Netflix’s Next Move, Zuck’s $170B Florida Mansion, the Billionaire Tax Push | Diet TBPN

11:31John Coogan:Yeah, Slotman. You're going to dress up as the knockoff Slotman. So maybe that's not your worldview, Tyler, but it's clearly the worldview of the Ellison family because they believe in this barbell effect.

11:41Jordi Hays:You know, another way to look at it is like you could get this hyper-personalization, but it could be around existing IP. So you get to watch a personalized version of Batman content that's targeted just for you individually, but the kids are still dressing up as Batman.

11:57John Coogan:And we've already seen a glimpse of this with video games. There are video games that leverage existing intellectual property, but allow you to customize your character in some way. Put more skill points into intelligence and cast spells versus strength and use a sword, right? Like, you can have your own experience if you play, even like the Arkham Batman series, it's pretty linear, but you can play it more aggressively. You can play it more stealthily. and that allows you to experience something that is unifying and we can discuss, okay you played the same game as me, you understand the same character as me, but we had a different experience.

12:35John Coogan:I think AI accelerates that and makes it more valuable, not less. This is the ninth or tenth time that Warner Brothers has changed hands since it became an independent movie studio in 1923. There's some of those acquisitions that have been like divestitures or reorganizations within other companies. But I do think that David Ellison is going to go the long distance with this. I think with a little careful financial management and probably a few content licensing deals, this might be the last one. He's been working in Hollywood since he was a kid and has been very dedicated to this particular industry for a very long time.

13:14John Coogan:And so I don't think he's going anywhere.

13:17Jordi Hays:And if you are inspired by the whole netflix warner brothers saga you should head over to the goodwill in downtown brooklyn tom from vanity fair says for 14.99 you can zaslov max this spring they're selling a nice port authority puffer vest from warner brothers discovery that is a good pickup zaslov is a deals guy hall of famer for sure according to the washington post there was a researcher skeptical of Havana syndrome. So he tested a secret weapon on himself. In 2024, a Norwegian researcher, skeptical that pulsed energy weapons could do damage to human brains, built a device and tested it on himself.

13:57Jordi Hays:It didn't go well. Built it, tested it.

13:59John Coogan:Working in secrecy, working in strict secrecy, a government scientist in Norway built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy. And in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans, in 2024, he tested it on himself. He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of Favanna syndrome. The unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of US spies and diplomats around the world.

14:25Jordi Hays:We don't know how to make scientists like this anymore. Glad they're still out there.

14:29John Coogan:It's extremely bullish for the tinfoil hat industry. Because I believe that the actual underlying basis for the idea of a tinfoil hat, of course we use it somewhat sarcastically here when we're discussing hypotheticals conspiracy theories, but the tinfoil hat is supposed to eliminate microwave radiation and various EMF pulses. And so if you're worried about getting Havana syndrome, maybe pick up an EMF proof tinfoil hat. Thomas Maxwell says we have to stop this.

14:56Jordi Hays:I'm not eating a, quote, Jacob. Eat a Jacob. I haven't seen this one before. It's 20 grams of grass fed protein, no seed oils, nothing artificial, sweetened with organic honey. Definitely resonated. 24 ,000 people agree. Tyler, you should do a taste test of all the different protein bars named after just regular dudes. David Barr, the Jacob Barr. There's probably more. You got to get on it.

15:21John Coogan:Lucy, named after a person. It was a whole trend for a while.

15:25Jordi Hays:Cursor, would like a word. Yeah. This was staggering. This was great. Crazy. They came out yesterday. They had heard the FUD on the timeline around Cursor. They came out yesterday and Bloomberg got some of their data. Their annual revenue topped$2 billion in February, according to a source, a figure that underscores the fast growth of the coding assistant. Sasha summed it up well. He said, Cursor sees the timeline turning against them. Quietly give Bloomberg a$2 billion ARR press release. No post from the company where founders haters squash through comms masterclass. Michael Truel actually did come out this morning and says, we believe Cursor discovered a novel solution to problem six of the first proof challenge, a set of math research problems that approximate the work of Stanford, MIT, Berkeley.

16:18Jordi Hays:Cursor's solution yields stronger results than the official human-written solution. Notably, we used the same harness that we built a browser from scratch a few weeks ago. It ran fully autonomously without nudging or hints for four days. This suggests that our technique for scaling agent coordination might generalize beyond coding. very very cool to see the progress from them and clearly uh doing something right in uh in the enterprise right just because like everything that you see on the timeline is like totally so many

16:48John Coogan:so many enthusiasts one of my buddies is uh kyle russell i worked with him like a decade ago he's at a company called valon um and he posted so uh valon uh they make sass for mortgage services He says it's very boring, but we're basically getting them all to flip from legacy software and a rate limited by biz ops people being able to onboard them. So we're going to try instead to think about it in terms of what tokens do we need to extract from the org in order to deploy fast. So he's in this like AI deployment lead role. And he went, I think, pretty viral saying this morning, one person on his team said, hey, can you unsub me from cursor?

17:28John Coogan:And somebody says done. And then a bunch of people said same, same. Like, I don't need it. I'm like, like, I'm happy with another program. And Kyle said, today, we announced we're removing 90 cursor seats, because they haven't had any use in two weeks. And it is like, it's flipped from like the most cutting edge thing to like, it's clearly very sticky, because you see, you see the ARR numbers that this like ultra frontier, coolest, hottest thing is getting some like FUD. And then Sasha broke this down where he was like, the timelines turning, turning against them. So you have to provide some evidence that you're not cooked because the timeline is very much like, oh, well, you're not the hottest thing anymore.

18:08John Coogan:You're not the coolest little thing for the people that are on the most frontier.

18:12Jordi Hays:Up from one billion in Q4, which is just insane.

18:16John Coogan:Yeah, and so, yeah, I mean, I think there's just something about, it goes back to diffusion. I was debating this with Tyler last night about how much of AI adoption is just actually getting the forward deployed engineer in, actually getting people to change their workflows, onboarding. There are certain people that will just bounce from the most frontier thing. Oh, this model is better. I'm on Codex. I'm on Claude. I'm on Codex. I'm on Claude. Back and forth. But for a lot of companies, they need a little bit more handholding. And so there's a whole massive chunk of the economy that can be transformed by developing great products and then actually getting them in the hands of businesses.

18:53John Coogan:Well, in some good news, Mark Zuckerberg has purchased a mansion in Miami for$170 million. This was such big news that we had to pull it forward from the mansion section on Friday to talk about today. But there is a little bit of a black belt here. We can go into it.

19:12Jordi Hays:So, of course, Mark got this because of California's wealth tax, which if it goes through, he would still be subject to at least a one-time payment, which would get litigated, of course. What we need now is a picture of him in his backyard recreating the Ben Affleck smoking meme. Wait, why? Because there's this new national wealth tax that Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders are pushing. So he's like, he just moved, he just got this new place across the country, probably overpaid to a degree. People are just gonna be like,

19:47John Coogan:actually I live in international waters full time. I don't live in America, I don't live in any country actually. I live in space. I live on the International Space Station or something. 170 million dollars sounds staggering. by a 5 % tax on Mark Zuckerberg's wealth over$11 billion. That should have been his shopping budget because in dude math, if you save money, you just have a free license to spend it. So you're like, by moving to Florida, I'm effectively saving myself$11 billion. I can spend that, right? Isn't that how that works? Exactly. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have paid$170 million for an under construction mansion on Miami sought after Indian Creek Island.

20:26John Coogan:The deal closed Monday. The purchase set a record in one of the country's most expensive to date. The current US record is held by billionaire Ken Griffin. He spent$238 million for an apartment. That is a crazy amount of money for an apartment, but I guess it's in a good building.

20:43Jordi Hays:This is a lot of apartments.

20:44John Coogan:The Florida record was set last year when a waterfront compound in Naples traded for 225 million. I feel like this isn't counting Ken Griffin's compound that he's building, because he's building.

20:54Jordi Hays:Yeah, because it's multiple properties.

20:55John Coogan:He's bought multiple properties.

20:56Jordi Hays:Okay, here's where it gets crazy. Tell me. Sellers are Dr. Aaron Rollins, a cosmetic surgeon to the star, and his wife, real estate agent, Maureen Rollins. The Rollinses paid more than$30 million for the roughly two-acre site in 2020. Wow.

21:10John Coogan:Flipping.

21:11Jordi Hays:Not bad.

21:11John Coogan:I mean, real estate agent, don't want to go up against them. They know what they're doing.

21:14Jordi Hays:Plans called for a nine-bedroom home measuring about 30 ,000 square feet with a dock and a swimming pool.

21:19John Coogan:Yeah.

21:19Jordi Hays:Amenities were to include gym, hair salon, and massage room, as well as a 1 ,500-gallon aquarium and library with a secret passageway.

21:27John Coogan:Zuck does need a hair salon in his house because he's always changing his hairstyle. Sometimes he's got the Caesar going. Sometimes he's got the Fro going. He's got the Gen Z. This is elite for him. Who knows what will go next? Maybe he'll have long, flowing locks like Fabio. Credit where credit is due. China really nailed the Bonnevillean aesthetic with their Antarctic research base. Qin Ling? Qin Ling?

21:48Jordi Hays:Okay, these are just renders, though, correct? These are renders.

21:50John Coogan:This is what they're thinking about building.

21:52Jordi Hays:Because if it was real, I'd be telling Tyler to get a boat immediately. Tyler was in Arizona over the weekend and sent us a very cool picture of him out at TSMC.

22:04John Coogan:Yeah, give us a review. Did you feel the power? Did it feel like visiting Arrakis?

22:08Jordi Hays:Yeah, it was like 91 degrees, extremely hot. It was massive, massive facility. They're still building. like there's like there were two kind of main sections i couldn't actually tell like what parts they were there were signs there were a bunch of fabs i think i took a picture next to like fab 21 or something wow um but there's like there's so much building going on and it's just like it's basically north of phoenix yeah and so there's like 10 mile radius where it's just like basically just empty land they're flattening the desert whoa but yeah very very cool gift shop no they didn't let us in there's a like a ton of security around at every gate i i wanted to like go in and like take a tour or something.

22:46John Coogan:I want to get a wafer that didn't make it through quality control and get some of the chip CEOs to sign up. Moving on, the billionaire tax has gone national. Bernie Sanders is proposing bringing it to the United States broadly at the federal level. Bad news for everyone who migrated to Miami or Florida because it is is going to follow you wherever you go. Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders are proposing a national wealth tax on billionaires going even further than California. They want 5 % unrealized wealth tax to be annual.

23:22Jordi Hays:Every year.

23:23John Coogan:Every year. That would be a serious capitalization. And I've seen some people running the numbers on like,

23:28Jordi Hays:oh, if this tax had been in place since 1999, Jeff Bezos would still be worth$61 billion and he could still afford his$500 million mega yacht, just like not actually like processing all the negative externalities of something like this.

23:45John Coogan:So yeah, I just I just I would be like a core like a PE backed like shell pretty quickly because you lose control. Right.

23:51Jordi Hays:Yeah. That or Amazon never even gets the level of investment that it got because of capital flight. I would be so much more sympathetic to Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders on this if they had like here's five case studies where wealth taxes worked. worked. And like, they can't come up with a single one. And so it just feels like...

24:14John Coogan:50 % over 10 years. That is a lot. But the implementation of this tax would ultimately create wealth flights, as Chris withins. The wealthy are wealthy because they fight to preserve their wealth. So in year one, the base is already decimated. Then every single year afterwards, the remaining billionaires leave or hide their assets. Meanwhile, the markets are all declining all this time because they see that America has been infiltrated by wealth destroying communists. Chris is not a fan.

24:40Jordi Hays:There's something like$8 trillion of billionaire wealth and$160 to$170 of middle class wealth. So that is the real prize pool. And again, hopefully our lawmakers and voters process how ridiculous this is and reject

25:02John Coogan:it. and write the balance sheet of the US government.

25:05Jordi Hays:The market is only down 0.08 % year to date. Things must be really calm, right? This is actually crazy.

25:11John Coogan:If you asked me where the market was and I hadn't looked, what is this from? What movie is this? Is this AI or something? This is a crazy scene. I really like this. This is a good meme template. I haven't used this before. Is it from Maze Runner? Oh, maybe Maze Runner. I don't know.

25:28Jordi Hays:Doomer says the past looks more like the future than the present does. Let's pull up. What is this? PM's Phoenix, an expandable van you can build for$2 ,000. This is sick.

25:42John Coogan:Most campers and vans these days that are roomy enough to live in are too large for comfortable driving. Conversely, the compact, fun, drivable rigs are usually too small to live in. And no matter what its size, the seller will probably want all the money you have now, plus most of what you'll make in the next five years. This is a good copy.

26:00Jordi Hays:So this was in Popular Mechanics in 1978.

26:05John Coogan:This is a good daily. Someone should pick this up.

26:07Jordi Hays:Built on a Volkswagen minibus chassis.

26:09John Coogan:I like that they restyled the front cab as well. A camper back end looks pretty similar. But it still feels odd to take an electric vehicle into the wilderness. I don't know why, because it's not like you're bringing a bunch of, not like there's a gas station out in the middle of nowhere. but this would give me range anxiety, even though I think that's deeply fake at this point.

26:33Jordi Hays:New model alert.

26:34John Coogan:New model alert. What we got?

26:36Jordi Hays:Introducing Logan's, introducing Gemini 3.1 Flashlight, a huge step forward on the boundary of intelligence, beating 2.5 Flash on many tasks. Tyler, you should try to do a speed check. OpenAI also came out this morning with 5.3 Instant. Okay. Touting increased accuracy.

26:59John Coogan:Is this in ChatGPT? Because I feel like I've had 5.3 in Codex, but not in... Oh, I got, yeah, I have 5.3 instant in ChatGPT.com now. Interesting.

27:11Jordi Hays:I do not yet. Very cool. Calci partnered with Bezel. Oh, yeah. This is a good collab. To allow people to trade price movements of iconic watches. So we can pull up this video. this basically allows you to trade on what the on the prices of rolexes for the month month of march basically is price going to move up or down so quade over at bezel has been telling us about

27:38John Coogan:this one so you could you could in theory buy a watch on bezel and then take out a short position on kalshi and have a market neutral submariner or something right because if the price goes up you own the watch. It's not just any sub.

27:52Jordi Hays:It's a market neutral sub.

27:54John Coogan:It's market neutral. Because if the market crashes, you make money on Calci, but you lost money on the watch and you're neutral. So you can hedge yourself now. That's very bizarre. Yeah, I saw somebody pushing

28:04Jordi Hays:back and being like, oh, you can, this is silly. You could just buy the watches and actually trade them. But obviously it's quite a bit more complicated.

28:14John Coogan:Well, you can't sell one that you don't have. Now you can short watches. I want to talk about fast food CEOs. Yeah,

28:19Jordi Hays:Let's pull up this video of McDonald's CEO.

28:22John Coogan:We never watched this all the way through. This is McDonald's CEO, Chris Kempenski. He went viral after seeming reluctant to eat his own burgers. He takes a tiny bite, looks uncomfortable, and calls the food product. That's the size of it. With, you've heard about it. The big arch. Here it is, the big arch. This is pretty good. This is something that we have tested already. On humans. Germany, Canada. On animals. I love this product. It is so good. I'm going to do a tasting right now, but I'm going to eat this for my lunch, just so you know. So here we go. First, holy cow. If I can survive a single meal, it's good enough for you.

28:58John Coogan:We've got a very unique kind of sesame poppy sort of bun on it. This isn't that bad of a public presentation, in my opinion. We've got two quarter pound patties, delicious Big Arch sauce. It's probably his first TikTok, but he's doing okay. Oh, there's so much going on with this. First of all, let's try to get this thing. I don't even know how to attack it. Got so much to it. There's also some crispy onions on here as well. I see those kind of coming out. He's stoked. All right. I met the CEO of McDonald's, the previous CEO, at South by Southwest in 2013. That is so good. That's a big bite for a big art.

29:35John Coogan:That's a huge burger. It's distinctively McDonald's. Undeniably not that big of a bite. Yeah, not that big of a bite.

29:42Jordi Hays:He just kind of.

29:43John Coogan:But eating on camera is so hard. If you just start housing that thing, there's going to be a whole different set of backlash. It definitely looked like his first ever bite of a burger. Yeah. It was not a strong performance. Lulu said lay up opportunity for the number two ranked fast food chain CEO to film a brutal. And I think somebody did.

30:03Jordi Hays:We can pull up another video here.

30:05John Coogan:Someone did it. There's someone saying Japanese manga writer trying to write Americans.

30:11Jordi Hays:the CEO would perhaps compete over who would take the manliest bite of a burger. No, that's ridiculous. Surely America cannot be like that. Okay, but watch this. Burger King? Oh, that's a real bite. That's a real bite. Yeah.

30:25John Coogan:I'm a Burger King guy now. He won me over very, very well. This guy seems like he can flip burgers. He can take bites of burgers.

30:35Jordi Hays:I saw another video of Chris, the McDonald's CEO, coming out on his personal Instagram, saying he eats, he wanted to clarify that he does eat McDonald's three or four times a week, he said. So he is defending his honor.

30:47John Coogan:McDonald's is great.

30:48Jordi Hays:I love this product. I love this product. That's what every chef says after they bring out a meal. They say, I love this product. I think you will, too.

30:59John Coogan:He's a business guy. I don't have a problem with that. Refer to it as product. Go off. I stand by it. I think it's great.

31:06Jordi Hays:Thank you for being with us. We will be back tomorrow.

31:10John Coogan:11 a.m.

31:11Jordi Hays:I cannot wait. I cannot wait.

31:12John Coogan:See you.

31:13Jordi Hays:Do it. Goodbye.