New Glenn Explodes, Enterprise AI Enters ROI Era, The Dinosaur Fossil Boom | Diet TBPN

0:00John Coogan:A bunch of stories. We're going to go through mostly the stories that have just broken over the last 24 hours. The first is this insane video from Blue Origin. Very, very disappointing to see. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket just blew up at LC 36 while attempting to static fire ahead of NG-4. We can watch this video because it is absolutely insane how it was on board. Nuclear bomb went off. It looks like a scene from Oppenheimer. It looks like a Christopher Nolan movie. This is absolutely remarkable. Everyday Astronaut says, oh, my God, that was a very big one. I hate to see setbacks in progress.

0:41John Coogan:This is not good. That has to be extremely, extremely frustrating. Brendan Grell broke down a little bit of the back and forth on this particular rocket initiative. Jeff Bezos' rocket company suffered a catastrophic failure last night when its New Glenn rocket, a reusable heavy lift orbital spacecraft designed to compete with SpaceX's Falcon Heavy. And we were talking about this in the backdrop of the SpaceX IPO, and I heard Brad Gerstner talking about this on CNBC. See, I think someone was playing a Gerstner interview in the studio today. And he was saying, the launch business is fantastic, but it's not enough without Starlink, which is a fantastic business.

1:23John Coogan:But that's not enough without the AI business, which is a fantastic business and growing. And so to just have a launch business and then have a setback like this has got to be extremely frustrating. If you're competing with a company that's going to raise$80 billion. I forget how much SpaceX is actually going to raise, but they're going to raise a lot of money. They're going to have a lot of capital to deploy in their march towards ever more frequent and reliable launch capacity. Yeah, especially painful. Blue Origin started before SpaceX. We talked about this before. It's been hard. And yeah, unclear how much this will set them back, but certainly disappointing.

2:03John Coogan:So the good news is that no one was hurt, which is incredible because you see the rocket. It looks like it's surrounded by a city. It looks like there's buildings around. And to see that much destruction with no one injured at all is a miracle. And I'm so happy to hear that. Jeff Bezos tweeted, very rough day. We'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it. And Elon chimed in with some words of encouragement. Space is hard. A lot of folks were sending their encouragement because I think even if you're a SpaceX maxi, it is very exciting for America to have multiple heavy launch capability providers in the market.

2:43John Coogan:It's good. It was very exciting when New Glenn got to orbit, came back. That was the second time that that sort of rocket technology had been demoed. And it was demoed in America. Sort of even our second best rocket provider is better than everyone else around the globe. What else do you have, Tyler? Yeah, just some added context. This was the fourth test. This was prepping for the fourth test. In the third test, if you remember, this is when the rocket kind of correctly went up, but then deployed an ASTS satellite in the wrong orbit. Oh, yeah, we just went to the wrong orbit. Wait, but that was New Glenn?

3:17Yeah, that was the third test.

3:19John Coogan:That was pretty recent. So they're on a pretty good cadence here, but this is still a huge setback. Yeah, AST is down 16 % today. Because of this, most likely. Interesting, interesting. So Elon Musk lent his support, tweeting, Most unfortunate rockets are hard. That's an understatement. A lot of people were saying like if you think software engineering is hard, you could have been a rocket scientist. It is, after all, rocket science. The explosion caused extreme structural damage to its only functional launch pad. While Blue Origin has successfully reached base a number of times with other vehicles, New Glenn has had just one successful flight out of three attempted tries.

3:56John Coogan:From 2006 to 2008, Elon Musk had three consecutive failures with Falcon 1 before successfully launching it. And so failure is, you know, is a natural state of these pursuits, but never fun to watch it happen. There were some people that were syncing up the different angles. There were some different angles on this that were absolutely crazy to see. Yeah, this one from Truthful. Truthful. This is the one that you want to see. This literally looks like a nuke went off. So scary. Yeah, vertical footage. Absolutely crazy. Amazing footage from a local. I wonder what the reaction is from the people.

4:33Wow, that's really far away. It's far away, but it's also a pretty big mushroom cloud. I imagine maybe they walk to their cars.

4:40John Coogan:Yeah, I saw some people saying, I don't want to hear about my carbon footprint ever again because this seems like an immensely disastrous explosion. Other people were saying Bezos did Roman's rocket launch from Succession IRL. If you remember this scene, we can pull it up. Yeah. You haven't seen Succession. I've seen the first season. I haven't seen the full thing. But he has a pet project. He does. Yeah. Okay. And it blows up. It blows up. That's certainly dramatic. I feel like that makes for good TV. Yeah, we were, right before the show started, we were talking about the nominative determinism of blue origin.

5:17John said it blew up. Ba-bum-choo. But, or, you know, blue as in sort of sad. Feeling blue. Sad. Yeah. Sad start. But. They will rebuild. They will be back.

5:29John Coogan:So OSINT Defender says, Daylight reveals the extent of damage caused to Launch Complex 36 in the surrounding area of Cape Canaveral's Space Force Station in Florida, following last night's massive explosion at Blue Origin New Glenn during a static fire test. And there was a static fire test that went poorly at Starbase, and they had a similar explosion. And people were regarding that as like a major setback. And maybe it was, but at the same time, we saw a very successful launch of Starship just a week or two ago. And so this looks way better than I would have thought. Yeah, I agree. It looked like total destruction.

6:04John Coogan:I was expecting a crater in the ground. Yeah, so this one. You can see here, clearly a lot of damage. Not good. Right around the pad, but there's plenty of other infrastructure. That seems to be still standing. And so you should, in theory, be able to rebuild. But I mean, with anything rocket related, You have to imagine that every nut and bolt on that tower, even though it is standing, needs to be re-inspected, re-examined, make sure that it's not corroded. There's got to be so much work for the team. They have my full faith that they will get it done. Well, shifting over to the token maxing debate.

6:41John Coogan:People are spending more and more on tokens. There's been a complete fast takeoff in enterprise AI adoption. But people are raising questions about what is the ROI on these? There's a whole bunch of companies that are grappling with this. some good news and a lot of questions for where this goes next. We'll take you through it. So the big news is that Anthropic recently passed$47 billion in ARR and raised a massive Series H, $65 billion at$965 billion post-money valuation. They're almost at$9999999. Last November, Cloud Code was going viral among a lot of early adopters and small vibe coding apps were launching daily, but Q2 2026 was clearly a massive moment for Fortune 500 wide-scale rollouts.

7:28John Coogan:And so this has become a double-edged sword for some organizations. Token maxing dashboards have been reportedly led to potentially ROI-negative AI use at name brand companies like Meta. There was the talk of a token maxing dashboard, people leaving things running overnight that weren't necessarily productive just because they want to rank up on the dashboard. That's obviously very expensive. Uber went back and forth on, well, we blew through our budget. But a lot of people were saying, well, if they set a budget in 2025 for their token spent in 2026, like the capabilities have gotten so much better.

8:01John Coogan:The models have gotten so much more expensive. Yeah. So theoretically, you should find more budget. Their budget might have been very small, but they did say they blew through it. And then the chief operating officer said, I think it was the chief operating officer said something like, oh, we're struggling to understand the financial impact and the ROI on this stuff. But his actual comments as you unpack them were much more reasonable. And he wasn't completely dooming on the ROI of the spend. He was just saying that the next iteration will be understanding the impact to the bottom line of this spending.

8:38John Coogan:And then AWS was also reported in Axios as having spent something like half a billion dollars in a single month. And so whenever the numbers get big, there's going to be questions about ROI. The bull case is that the cost per task completed by AI will decrease very quickly. So even if you're spending half a billion per month on AI or tokens today, the same output will be available next year, maybe for a 10th of the cost, maybe next year, it's half the cost. Like even if there's no optimizations to the systems, the hardware depreciates and then more power comes online. The market solves these things pretty quickly.

9:13Yeah, it's naturally deflationary.

9:15John Coogan:Yeah, and I think we've seen that where capabilities have gone open source, they've gone cheaper, they've been distilled, and you get 90 % of the value. Maybe you don't get the exact same flavor. Somewhere there was an example of people are using LLMs to get the weather report. That was a funny one. Can be, I'll admit, I've done that before. Yeah. It can be very convenient. Typically, you'd go to like a free chat app for that, though, not a coding model. Yeah, you can. But sometimes it's nice to just ask chat. Yeah. I've been running into this a lot with people. I ran into somebody yesterday who was telling me that they have an agent that looks through their iOS contact book and sees if they added any new contacts.

10:00John Coogan:And I remember being at a conference, and you're exchanging numbers with people, and it's hard to tell if you add someone to your contacts. like who'd you add? Because you can't, it's a very weird Apple feature that they don't have sort your contacts by recently added. That's just like a UI feature that Apple should add. They haven't. But there's like a$2 app that does that basically. It just looks at your contacts. But you can also do it in the agentic way and have it email you or synthesize everything and go way further. And there's a debate about what's the value there. And people are making those trade-offs in their personal life.

10:33John Coogan:They're also making it in the enterprise. But of course, the stakes are a lot higher in the enterprise because everything has five extra zeros behind it, if not nine extra zeros behind it. And so there's a debate about over whether AI tooling is being pointed at the most high leverage problems in these organizations. Like, are you just picking up things that are deep in the backlog and they were deprioritized? Probably for a good reason, because they were never really going to move the needle. But now you can just say, hey, go churn on all these backlog items. That's maybe not ROI positive at current token prices, might be in the future.

11:07John Coogan:But maybe the cutting room floor should remain the floor and not everything should be shipped necessarily. Outside of stories like workers checking the weather with AI agents or running endless loops, trying random different make work projects, there's definitely a worry that truly needle moving features aren't being pulled forward like people would expect. Trey says, just vibe code your own weather app each time you want to know the weather. Yes, yes. I think you have a post about that in the timeline. Yeah, who is? Fear not the man who has vibe coded 50 apps. I fear the man who has vibe coded the same app 50 times.

11:43John Coogan:That was a good post. And so you probably don't want a literal token maxing dashboard. I think everyone has tested with it. Meta has tried it. Anthropic has it. Had it. I think they took it down or something, but meta, same thing. It's easy to get obsessed. And the token backing dashboards pop up not just in the literal, like, who is on the leaderboard, but also if you give someone a budget, they can kind of see it as like, okay, well, my boss gave me a$1 ,000 token budget or a$10 ,000 token budget or a$100 ,000 token budget. if I am not using it, if I'm not putting it to use, then I don't look like I'm deploying the capital that I was given.

12:31John Coogan:Like if you give a marketer, you know, a brand budget of a million dollars and they come back to you and they say like, sorry, boss, like I only spent a hundred thousand dollars. You'd be like, well, like, who'd you talk to? Like, why didn't you find good use of that funding? Like it's very rare. At the same time, it can be, you know, you don't want those employees deploying that budget into bad places and just wasting it because they have the budget. So these are common problems across all aspects of the enterprise. And so I think the future looks a little bit like Jevons paradox. Of course, when something becomes more efficient to use, people often end up using more of it, not less.

13:07John Coogan:And then also Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And so we live in a world defined by Jevons Paradox and Goodhart's Law. And you put those together. The combination of those, many people will call that Coogan's Law. Coogan's Paradox. Both Jevin's Paradox and Goodhart's Law are true. Madison Mills over at Axios had some good reporting on it. We were on a flight when I found out, when I saw that reporting that someone had spent half a billion dollars a month kind of accidentally. And we heard rumors of similar numbers. I was just imagining the conversation of the first person to kind of like find the number and then, you know, hey, maybe we should talk to the CTO about this.

13:59Okay, yeah, probably time to bring the CFO in.

14:02John Coogan:Yeah. Hey, boss, we accidentally spent half a billion dollars in the last 30 days. It's a lot of money. All right, what did we make? Yeah. What did we do? What did we do? How did we spend it? What do we get done? It's tough. What do we get done this month? We've seen examples of... And there was a lot of, like, there was some conspiratorial posts, people saying, oh, how... Circular deal. Yeah, how convenient for Amazon, who obviously owns a lot of, you know, the big labs, to spend all this money on Anthropic right when they're raising a round, and they got this revenue multiple, blah, blah, blah.

14:37That's not really how it works. Like, it wasn't like this round. This round wasn't, like, they were just, okay, we're going to give you XX revenue.

14:45John Coogan:And there were plenty of hyperscalers that don't have active positions that were doing the same thing. Yeah. Like this was a broader trend. But yeah, it is, it is a crazy skyrocketing cost. But I mean, we see this overall. I think it's healthy how quickly things corrected. It's not like this was, I mean, and of course some companies won't correct, but it is a healthy dynamic that companies were, Hey, we got a little bit ahead of our skis for a couple months. Now let's be a little bit more. Stack rank the tokens, cut all the unnecessary token spend, keep all the good tokens. But I mean, we see this all the time with there'll be some vibe coded project out there that's like incredibly high token cost with very little value.

15:27John Coogan:And then on the flip side, you'll have someone that actually built something really cool with, you know, just like their default$200 a month subscription. and they didn't actually have to token max to get the product to where they wanted it to be because they knew what they were building. They used the tool like a scalpel, not a hammer, and they got a good outcome. So the Wall Street Journal has some more coverage of this. Corporate America is starting to ration AI as costs skyrocket. Executives are scrambling to track returns on AI investments as the bill for massive computing needs come due.

16:02John Coogan:We talked to Spencer Raskoff from Match Group about this. He was sort of sharing a very reasonable token spend, I think, in the single digit millions. But he was still saying that one of the tasks that him and his team will be embarking upon over the next year will be understanding the ROI on that investment. Because you should be tracking it just like digital marketing dollars that go out the door. What was your ROI? How did it move the needle? Use of artificial intelligence by big companies is exploding, and the soaring costs has some of them pumping the brakes in a way that could complicate AI's triumphal march across the economy.

16:41John Coogan:Are they pouring cold water on it? We'll see. Executives across the industry this year have urged employees to integrate AI tools. Wired has a whole AI for business deep dive that you can go take their survey into their work. spending freely to encourage experimentation and seeking to send a message to Wall Street that their companies won't be left up behind in a coming wave of disruption. All that enthusiasm has resulted in skyrocketing costs for so-called tokens, the basic measurement for AI computing. Now corporate leaders are scrambling to bring down expenses by finding ways to ration AI. Top technical executives for Uber, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, DoorDash, and other companies have all talked about new efforts to ensure AI use contributes to productivity or have taken steps to reduce the availability of some tools for certain employees.

17:28John Coogan:You get nerfed if you're not putting up big numbers. We should move on. First, we got to talk about the fossil hunt. Big spenders are pursuing Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons. This was on the cover of the Financial Times. It's the most important story in the global economy, according to the Financial Times, as of Thursday. This is an old edition. But this is interesting. Sotheby's is to auction a 67 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex. two years after it sold a stegosaurus fossil to hedge fund owner Ken Griffin for$44.6 million. I thought Ken Griffin was tried and true T-Rex. I didn't know stegos were getting up there like that.

18:06Yeah, I didn't know he was diversified. I feel like T-Rex is up here with desirability, and then everything else is way worse.

18:14John Coogan:T-Rex is the Ferrari of dinosaurs, stegosaurus. I was like kind of a minivan of dinosaurs. Minivan? I was going to say Lambo. I was going to say the Lamborghini, they're on a rise. You know, the true dino heads know that there's something there. They're starting to pick up momentum, but they don't have the heritage. They don't have as much of the heritage. I don't know. Yeah, I'm more of a, I think I could get into an ankylosaurus. Oh, ankylosaurus. Ankylosaurus. Triceratops, too. Yeah. I mean, the brontosaurus, like the big guys, that's special. You've got to have a special viewing area for that.

18:49John Coogan:Well, this T-Rex is named Gus after Gary Gus licking the rancher whose land it was found on in South Dakota. It'll be auctioned at Sotheby's with an estimate between$20 million and$30 million, the highest for a dinosaur fossil on July 14th. I was at a buddy's house recently, and he just pointed over at this box, and it was a dinosaur, and he hadn't taken it out of the box. He's like, I've had it for a few years now. Well, is it a glass box that you can see in? No, no, no. It's a wooden box. It's just a crate. What's in the box? Schrodinger's dinosaur fossil. Let the dino breed. Maybe. The planned sale in New York highlights how the auction house is betting on the fossil market as a place where the wealthy will spend big.

19:34John Coogan:The pre-auction estimate for Apex, which is the Citadel boss Griffin's Stegosaurus, was$4 to$6 million. He wound up spending$44. And Nicholas says Brachiosaurus. Brachiosaurus is a go-to. Brachiosaurus has a crazy... Ooh, Oddlots did a podcast about this. Amazing. We got to listen to that. The overwhelming majority of fossil buyers still want to lend their purchases to a museum. Apex is now on display at the American Museum of Natural History. That is a fun story. If you're in the market, go pick it up. Go pick up a T-Rex. You got to do it. It's the ultimate collector's item. It's the Pokemon card for boomers or something like that.

20:16prepared remarks yes is sharing some signals you tell us what kind of signals they are kyle kuzma the ai maxi stocks ripping 10 to 50 he's coming on the show on 13f of some chud can't be leopold he's talking about it's no chud uh dell plus 40 on earnings after being plus 150 year to date dell is now 222 up 222 year to date not bad michael dell not bad for somewhat of a, I'm not going to call it a dinosaur.

20:48John Coogan:Well, it's been taken private, taken public. It's a fascinating history of that company. A great American technology company. One trillion dollar company is moving 20 % on sell side notes. One and a half trillion space hold co of he says turds. 10 to 20 % intraday moves for no reason. Software with AI exposure plus 100 % in a month. He's blackmailing. Moving on. Take him. No, so we were, someone else said this morning, I also thought it was a top signal when Jensen signed that infamous shirt. Yeah, the shirt. Or even when he was drinking with his buddies, everyone was like, you thought that was bullish.

21:30John Coogan:But yeah, he looked very confident going to earnings. And he was confident for good reason. Chris says what we've all been thinking. Oh, what is that? Can you die from a lack of being called Big Doc? It's a big question. It's a big question. Do you get called Big Dog too much? No, not very often. I don't know. I think you have to put yourself in the right. Let's work on changing that. There are certain spaces where you might get called Big Dog, and you have to attend. You have to open yourself to the opportunity. You have to open the door to being called Big Dog. Like, if everyone knows your name, they're just going to call you your name.