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

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

A bunch of stories. We're going to go through mostly the stories that have just broken in 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-L-C-306 while attempting to static fire ahead of NG4. We can watch this video because it is absolutely insane. Looks like a nuclear bomb went off. It looks like a scene from Oppenheimer. It looks like 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. This is not good. That has to be extremely, extremely frustrating. Brandy 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 it's 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 Gersner talking about this on CNBC.

I think someone was playing a Gershner 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. 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, it's 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 ever more frequent and reliable launch capacity. started before SpaceX.

We talked about this before. That's been hard. And yeah, unclear, unclear how much this will set them back. But certainly disappointing. 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. 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's it is very exciting for America to have multiple heavy launch capability providers in the market. It's good. It was very exciting when New Glenn got to orbit, came back. That was the second time that that that sort of rocket technology had been demoed.

And it was demoed in America, sort of even our second best rocket proprietor is better than everyone else around the globe. What else do you have, Tyler? Yeah, just some added context. So 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. Wait, but that was New Glenn? That was, yeah, that was the third test. That was pretty recent. So they're on a pretty good case. cadence here, but this is still a huge setback. Yeah, ASP 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 are 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. From 2006 to 2008, Elon Musk had three consecutive failures with Falcon won before successfully launching it. And so failure 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 people watching a launch. Yeah, this one from truthful. 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 local.

I wonder what the reaction is from the people. Wow, that's really far away. It's far away, but it's also a pretty big mushroom cloud. Yeah. I imagine maybe they walk to their cars. Yeah, I saw some people saying, like, 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 Romans 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 Hurst 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. John said it blew up. But, uh, or, you know, blue as in sort of sad, feeling blue. Sad, yeah, sad start. But they will rebuild. They will be back. 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 of 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.

I was expecting a crater. Zoom out a little bit. I was expecting a crater in the ground. Yeah, so 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, 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 $965 billion. They're almost at 99999.99.99. Last November, Claude 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. 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.

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, 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 like the ROI on this stuff. But his actual comments as you unpacked them were much more reasonable and he wasn't completely, you know, dooming on the ROI of the spend. He was just saying that like the next iteration will be understanding the impact to the bottom line of this spending. And then AWS was also reported in Axios 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 tenth 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. Like the market solves these things pretty quickly. Yeah, it's naturally deflationary. Yeah, 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, you know, 90% of the value. Maybe you don't get the exact same flavor. Yeah, somewhere there was an example of, you know, people are using LLMs to get the weather report. That was a funny one. Can be, I'll admit, I've done that before. It can be very convenient. Typically, you'd go to like a free chat app for that, though, not a coding model. 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. And I remember being at a conference, and you know, you're changing, you're exchanging numbers with people, and it's hard to tell if you add someone to your contacts, like, who'd you add? Like, 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 context. But you can also do it in the agentic way and have an email you or synthesize everything and go way further. And there's a, you know, a debate about what's the value. there and people are making those tradeoffs in their personal life. 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. But maybe the cutting room floor should remain the floor and not be, 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. 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's 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 marketing 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 to 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. 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 $100,000, 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 Jevin's paradox, of course. When something becomes more efficient to use, people often end up using more of it, not less, and then also Good Hearts Law.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And so we live in a world defined by Jevin's Paradox and Good Hearts Law. And you put those together. The combination of those, many people will call that Coogan's Law. Cougain's Paradox. Kugin's Paradox. Both Jevin's Paradox and Goodhart's Law are true. Madison Mills over at Axios had some good reporting on it.

I was, 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'd heard rumors of similar numbers. 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. Okay. Yeah, probably time to bring the CFO in. Yeah. Hey, 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 do we do? How do we spend it?

What do we get done? It's tough. What do we get done this month? And there was, there was a lot of like, there was some conspiratorial posts people saying, oh, how, 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 around and they got this revenue multiple, blah, blah, blah, that'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 X, X, X revenue. 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 a crazy skyrocketing cost. But, I mean, we see this overall. 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. Yeah. Now let's be a little bit more. Stack rank the tokens, cut all the unnecessary token spend, keep all the good tokens spent. 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. 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, you know, 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 cost skyrocket. Executives are scrambling to track returns on AI investments as the bill for massive computing needs come due. 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, like, 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. 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 unit 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. You get nerfed if you're not putting up big numbers. We should move on. First, we've 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 the financial times. 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 was I didn't know I didn't know stegas were getting up there like I yeah I didn't know he was diversified you know I feel like T-Rex is up here yeah. Yeah. T-Rex is the Ferrari of dinosaurs, stagosaurus. I was like kind of a minivan of dinosaurs.

Minivan, I was gonna say Lambo. I was gonna 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, and kilosaurus.

Triceratops too. Yeah. I mean the brontosaurus, like the big guys, that's, that's specially, You got to have a special viewing area for that. 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. 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 wooden box. It's just a crate. What's in the box? Schrodinger's dinosaur fossil. 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. The pre-oction estimate for Apex, which is the Citadel boss, Griffin's Stegosaurus, was 4 to 6 million. He wound up spending 4.44.

Brachiosaurus is a go-to. Brachiosaurus has a crazy... Oh, Odlots did a podcast about this? Amazing. We've 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 fun story. If you're in the market, go pick it up. Go pick up a T-Rex. You've got to do it. It's the ultimate collector's item. It's the Pokemon card for boomers or something like that. Prepared remarks 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. Dell plus 40% on earnings after being plus 150% year to date. Dell is now 220 up 222% year to date.

Not bad. Michael Dell. Not bad for somewhat of a, I'm not going to call it a dinosaur. Well, it's been taken private, taking 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 blackpilling. Moving on. Take him. 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 a big signal.

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. That'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. There's 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.

You have to be walking around in a certain space. Deep Fates, this was the post we had earlier. I fear not the man who vibe-coded 50 new apps, but the man who vibe-coded one new app 50 times. It's a banger post. I think he meant to say, but the man who vibe-coded the same app 50 times. Yeah, the same new app 50 times, something like that.

This was good. Over on Reddit, R-Slas CFA. Would it be considered insider trading if I'm on a hunting trip or safari with a CEO of a large firm and they get mauled by hyenas, and I start buying put options on their firm. Let's say I go to Tanzania.

This does not sound hypothetical. With the CEO of a very prominent firm in the United States when we suddenly get overraned by a pack of a dozen hungry hyenas. However, I and my youthfulness are, of course, quicker than this old man, and I manage to escape and hide behind a rock while the hyenas mall him. If instead of helping him fend them off, I open up Robin Hood and start buying put options on his company, would this be insider trading?

There's absolutely no way this can be priced into the stock predicted. Oh, but the material non-public info, blah, blah, blah, okay, but what if before I buy the puts, I post a video of him getting attacked on my public Instagram story of what then? Thoughts purely hypothetical. Does not sound hypothetical. Well, it all depends on what the market thinks about the CEO,

because it's possible that the market sees his bullish signal. The CEO is no longer there. He's clearly pricing in the 21% nuke salute, you know, where the market at least briefly sells off 21%, and then hopefully it pops back up. But of course, people are saying it's priced in. Everything's priced in. Brad Hunt, asked John about his new basketball.

Can so is the car here? We have the basketball. Nick, can you go get the basketball that's in my driver's seat or in the passenger seat? Because we were at Laurel Supply yesterday, which makes Airwan look like a 7-11. It makes air one look like a seven-level. It's so above. No. No. It's very comparable. Is the new airwan in, in L.A.

Yeah. It's not. It's very nice. Not an actual heroin. Food was good. Everything is a one-to-one copy of air one. It didn't need. It's like disorienting. They did not try to differentiate a single thing.

Yeah. They copied every item on the menu. They copied every, delicious food. Every single item. In my culture, that's very offensive. you're going to go through the process of creation. Yeah, you'd think it would be able to do something differently.

Okay, but outside of Laurel Supply, I receive from, I get stopped by a person who I believe is in the chat. And he says, here is a basketball. I got this for you because he's raising money for a company, Punter, and it says, invest in the future of sports, Punter.us slash invest. And he had this basketball with a QR code on here. What a unique way to draw attention to your company. What a unique way to pitch someone. And you know we love a basketball in the studio.

We do. We use a soft one because there's a lot of camera gear so we don't throw a full-size basketball. We use a foam one. But thank you to the punter team for making this possible. Very interesting. Very, very fun way. And what a great way to end to the show. We had an NBA star on the show.

Can we finish for the basketball? Have a great weekend. We'll see you on Monday. Have an incredible weekend. Have an incredible weekend. I can't wait for Monday. I can't wait for Monday. Sign up for our newsletter at TBPN.com.

And we will see you on Monday. On Monday. Goodbye.