SpaceX IPO Date, ChatGPT x Personal Finance, Sanders & AOC vs. Data Centers | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:We have a special guest today, Rahul Sunwalker. Introduce yourself for everyone who doesn't know. Hello guys, I'm Rahul Sunwalker, friend of John and Jordi, founder of Julius. Yeah, how are things going? I don't personally think he needs an introduction. I don't think so either. It's Friday. Bunch of tech news, bunch of random posts, the mansion section. Warren Buffett is stepping out for his famed charity lunch again. He's done these for years. A mystery bidder, I wonder if the mystery bidder will be unmasked at some point. A mystery bidder just bid over$9 million to win an auction with the Oracle of Omaha.

0:37John Coogan:Which would you pick? $9 million in your bank account or lunch with the Oracle of Omaha? I'm taking lunch with Oracle of Omaha any day. Any day. Any day. What would I do with$9 million? You could buy Berkshire shares. Let him work for you forever. Rahul lives in SF, right? Yeah. So you come in at nine, you're going to get outbid. Okay, yeah. So what are you going to do at nine? Well, nine is down. So if you look at the chart, there was sort of a slow takeoff in the price of these winning bids for Buffett lunches. Mystery Bidder just paid over$9 million to win an auction with the Oracle of Omaha, who last participated in the event in 2022.

1:16John Coogan:He took a couple of years off, 2020. Of course, COVID took it off, 2021. Made a comeback in 2022. And there was massive demand because previously this was a$2 million lunch. Originally in 2003, it was just a couple hundred K. But then it spiked to almost$20 million. The year's winning bid is a steep drop from the last time Buffett participated in the lunch. But the trend is quite positive. I think it's pretty good if you interpolate this. He's still raising multi-millions every year. So here's what I'm curious about. So it's a mystery bidder. We have no idea why they bid. We just know they want to go to lunch.

1:52Right. We know they want to be at lunch. Right. But delicious lunch. There's a there's a different groups in attendance. Right. You have Steph Curry.

1:59John Coogan:Yeah. And his wife. And so there's a possibility that this person just wanted lunch with them. They could come in and say Warren, you know, keeps kind of like he wants to be friendly. Right. So they paid a lot. So he's trying to engage. And they're like, really, dude, I paid nine million dollars to have lunch with Steph Curry. And you're trying to constantly get a word in what's going on. And and so, yeah, we don't know if this is just a basketball. ball enthusiasts, someone that wants to talk about how the game is evolving. Yeah, hard to sort of disentangle until you figure out who the mystery bidder is.

2:29John Coogan:Are they courtside every game or are they at the Shareholders Conference? At 92, Warren Buffett said he ran out of gas. The spirit remained eager, but the flesh became progressively weaker. That's a wild quote from Warren Buffett. And what about this one? He said both the money and the message remain important. Wait, whoa, whoa. That's not that crazy. The money and the message. I mean, if you say it like he's selling a course, then it sounds significant. Well, we have a question for you. So there was an article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Typing is being replaced by whispering, and it's way more annoying.

3:09John Coogan:As a CEO, as a startup founder, I want your take on workplaces that are starting to resemble high-end call centers. Only these employees are talking to AI. And so they start with an anecdote about working from home. Normally, this couple would be typing on the keyboard, but now they're dictating to Codex and Claude Code. And over at RAMP, engineers sit at their desks wearing gaming headsets so they can talk loudly to their AI assistants. What do you think? Should the future of the office sound more like a sales floor? What do you think? I think on one side, I'm pro this trend of talking to your AI over typing because I can audit what people are typing in the office.

3:58What if they're typing on Instagram or a Twitch live stream?

4:02John Coogan:Okay, so if you're just walking by, you can hear someone. So if you just see and they're saying, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, then there might be an issue. Yeah, yeah. Why are you doing that on the company time? Sure, sure, sure. If they're, like, talking to the AI, like, hey, make me, like, an app. It's more accountability. More accountability. Yeah. On the other hand, it's like, I don't want to hear your prompts. Sure. Like, if somebody read my prompts, I would be so embarrassed. Okay. It's kind of like, you know, they're so personal. What's your May 2026 approach to prompting? My May 2026 approach to prompting is I've completely given up on, like, yelling at AI.

4:41Like, just freaking do this. I've completely stopped doing that. Okay.

4:45John Coogan:Is that just because it's good now? Yeah, I do more like cognitive behavioral therapy with AI now. Like I do more CBT. I try to like reassure the AI. Oh, set it up for success. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do this. Like think about, you know, you're like Palmer Lucky. Yeah. And you can design this like new piece of hardware that's never existed before. Yeah. So I do more of that. You know, up until 2025, I was more yelling at the AI. Yeah. I've completely dropped out of the whole, like, don't make mistakes, don't hallucinate. I feel like all that's been either baked into the pre-training or post-training, or it's, like, even in the system prompt already.

5:23John Coogan:I used to have, the thing that annoyed me for a while was antithetical parallelism. So it's not this, it's that, or hyphens. Those types of things were just tells of AI written content. And I had a special prompt that would inject that in everything. thing it would say hey don't use the it's not this it's that don't use uh contrastive parallelism or antithetical parallelism uh but i since ripped that out and just went back to default and it feels like like all the firms sort of fixed the the base training so that it's not as like uh clankery yeah absolutely i mean i feel like warren kind of ripped one of the models too you know when he said the spirit is eager, but the body is weaker.

6:07Oh! I just... You think Warren's... He's subtweeting the models. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

6:16John Coogan:What about this idea for a gym that's themed like the Rainforest Cafe, and there's even a thunderstorm every minute, every 20 minutes. Have you ever been to the Rainforest Cafe? No, where's the Rainforest Cafe? Rainforest Cafe is a themed restaurant where you walk in and there's rainforest all around you, And there are statues of animals. And the special thing about the Rainforest Cafe is that it's not just like, you know, you go to some steakhouse and they have some pictures on the wall because showing the lineage or you go to an Italian restaurant and you see pictures of celebrities that came in and signed.

6:50John Coogan:It's not purely decorative. It's actually interactive. And at the Rainforest Cafe, every 20 minutes, there's a thunderstorm, and it plays very loudly, and it actually draws your attention away from whatever you're talking about. It's a brain rot restaurant, basically. That's what Rainforest Cafe is. I can't believe you haven't been. You should go. Tyler, have you been to Rainforest Cafe? I have. Here we go. I want to go there. They really go over the top of the decor. Look at the table. It looks like AI slop, honestly, on the table. Is this a real image? Well, I think it's because many of the leading labs train almost exclusively on content from the Rainforest Cafe.

7:27John Coogan:Have you ever been to the Rainforest Cafe, Tyler? No. Has anyone been to the Rainforest Cafe? Okay, we got a couple Rainforest Cafe enjoyers in the TV panel today. But a gym with a theme, would you go? I feel like we're kind of reinventing nature from first principles right now. You might just want to go to the Rainforest to lift. Yeah, just lift heavy things, like go outside, lift rock. Yeah. So this poster suggests that all the machines would be painted to look like they're made of bamboo. The leather is fake leopard print. Someone get me in touch with the mayor of Miami. This would go crazy over there.

8:03John Coogan:Men are allowed or perhaps required to wear loincloths, et cetera. It goes other places. And then he starts drawing out what it would look like. The gym that we worked out in today has a little bit of a theme to it. But it's not too on the nose. but there is you notice the machines have like some decorative stuff on it and it feels like they went one notch further than just the standard gym equipment it's a little flamboyant i would say yeah uh well uh i wanted to ask you about uh schemes that are allegedly taking place in silicon valley these days uh rev swap dot ai this seems like a joke this seems like a like a drop designed to go viral.

8:45John Coogan:Harry Raghavan says, in case you're wondering, this is the stage of the market we're at. And the idea is that you trade dollars with other startups and you book it as revenue. So RevSwap AI is the first, the world's first peer-to-peer revenue laundering platform. See, it's got to be a joke at that point. For SF startups, you give us$1 million, we give you$1 million back. Now you have$1 million ARR math. Start swapping. uh how yeah the problem the problem of the the problem with these is it's funny for uh people that are like maybe closer to the inside but this got half a million views yeah so that means there's hundreds of thousands of people that think this is like a real thing yeah they either they either think they're they're doing a startup and they should do this or they think they're outside and they're like this is how bad startups are yeah i don't think many startups are doing this but But if you've talked to VCs, is like quality of revenue coming up, revenue concentration, circular revenue deals?

9:48John Coogan:Is any of that coming up these days? I think investors deeply care about all those things. And good investors still do their due diligence when investing in companies, especially when they're at a mid to later stage, right? Sure. But really, like, where do you draw the line, right? You see NVIDIA investing in a lot of neoclots that go buy their GPUs. They help start these new clouds. And then you have, of course, like NVIDIA investing in AI labs that end up being like downstream consumers of these GPUs. And so like, I think in a way, like, yes, it's kind of like a revenue swap where you're investing in a company and then like they're kind of like buying your product.

10:30Kind of just like trading dollars. but so I think there's like in some places it makes sense in some certain context in the if you're a founder though and if you're an early stage founder if you're just like going for this you have to ask yourself like okay what am I really in this for like am I here to like build a business and build a thing that people want or am I here to just like LARP LARP yeah and a lot of people do play like founder as opposed to like building a business building a company yeah but But this is also like a crime. So it's not just LARPing. Like, I don't know. I actually think you disclose it.

11:05John Coogan:If you're just like, yeah, we have this weird circular deal. You should probably discount it to zero. That's not wire fraud. Like if you're disclosing it, like the wire fraud is only when you are stating one thing as another, like you're lying. If you're not lying about it and you're just like, yeah, we have this weird circular deal where we pay this company, they pay us. You should probably not give us any credit for that in our valuation. Their entire life is a LARP. The big news today is, of course, Bernie Sanders and AOC introduced a bill to pause all AI data center construction. I want to know within this bill how they are defining AI data center.

11:41John Coogan:Of course, GPUs are graphics processing units. You wire a bunch of them together. You can do AI. You can do machine learning. You can render CGI films. There's a lot of different uses, and I wonder how they're grappling with that definition. But 300 local bills have been, 300 plus local bills have been filed. Half of planned 2026 data centers are facing delays or cancellation. Each one brings billions to local economy, says Gary Tan. The people who say they want American jobs are trying to block the biggest job creation engine since the interstate highway system. Sanders and AOC are straight up sabotaging the economy, says Nick.

12:22John Coogan:Davidov, no spy or a rival country agent can achieve what local useful idiots can. And so people are going back and forth about the data center construction ban. I wonder how this will pencil out. Elizabeth Warren says, a single AI data center uses as much electricity as 100 ,000 households and utility companies are passing the upgrade costs to you, not to the trillion dollar tech Giants that, of course, was attempted to be addressed by the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, but it is early days. And so we'll have to see how that pans out. Yeah. And this is the same bill that was introduced in March, but it's continuing to pop up again, obviously, as they try to move it along.

13:10But it hasn't passed committee yet. It doesn't obviously have like bipartisan support.

13:17John Coogan:Yeah. Very unlikely. And there's a lot of geopolitical considerations. Anthropic put out a big essay today around different resolutions to U.S.-China competition in the age of AI. Obviously, they are very aggressive about don't lose the lead, continue to build data centers, but the nimbyism, the noise complaints, the environmental concerns, like all of these things do have to be addressed in a democratic society if we are to move along smoothly. Tyler. Yeah, so just for like the definitions, how it's defined. So a data center is defined as a building that has more than 20 megawatts maximum power capacity or total peak power that are used to deliver 20 kilowatts or more to a single server rack or to use liquid cooling to individual hardware components.

14:09So yeah, I'm just wondering if we're going to get

14:11John Coogan:some weird workaround where, okay, Instead of like one big building, you get a thousand smaller buildings that are all. So it also says like a building that's contiguous or adjacent to another building. OK. So I think they have to put some like trees in between them or something. I don't know. I just like every time there's a law, people will find a way around the law. And so I'm very interested to see how this winds up changing. It could change it for good. You know, it could be like, OK, yeah, like like clean energy and it's underground and it doesn't it's not noisy. and it doesn't create, it feels like the real issue at debate is like passing the cost on to people who don't benefit, a negative externality, which the government has been internalizing negative externalities since its inception.

14:58John Coogan:And so there's certainly a good outcome, but it will be - Almonds are catching some heat from JCal. Oh yeah. He is showing almond production versus data center water consumption from 1999 to 2026. And yeah, everyone has been saying for years, even prior to the AI boom, just how much water almonds use. This was particularly top of mind when California was in a massive drought. And then you drive through different parts of California and it's just almond trees as far as the eye can see. And so anyways, almonds catching strays. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you look at this and you think about the growth rate in this year, like you can see the blue line is ticking up and you can see that the red line for almonds is flatlining.

15:48John Coogan:And so if you are extremely aggressive about counting the ooms and you project this out a couple of years, you can see these two things flip. But of course there are ways to avoid situations like that with water use increasing, such as what Blake Scholl proposes, which is closed loop cooling and booms superpower turbines that don't need any water. And you can avoid all of that. But the whole water debate seems like not the focus of the Sanders AOC proposal. It seems much more focused on generation and upgrading the grid, which is expensive and is real. Everyone knows that data centers do use a lot of power.

16:32John Coogan:No one's saying that the high energy intensity is fake news, even though the water debate was a little bit, it was sort of quickly debunked. The energy debate has not been debunked. And so there is a need for more clean energy, more power, and more grid upgrades that are not visited upon local communities. The big question that we were trying to answer, and we're going to try and get someone on the show. If you were attempting to build a data center that had 80 % approval, what would that look like? What is the Ezra Klein abundance vision for a data center? It's probably powered by clean energy.

17:12John Coogan:It's probably somewhere very remote. Brandon was talking about the 40-minute commute. The 40-minute commute is something that many Americans do, and it is not insurmountable. And he was just reflecting on if you're ever driven in or around Las Vegas, If you drive 40 minutes in any direction, you get to a lot of empty land where certainly a big building is not going to be an eyesore. You're not going to be able to hear 60 decibels from 20 minutes away. And there is a lot of land, but that hasn't been the default construction methodology for a lot of data center constructors. Yeah, it's like the TSMC plant in Arizona is like basically 30 minutes north of like central Phoenix.

17:55John Coogan:Yeah, it didn't seem like there were any houses. Yeah, so you basically go over a little hill, and then it's just completely empty land. There's a massive fab. It's thick. Yeah, I like that. I learned an interesting fact, which is that Apple has a secret fab. They have a silicon fab in Silicon Valley. They bought a fab for, I sent you the, I had to fact check this because I saw it, and it was framed as like this secret, like, you know, terrible thing. It was not that, it's not that scary. They bought it for$18.2 million. It's a 70 ,000 square foot facility owned by Maxim previously. They bought it maybe in 2015.

18:35John Coogan:And it's controversial because they were fined by, I believe, the EPA for some mislabeling of waste and air emissions controls. But it was a pretty small fine. It was something like a couple hundred, maybe$200 ,000. And it seemed like they might have just had a mistake. They brought down the hammer on them. Yeah. Well, I think it was like, you know, the air conditioning duct was slightly misconfigured. It was not like a nuclear waste spill, like destroying the whole town. But it was controversial, obviously, because Apple wants to be as clean and environmentally friendly as possible, which is why I lean into they don't want a massive.

19:18John Coogan:like they're not even a scaled chip manufacturer. This is a prototype facility. They manufacture between 600 nanometers to 90 nanometers, way different than what's happening at TSMC with two and three nanometers. So it's not a secret facility in the literal sense. The secret fab framing comes mostly from critics and whistleblower coverage, not because it was unknown to government or industry was licensed. The EPA says the Apple facility on Scott Boulevard So maybe that's your next trip, Tyler. You're going over to, where is it? It's in Santa Clara, in Santa Clara. On Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara, generated hazardous waste and had RCRA violations in 2023 to 2024, which they made fixes for.

20:06John Coogan:And they paid a$261 ,000 penalty. It's 3 ,250 Scott Boulevard. If you're in Santa Clara, go stop by. Let's give it up for Scott. I didn't know you had a Boulevard named after you. It's very funny. So the XAI co-founder, I go where Babushkin is planning to raise up to 1 billion at an up to$5 billion valuation for a new AI research startup with general catalyst, possibly leading. Why is Tyler laughing so much? A rule had a good post earlier. Oh yeah. Okay. GC has a very high moral bar, so I don't think Igor will be continuing to work on Ani. Maybe. And some of the other features that the XAI had been focused on.

20:56John Coogan:Might be pivoting. Anyway, we should go over to the journal because the mansion section has a very interesting story today about a 40-year marriage. Built one gut renovation at a time. If you want a successful relationship, buy 10 houses over four decades and constantly be renovating. I think there's a lot of truth in this. Let's read the story. I'll give you my take. So one Oklahoma couple spent decades and roughly$14 million buying, redoing, and selling eight properties around Tulsa for their ninth production they built from the ground up. They say for them, it's an adventure. Ann and Mark Farrow are a real estate wildcard.

21:36John Coogan:Always at home, never settled. Over 40 years, they've gutted and lived in eight houses around Tulsa. The ninth they built, together their house transactions have totaled about$14 million, a portfolio market by reimagined floor plans and high-end finishes. Their latest, a 7 ,200 square foot build draws on everything they have learned since their first renovation in the 1980s. Now, even the pharaohs wonder whether the journey is over. This house would be hard to duplicate, says Mark 67. 67. The Wall Street Brain Rot Journal added again. Turning 67 in 2026 is brutal. They also profiled an entrepreneur who's 67 who just started a company.

22:24John Coogan:Weird. Companies ripping, doing well, never too late to start a company. Yet resisting another fixer-upper won't be easy for the couple who rejected being called flippers. instead identifying as serial renovation lovers. I go through withdrawal without a home project, says Ann, 63, who's retired. While nine home projects would send most couples into mediation, the pharaohs view logistical nightmares as a shared thrill. Their secret? Radical honesty and speed. For us, it's an adventure, Mark says. These are real operators. No, no, this is a team. You're looking at the Collison brothers, There's the family business builders of real estate.

23:06John Coogan:We should scroll through the actual images of the house because they got started pretty small. $86 ,000 in 1986. They bought the starter home. They sold it in 1993 for$97 ,000. Held for nine years, only made 10%. But that was where the adventure began in 1986 with a Cape Cod style house. It was 2 ,000 square feet. interior was complete with a lavender formica countertops and a wet bar their first construction project closing in closing in an office to make an extra extra bedroom interesting you know how alcohol sales are falling off a cliff yes and there's like oh who was it Derek Thompson had a good post about this and he sort of enumerated all the different reasons why alcohol is falling off a cliff.

24:00John Coogan:He posts a lot. He posts a lot of good stuff. Where can I find it? Alcohol, alcohol. Wow, he does post a lot. So off the top of his head, secular anti-alcohol trends, GLP ones, post 1970s rise of helicopter parenting, reaction to the binge drinking spike of the late 20th century. There was a binge drinking spike in the late 20th century? Oh, that was like the CKY, by Johnny Knoxville era, I suppose. That probably led to a lot of that. There's also a power law in binge drinking, right? Yeah, they say, what, 1 % of the binge drinkers do 99 % of the binge drinking, something like that? No, I think it's actually like 10 % of people that consume alcohol consume like 90 % of the alcohol.