would been working for one minute a day instead of an hour
Speaker 2:a You could have had Codex back then private private instance of it. Yes. You would be currently
Speaker 1:Time traveling back in time just to become the most productive intern of all time is elite.
Speaker 2:That's something that's something you would actually do.
Speaker 1:Oh, it would be so so much fun. Maybe that's what the the future will hold. Intern simulator, you get to you get to go into VR and simulate being the most elite intern with with time travel technology.
Speaker 2:Anyway Should we talk about the world's fair?
Speaker 1:Yes. We need to talk about the world's fair. Tyler, you gave this a read. World's Fairs. Has someone tried to bring these back?
Speaker 1:This feels like a tech new media. We need a world's fair thing. Like, I I could see this being something that someone tries to revive, although it'd probably be a lot of screens these days. But at the World's Fair of old, there were a lot of cool technologies, lot of hardware, a lot of interesting exhibits, and we'll go through. I don't know how much you've studied the World's in the past, but The Wall Street Journal has been reflecting on The United States Of America at two fifty years with a whole bunch of articles that look back and contextualize American history, and we'll go through this one on the World's Fair right now.
Speaker 1:So among the groundbreaking innovations unveiled at US hosted exhibitions were the telephone, the Ferris wheel, and the electric and electric lighting. Ferris really crushed it on the naming thing. Where, you know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Thomas Edison invented lighting mostly. Those guys did not bake their name into the product nearly as well as Ferris because it's capital f, and I believe Ferris is the one who invented the Ferris wheel.
Speaker 1:Anyway, before splashy Silicon Valley product launches and the annual Consumer Electronics Show, the world showcased the its latest in innovations at high profiled world's fairs. These exhibits held every few years beginning in London in 1851 gave countries a public platform to showcase new technologies, products and ideas that were going to reshape daily life. For host countries and cities, the world's fairs or expositions We're an to own the world's
Speaker 2:Tyler sharing project. The person that invented the Ferris wheels full name was George Washington Gale Fairs junior.
Speaker 3:That's pretty elite. That's an elite. George Washington.
Speaker 2:George Washington. Stopping you from naming your child George Washington and then just slapping your your own last name at the end. Yes. Yes. I I mean, my George Washington Cosgrove.
Speaker 3:My John Tyler was the tenth president.
Speaker 1:Oh, true. Yeah. So There you go. That's my
Speaker 2:name. There we go.
Speaker 1:Okay. So many of the big expos were commemorative, says Paul Greenhall Greenhall, a British historian and author of two books on world's fairs and expositions. But all of them ended up doing something else. They changed the shape of cities. Much like the Olympics today, world's fairs were large scale planning efforts and economic investment as much as cultural events.
Speaker 1:Cities competed for the right to host them. Chicago was able to redefine its image from a gritty second city to a cultural and architectural hub after defeating New York in the bid for the eighteen ninety three exposition. Here's a look at The US hosted world's fairs that left the deepest mark. So Philadelphia
Speaker 2:Starting in Philly. Philly. 1876, you're not gonna believe what was what was shown, what was celebrated. This is crazy. We had two key technologies, telephones and ketchup.
Speaker 1:One was disrupted much faster than the other. Yep. I would say that the telephone has basically disappeared. Smartphone, text messaging. Telephone's not doing well.
Speaker 1:It's on its last iPhone made gain ground. Real inroads. No. Ketchup is still
Speaker 2:Even ranch kinda went on a run. Yeah. Really Mustard.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, it's a compliment, not a substitute. Are very few people that say, oh, I don't need the ketchup at all.
Speaker 2:Just the mustard.
Speaker 1:Just the mustard. Please. Most people they
Speaker 2:I don't know. I do think mustard is is Better? Better than ketchup. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. You can believe that. Yeah. America's first officially sanctioned world's fair, the Centennial International Exhibition arrived when the country was still defining its place among industrial nations. Unlike earlier European fairs built around single monumental halls, the Philadelphia event spread across a vast park with hundreds of structures.
Speaker 2:It was sort of like the Coachella of its time.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Among the most notable exhibits were the telephone. It was initially greeted with skepticism, but the potential of the cool contraption quickly drew attention. Once people realized what had been invented, it became clear how important it was. The fair also showcased Thomas Edison's automatic telegraph as well as machinery such as the typewriter. Imagine you just create the automatic telegraph and then you go to launch it and demo it and somebody invents the telephone.
Speaker 2:Was just like, really? Really, dude? And consumer packaged goods such as Heinz tomato ketchup. It normalized the idea that private companies, innovators and even governments could present their work side by side. A model that amplified the country's entrepreneurial culture.
Speaker 2:I love that. Chicago, 1893. You're not gonna believe it. You're not gonna believe the two technologies We that are
Speaker 1:gotta we gotta call call balls and strikes here. A little bit more underwhelming.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I don't know.
Speaker 1:Think Tell people what was Two
Speaker 2:key inventions. Last time, remember, we created telephones and catch up. Right? And so fast following this with the next fair, we create
Speaker 1:the No. No. No. No. It's not fast following.
Speaker 1:1876, the telephone
Speaker 2:Almost twenty years later.
Speaker 1:Almost twenty years later, they're like fast takeoff. It's eight we're so early. Telephone's cooking. What do we got?
Speaker 2:The Ferris wheel and popcorn.
Speaker 1:Popcorn is Popcorn. Good. Catch up before popcorn. Pretty good. Pretty good.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, Ferris wheel Ferris wheel
Speaker 2:Imagine the hundreds of people that came there to demo their inventions.
Speaker 1:If you're in telephones, pivot to Ferris wheels. There's a whole there's a whole industry. Oh, yeah. Ferris wheel that'll destroy
Speaker 3:the telephone. You gotta get on the
Speaker 1:Ferris wheel. It's the new thing.
Speaker 2:Well, it is it is it is sort of funny that like in like if you were to look back if we had a world's fair
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You'd have like creatine gummies and like AGI. So in 1893, they had the Ferris wheel and popcorn. Yeah. And then you fast forward to today. Like we found a way to put one of the Yes.
Speaker 2:Micronutrients in steak Yes. Into a candy shaped supplement. And we need you to eat four or five of these a day forever.
Speaker 1:2020, World's Fair. We have rockets that land. And we also have Allbirds. Allbirds. What else came out?
Speaker 1:That was very silly. Bored apes. We have we have
Speaker 2:invented Skims Bored shapewear.
Speaker 1:Shapewear and GLP ones. Somewhat related. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Buffalo, New York. O one.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:An electric city.
Speaker 1:This seems pretty elite. This is pretty huge. Nineteen o one.
Speaker 2:Though, remember mostly is the location where president William McKinley was shot. He died a week later. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was meant to showcase He was shot at World's World's Fair? That's crazy. Fact
Speaker 1:check that. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was meant to showcase America's dominance in innovation electrical power and infrastructure. The fair featured electric lighting and electric streetcars powered by hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:reflecting a moment when electricity was beginning to move from novelty towards widespread utility.
Speaker 2:Okay. So this is nineteen o one.
Speaker 1:Nineteen o one.
Speaker 2:And remember, in 1876, we created the telephone. And you fast forward to the next event in St. Louis in nineteen o four, you're not gonna believe what we remember the nineteen o four World's Fair.
Speaker 1:We created electricity and they're like, we got something better. What do we got?
Speaker 2:We now know this this World's Fair as a snack food extravaganza.
Speaker 1:It's really just AGI and crazy gummy.
Speaker 2:It was it was sort of a Cambrian explosion of snacking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, this is the nature of our show. It's like cerebris and groons. Like, this is this is like this is actually what what happens in America
Speaker 2:Louisiana Purchase Exposition was among the largest ever stage and nearly obliterated the city's finances. Oh, no. Still, its pop culture influence endures. The exposition popularized a host of snack foods that would become staples of American life including ice cream cones, peanut butter. Oh my.
Speaker 2:They went on an insane run right here. Ice cream cones, peanut butter, hot dogs, hamburgers and cotton candy. Elite. While the foods weren't all invented for the fair, their widespread availability there. Like, it's so funny.
Speaker 2:So so people are coming there again to share their their their their actual innovations. Yeah. And then like snacks had just come online. And so you can imagine like it just turns into a snack conference. Yep.
Speaker 2:Where everyone's just snacking like crazy. They're like, wait we have hot, you can go to a hot dog stand and then you can go get cotton candy in one place.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You gotta be kidding me. Fast forward, 1962 Seattle.
Speaker 1:Space race.
Speaker 2:It's a space race.
Speaker 1:That's exciting.
Speaker 2:The World's Fair by the mid twentieth century, the World's Fairs had become games of one upmanship. I like that. And geopolitical rivalry feels like where we're at today. Mhmm. Seattle's Century twenty one exposition took place in the shadow of the Cold War following The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik and the world's first artificial earth satellite.
Speaker 2:The Soviets turned down an invitation. They turned it down.
Speaker 1:Turned it down.
Speaker 2:Turned it down. The federal government became deeply involved. There was a sense that America needed to demonstrate technological leadership.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The Space Needle was constructed for the fair.
Speaker 1:I recently saw the inside of the Space Needle because wait. No. That's not the Space Needle. It's the Toronto version of the Space Needle because didn't Drake film a music video inside of it?
Speaker 2:He iced it out.
Speaker 1:Oh, he did?
Speaker 2:He made it ice blue.
Speaker 1:Because he's Iceman or
Speaker 2:something?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's the name of the album. And inside, you can see all of the broadcasting equipment and there's these huge radio dishes inside. It's very cool. Anyway.
Speaker 2:Fast forward just a few years, couple years.
Speaker 1:This one
Speaker 2:believe what you're not gonna believe what they created. What announced at this world's fair. '64. They invent 1964, more than just under a hundred years since the telephone was invented, we invented punch cards.
Speaker 1:Punch cards.
Speaker 2:Which which feel like a kind of early version of of enterprise software in some way. True. World's Fair Flushing Meadows This a record. Yes. This is records.
Speaker 2:Visitors were dazzled by color television demonstration and the picture phone, an early video calling system.
Speaker 1:They had FaceTime.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Is crazy.
Speaker 1:This is crazy. I can't believe When I told sixty four they invented FaceTime, he was like, did they use mirrors? And he thought it was just a periscope.
Speaker 2:It's just just a mirror that you love. No.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's like it's like a series of mirrors that bounce my image across, like, so you can be in the other room and you can see me and talk. No. No.
Speaker 1:They had full video calling, I guess. AT and T's Picture Phone, which added video to telephone calls.
Speaker 3:Yes. So so it cost $16 to for a three minute call. Oh. So it's a $121 today's in today's money.
Speaker 1:That's expensive.
Speaker 3:Yeah. $40
Speaker 1:I wonder if I wonder if there were CEOs at the time who were like, we need we need to be if you're not if you're making $10 a year and you're not spending $20 a year on your picture phone, you're not gonna have
Speaker 3:a they were talking about
Speaker 2:Jevan's Paradox.
Speaker 1:Yes. Probably. I don't know. When did
Speaker 2:officially sanctioned World's Fair in The US was hosted in New Orleans in 1984 and it produced no truly defining technological debut or
Speaker 1:A stagnation theory, undefeated, brutal. By that point, function of World Fairs had largely migrated elsewhere to museums, television, theme parks and technology conference. As a result, the World's Fair concept gradually faded. Putting on an expo is a lost art, the author says. But when America needed it, no one did it better.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there was
Speaker 3:a little push.
Speaker 2:You could bring something like this back, but I feel like it would end up being like to a tech conference, You know?
Speaker 1:I wanted to talk about the robotic legs, the exoskeletons. Would you rock these? Or would you be sitting it out? The HyperShell X Ultra S is an exoskeleton that The Wall Street Journal demoed.
Speaker 2:Thousand watt hips.
Speaker 1:Thousand watt hips. You wear these and they help you hike and run up hills. I listened to too many shows with with Palmer Lockhe where he talks about the the capability of an Iron Man suit potentially just ripping you apart. And so I would be a little afraid. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:The I might give it try.
Speaker 2:You know, bad actor. Remember all the DGI drones had like a backdoor?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Bad actor takes over your
Speaker 1:Start your dancing.
Speaker 2:And then it makes you Really? Michael Jackson Start badly in front of your peers.
Speaker 1:Potentially. Potentially.
Speaker 2:Could be wildly embarrassing.
Speaker 1:Also, CATL, c a t l, the Chinese EV battery giant is investing in deep seek. Some big rounds going on. Also, BYD breaking up. Remember? Remember that Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:This is what they predicted that BYD would get an f one team.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Which is what happening. Which is what's happening. At least they're in talks. BYD is in talks with Christian Horner over entering f one. That would be pretty crazy.
Speaker 1:Does BYD have any gas powered ICE engines? I don't know.
Speaker 2:They're about to.
Speaker 1:They're about to. Who knows? What else is going? Go have fun. We'll see you Tuesday.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your day. Have a great weekend. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. It's been an honor.
Speaker 1:And we will see you today? Tomorrow
Speaker 2:slash Tuesday. Weekend. We love
Speaker 1:you. Goodbye.