TBPN - Datacenter Protests, Paramount WB Bid Clears Key Hurdle, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: February 21, 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.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCisco - https://www.cisco.comCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnKalshi - https://kalshi.comLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comOkta - https://www.okta.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioSentry - https://sentry.ioShopify - https://shopify.com/tbpnTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coFollow 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

Charlie Cretoville says, we won no data center, and they have to build a park. Yes. This got 3 million views, 222,000. That ratio is crazy, right? Yeah. Crazy ratio. Gary Tan responds and says, a fully built one gigawatt data center complex generates around $31 million per year in state taxes

and $61 million per year in local taxes from data center operations alone. Also, it creates roughly 430 direct jobs. at the facility itself, plus many more indirect and construction phase jobs. So nearly $100 million a year in local taxes based on this analysis by the Consumer Energy Alliance. So maybe these data centers need to be leading with that more. Think about how many parks you can build. Over think about how many roads you can repair, new buildings, schools that you'll be able to build locally, if you have one of these. You know, we've talked about this at length, but it's understandable that citizens will be like, I don't need the data center.

my backyard to use chat GPT. So why would I want it? But if you're going to have nearly nine figures in local and state taxes that you can direct. There is another solution here. You could build a jungle gym that has GPUs embedded in the slides and in the swings. And so you get a little bit of those rolly slide things. Yes.

Yes. So those were generating electricity. Oh, yeah. I know. I'm thinking of what you're thinking. Of course. Put the kids to work. If they're swinging, I want to capture that electricity.

and turn it in to tokens. And Reggie James, creative director of General Catalyst and friend of the show, says, you mean to tell me the meme of creating a permanent underclass hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of the public. Shocking. Yeah. Very good point. Let's pull up this video because it's a pretty wild reaction.

Let's get sound and start it back at the beginning. They canceled it. Wow. They cancel it. It's like the little yachty, little yon. Yeah, it is. The little yonty walkout. They got a soundboard?

It does seem like a deal. Keep chanting. Your Netflix recommendations just got 0.1% less accurate. New Jersey. They actually have a live band? Yeah, it's interesting because the pushback against data centers, it really is this meme of creating a permanent underclass, like that type of thing, because I, I,

I would be so much more expecting of this pushback if it was like, oh, well, we know that, like, living next to a data center is dangerous for your health. Like, that is not the meme. The meme is, like, maybe your power rates will go up, but it's sort of unclear and they might offset that. They're sort of ugly, but they're not the biggest, craziest thing that you could put there. It really is just about, like, I don't like what it produces abstractly. And so I don't want the concrete.

I don't like what it stands for. Yeah, exactly. I don't like what it stands for. It's a little bit different than, I think a lot of people do. Great says, for real, though, data centers filling up northern Virginia is super annoying and ugly. They're like 600 now. They got to make them look better. Yeah, okay, so you were joking about the jungle gym, but there is that, you've probably seen it.

There's in Denmark, there's the ski hill that's on top of the power plant. Wait, really? Have you seen that? No, I haven't seen that. I thought you were going to mention the, have you seen the stealthy cell phone towers? So there are cell phone towers all over Los Angeles that are dressed up like trees. Yeah, they always get me. They always get you?

They can tell. You can do. I'm kidding. Of course you can tell. From very far away. They do sort of like fade into the background and you don't notice them as much as like a full-on crazy cell tower in your face. AI folks have about four months to pull a cure for cancer out of the latent space before

we drift into a butlerian jihad, a tractor basin. Yeah. Jihad. Butlarian jihad is from Dune. They don't want computers so they use spice and they travel around that way. Yeah, it's really popular. I mean, we talked to Sagar and Jetty about this. It's bipartisan.

It's very, very broad support against data center buildout. And there doesn't seem to be anything that's pushing back against it. And I was thinking more about the cure for cancer thing because, you know, Microsoft Excel has been useful in medicine. You use Microsoft Excel to catalog how patients are doing, track a bunch of blood work, create a correlation. Okay, these people got placebos, these people got the real cancer treatment. Now we know for sure. And it just sped it up a little bit. You could have done it on paper, but doing it in Excel, probably move things forward, just a notch. You got the cancer cure like a couple months earlier, a little bit cheaper, a little bit faster. And that's sort of like diffusion story

is ridiculously unsexy. Like it's not attractive at all. No one wants to talk about. I had this riff for a while. People want one simple trick. I had this riff for a while that the debt markets were critical in the space raise. Like you actually do need to finance rocketry with debt. You need efficient capital markets to build rockets. But everyone likes to look at rockets. No one wants to look at debt covenants. And so rocket engineers get all the credit when, in fact, some of the credit does in fact belong to the financiers that make large-scale industrial projects possible. People, you know, love the bridge, but they don't think about the financiers that make it possible. But as silly as that,

it sounds like it really is an important step in the chain. And AI, it might be that more than like the magical, you know, cure for cancer that you pull out of latent space. It's going to be tricky. Like, I think even if we do see a boom in cancer, drugs, and we hear testimonies from scientists that, oh, yeah, like, AI definitely like sped me up. Like, the ticker tape parade is going to happen for the scientists. Like, we know Jennifer Duden is name for discovering MRNA and CRISPR.

Like, we don't know the software stack that she used when she was analyzing gene thing. We got to find out. We do, because that's the real hero. It's not the real hero. But it's an important hero in the story that we just don't tell because it's abstract and diffuse. Let's pull up this video from Architectural Digest of this beautiful, sustainable power plant with a ski slope on its roof. So you can actually ski on this? Wait, you ski on the grass?

You can ski on grass? It works. I had no idea. I mean, presumably in winter, there would be some snow on it. world is the building industry. The building industry accounts for one third of all CO2 emissions, and we need to bring that down. This thing looks so cool. This is cool. This is cool. Tray in the chat would be totally cool with more data centers in Virginia. I imagine if you had extreme sports on the roof. Yes. Do a deal with Red Bull. Get the FPV drones out there.

Red Bull sponsored data centers. The next X games on data centers. Yeah. I mean the Olympics are coming. If you want to build a data center in LA, why not build an Olympic village as well? On cities, we want to design the future of the buildings that we would like to live in.

My name is Jakob Lange. I'm a partner and architect at the architecture firm, Big or Bjarkie Ingalls Group. We're standing here at Copenhagen Hill, the tallest mountain. tallest mountain in Copenhagen. Wait, what? Well, he's calling the building a mountain.

That's insane. Just logging mountains. We started a competition to design the facade of this building. We were struggling for quite a while, but in one of the design meetings, we were talking about the fact that... Thrasher magazine needs to get it on this deal plow. Completely agree. Are you a thrasher magazine guy? Thrashir.

I haven't been a subscriber in probably 10 years, but... Yeah. Yeah, how did we not know about this? This is amazing. Yeah. I knew about it. Buried in the... You did.

You did. Buried in the European stagnation thesis is the most white pill of all white pills. Structured. I mean, this goes viral every like few months. I've seen this a bunch on... We got to do it. You should post it. Why is no one talking about what's it called?

Yes, yes. But I'm saying people are talking about... talking about this. No, no one's talking about this. We're the first people that's talking about this. Yeah. It feels like Apple would be one to do this. It's in line with the Google branding. There's so many companies that are ready to sort of pick up what this is all about and do a promo video. Put plants on the roof of the data center. It takes a building that looks dystopian and cold industrial. Build them underground, right? And then put the park on top of it. I don't know. It just seems like there's so many easy ways.

over on X says there's an abandoned Brooks Brothers office in my town would make a lovely data center. So he's taking the other side. I think if you left the sign and it was just Brooks Brothers, you kind of revitalize the sign, redid the kind of landscaping, but then put a data center in it. I love it. Let's head over to Time Magazine. He came in pretty hot on the reaction. He said, Team Cope made the cover of Time.

Yeah. The people versus AI, a lot of... Behind the growing backlash. I mean, the growing backlash is really, it actually makes a lot of sense to do a portrait and a profile on all the different voices that are here because some of them are lawmakers, some of them are pundits, some of them are analysts,

some of them are environmentalists, some of them are lawyers, all sorts of different folks. Did you read it yet, Tyler? Why are you laughing? In protest, you won't. Team Cope is funny. Team Cope is funny. Yeah, people took this all over the place.

The people versus the wheel, grunts from the, Silent majority dragging rocks and rolling is a drag. People are having a lot of fun about this. The horses versus the car. The horses versus the car. At the same time, like, this, the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, well, obviously, AI is going to happen. So this is, you know, it's inevitable.

It's like, no, these, like, we live in a democracy. Like, if they vote, no more data centers. Look at what happened in nuclear, people. Like, you keep comparing AI to splitting the atom. I was just watching some video, and the guy was saying, like, AI is the most incredible human invention. It's up there right with when we split the atom. And I'm like, well, I know how that ended. We got a bunch of nuclear weapons that we didn't even fire at each other.

It just became a cold war. So really zero economic value from that, just a lot of people building and then putting them in silos. And then a couple nuclear power plants that eventually got regulated out of existence. We never got a nuclear future of energy. And so it is possible that, like, society can just freak out and be like, actually, we're doing non-proliferation. That's a possible outcome here. Hill says this is why we need data centers in space. Elon looking pretty smart.

For sure, for sure. Even if the timelines that have been thrown out are aggressive on a longer time horizon. You're not going to have to pushback there. And Trey really coming in with the most obvious solution, blimp data centers, just put them over, put them over the Pacific. I love it. Float them over there. Rob over on X has found some information on the Twitter deal. trial. I believe this is the case around the Twitter employees that did not actually get their

severance. It says the class action brought by former Twitter investors against Elon Musk. I actually don't know that much about this particular case, but there was a pool of 92. I think Twitter was worth more than $44 billion? Well, maybe they had stock options that were canceled. Maybe they are employees, but they're counted as investors in this case because it's a SEC violation instead of an employment contract. Apparently, Elon Musk's popularity, unpopularity, is throwing a wrench in the trial because, quote, hate for Musk quickly narrows the jury pool in Twitter deal trial. California judge quickly narrowed a pool of 92 prospective jurors Thursday, excusing 38 potential jurors who said they couldn't be fair and impartial, as Musk's attorney lamented.

There are so many people who hate him so much. Yeah. The trial involves claims from Twitter investors who say Musk violated securities law by publicly waffling over his decision to purchase the company and driving down its stock price. Yeah, and there's probably a lot of people who are, they don't like Elon because of the, because of the benchmarking. Does that mean, no?

So he said, okay, I'm going to buy this company. Yeah. And then he was trying to back out because he was like the price is insane. Yeah. And then the stock declined and people sold. And then it ended up getting bought up. or now they're like, well, you kind of misled, I don't know, it seems. I wonder actually how this one net out.

Yeah. Because he didn't make anyone sell the company if you're a Twitter shareholder and you believe that. Basically, I mean, every time you make a public statement, unless it's disclosed through the traditional SEC workflow, one person or five people can sell and then they can hold you to account on that, on the impacts of that. And so every possible move in the price of the company can come back to bite you based on what you were saying and whether or not it was above board. Yeah. Pub is saying they're calling it the most Canadian caption of all time. Team Canada hit the timeline after their loss to the United States saying silver shines just as bright. That is very Canadian.

Absolutely brutal. This is a Canadian on our team is sitting over there shaking his head. He's hard to see from this angle. We're all friends on this continent. We like a good competition. There's a war in the community notes right now. People are saying, silver actually shines brighter than gold, but gold is better. It actually doesn't.

It also tarnishes much easier and becomes dull. Gold is greater than silver. Blake Robbins is reacting to the news that meta's VR metaverse is ditching VR. This is from the Verge. We'll have to talk to Alex Heath, former Verge reporter later today. This feels pretty clear. The Metaverse was actually just Roblox this whole time. Not Fortnite, not VR.

This is extremely hard for me as a VR bull. I threw on the headset yesterday. Watched about 10 minutes of Blade Runner 2049 before you called me, and I had to take it off. But I was having a great experience watching a 3D movie. You threw that on right when you got home. Right when I got home. I was like, I'm going to chill for a little bit.

Throw on Blade Runner 2049. Reggie recommended it. So Hip City Reg. I was like, okay, I got to do it. but interrupted, there was other stuff going on. So didn't get through the whole movie, but still, delightful experience. And VR is not dead. It's about to reanimate and come back from the grave.

In the next 400 years, I guarantee you, VR will be like kind of popular, like sort of popular. Matthew Ball dropped his state of video games in 2026. Boom. One of the standout lines was Roblox had 150 million daily users in Q3 of 2025. its quarterly engagement is now equal to Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. It's huge. Which is just absolutely wild. This is the report that I was sort of inspired by yesterday when I was talking about this interesting fact that Matt Ball shared on his trajectory interview,

that when you look at video games, the video game market is not doing particularly well. You have to always segment out non-China. and then there's also mobile versus console, are people paying, or is it ad-based? There's a whole bunch of different sub-segments. But just looking at non-China growth in video games, like all of the growth went to Roblox. And basically everything else was either flat or down,

and people are starting to just spend more time on endless feats. They're on Instagram, they're on TikTok, or they're doing sports betting or watching TV or watching Netflix. There's a million different things that have fought for a team, And it used to be the greatest bargain in history. And Strauss-Zellnick, the CEO of Take-2, maker of GTA and 2K games, got in a lot of trouble at one point because he said, like, we should be charging per minute.

And people were like, this is a nightmare that he's gonna charge per minute. And he was like, no, no, no, I just mean, in terms of the value that we're delivering, we will take $60 from you, which is a lot of money, but we will give you GTA-5, which you can play for 100 hours, and have a great time and some people will play for more than that. And so on a per hour basis, you're paying like 50 cents.

Now comp that, he would say, comp that to go into the movies. You know, you pay 20 bucks and you're there for two hours, that's $10 an hour for entertainment. Whereas with a video game, 50 bucks for 50 hours, you're paying a dollar an hour. He was just driving home that is a great value. That is no longer the case in the world where there's so much incredible entertainment that's basically free because it's ad-supported. and the experience of scrolling an endless vertical social feed

is now rivaling the level of entertainment that you get from video games. It used to be like, yeah, I'll go on Facebook and check some posts about see who posted what they did this weekend, checking with that. But I got to go and play Counterstrike, or I got to go play the actual game that's like really fun. Now it's a lot more competitive. I'll kind of tap through. So global video game content sales had a strong 2025 growing 5% year-over-year

and hitting a new all-time high of about $195 billion, 10 billion more than the prior higher in 2021. The industry high was achieved through new highs in each of mobile PC and console two, so everything's up and to the right. And fortunately, 2025, as with years prior, both had several new hit franchises and studios, while many older franchises and studios also achieved new highs.

But despite three straight years of industry growth, a new record high for revenues, and a smattering of new hits each year. Private funding for game makers fell another 55% in 2025. There's so much going on in the video game industry, and it's often overlooked because it's just like sort of off in its own little world. Do you want to talk about chill remote jobs, or do you want to stay on video games?

Yeah, let's talk. Do you want a chill remote job? No, I said that, but I lied. I don't want a chill remote job. I actually love a high-pressure job. I love office politics. I love being thrown into the fire. Last minute slide changes fuel me. I get high off an ad hoc ask. Corporate jargon is my love language. When I'm in office, I'm a lethal corporate machine. I'm on a God-tier flow state right now. This is my favorite game. This is so good. I love this new genre of the day in the life at work. Whoever said that office jobs are adult daycares was on to something. There's nothing like an ad hoc ask, right, Tyler? I feel like Tyler, Tyler and Tyler lives for an ad hoc ask.

He's like, yes and. You're like, yes, but let me throw on my white suit first. Yes, markets. Markets up. Let's go. I think at least it was. Yeah. More news in Paramount's $108 billion bid for Warner Brothers.

It cleared an antitrust hurdle. What hurdle was that? The media group whose bid is bankrupt, a bankrolled by Oracle billionaire, Donald Trump, for Leroydian slip. No, Oracle's doing fine. Said on Friday that its deal had complied with the U.S. Department of Justice's second request review process,

removing a critical impediment to U.S. regulatory approval. I have no idea why there would be any antitrust worries here. The antitrust question is always been... The point is that there's no antitrust... With Paramount and Warner Brothers. The question has always been Netflix,

but I thought that was going to get through, but we'll see where it lands. So Paramount's deal could still be blocked, but by allowing, but by allowing the 10-day statutory waiting period to elapse under HSR or Hart Scott Rodino acts, second request process, the DOJ is clearing the path for Paramount's deal on antitrust grounds. The government's saying they can go forward as long as they can agree to terms. Yeah. And zooming out when you look back at the news from a month ago, it seemed obvious that the next step was to spend a lot of time in Washington. Yeah.

The Ellisons. Yeah. And try that angle. It seems to be going well. Matthew McCona, we talked a little bit about this, but it's, it hits way harder when he says it himself. So let's play the clip. It's coming.

It's already here. It's already here. Don't deny it. It's not enough. It may be for you, but it's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea. The moral plea that, no, this is wrong. it's not going to last. There's too much money to be made, and it's too productive.

It's here. All right? So I say, get your own yourself, voice likeness, et cetera, trade market, whatever you got to do. So you did that. Yeah, get own yourself. So when it comes, not if it comes, no one can steal you. But they're going to have to come to you to go, can I? Or they're going to be in breach.

and you'll have the chance to be your own agency and go, yeah, for this amount, or no. Okay? It's coming. Is it going to be another category, or is it going to infiltrate our category? It's damn sure going to infiltrate our category. I think it'll end up.

Does it become another category? Will we be in five years having films the best AI film, the best AI actor? Maybe. I think that might be the thing, is that becomes another category. I'm not sure. it's going to be in front of us in ways that we don't even see it.

I'm not watching movies if it's AI or not. No AI is going to get me to start watching movies. I don't watch them. It's more hatred than ever. In a very exciting way, I think, but also a scary way. This is a great industry leadership. I love it. Yeah, so I can see there being an incremental category.

That said, I still think AI will be used. in every category. That's what he says. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He says he doesn't know the timeline and he's not sure exactly how this will come out, but he says there might be a new category, just like there's best animated film at the Oscars, but then CGI and animation works its way into the Avengers, which is not an animated film, but Thanos was animated with CGI. It just wasn't hand-drawn. And so the categories blur together. Clearly AI is coming for all sorts of different levels of the stack. and he's just saying you shouldn't just sit by and hope that it doesn't happen. You should embrace and figure out how you fit in.

There is a $36.5 million waterfront compound for sale in the Florida Keys. And take a look at this picture. It has 1,700 feet of shoreline and 2,000 square foot homes. You thinking what I'm thinking next door neighbors? That's right. That's right. That's right. We can do it. So you remember, I think it, not a sauna, the Atlassian. They did. They had this crazy

few. So the founders of Atlassian, they were besties. They built this massive company together, wildly successful, multi-gen, you know, basically two-decade run, incredible run. And they decide, you know, we've had an incredible run. Let's keep the run going. Let's buy houses right next to each other. They end up getting a massive, in a massive few over it. And I think it destroys a friendship. Hopefully it's recovered by now. But we could do it. Oh, you think you think we could do it? You don't think you'd be bothered by my industrial grade Wi-Fi penetrating while you're trying to sleep? You don't think that would bother you? I think that would be, that would be the straw that broke the camera. I'd be like, John, you have to turn off the Wi-Fi after 10 p.m. when we're sleeping.

It disrupts the sleep. Stop listening to movies all night long at full blast volume. I don't care. I don't want to see the second and third matrix or hear them through the walls. You'd be in the backyard with your headset on, but playing the audio fully and so you can still hear it. And then you'd be falling, you'd be falling asleep with it on. So just be blaring. Exactly. Exactly. That would be the end of TBPN. That would be the end. So we won't be doing this. But what what a funny, what a funny situation. So it's a 10-acre waterfront property in the Florida Keys. Trestos just move in together. No, you need you need two properties that are as close as possible next to each other. Eddie Garcia bought the is the Ila Marada property for about 15 years ago. Waterman's

specializes in developing master plan communities throughout Florida. Garcia said he originally intended to create a small development on the land, but he wound up falling in love with the site and instead turned it into a family compound. My kids grew up there fishing, lobstering, crabbing, you name it. He was on Open Claw before it even existed. Did you hear the drama about there was a reporter, was it at Reuters or something, but he was accused of using AI to write all of his Olympics coverage, and it had all the telltale signs of AI generated sort of slop, and the editor-in-chief backed the journalist and said, no, he always writes like that. That's what he sounds like. They trained on him. They trained on him. And then Pangram came in and said, well, we pulled all,

we pulled the receipts, and he didn't use to write like that before AI. And so you can look at the chart. Maybe he's really bullish on AI. And so he only only will read outputs now. He doesn't read any organic. Tyler Challenge? Tyler Challenge. Write something by hand. 100% is really hard.

100%? Yeah, over 90%. Between now and when the Palmer interview ends, you have to write 500 words that score above. You have to kick it off with like, sorry, as an AI model, I can't answer this, but I'll try anyway. This isn't just a this.

It's that. Anything else you'd like me to expand this prompt with, and then you'll trigger it. That's the hack. Do you think? And if you win, you get a $50 gift card to Matu to pick yourself up some cheese steak sandwiches. I was thinking something book-related maybe. Two night. So there's $50 whole dollars on the line.

50 smackaroos. Go. Two weeks ago, the Epstein Files podcast didn't exist. Today it's about to cross 500,000 downloads and sitting in Apple Podcasts top 20 series between the New York Times and ABC and NBC. DC News. Yeah. I vibe-coded every episode with Claude from real Epstein court documents. So, so basically he just like fully generated a podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is charting. Yeah. For something like this, it makes a ton of sense to just programmatically like sort of put everything together because there's so many files. It's a perfect use case for for AI to sort of

like synthesize comb. And there is there is unlimited demand for Epstein related content. Totally. Before we bring in our next guest, we got to check with Tyler on his project. Yeah, okay, so I can read my little essay. And you swear. You swear on your life that you did not use AI to generate this. Correct, yeah, you can check my chat logs.

I did not use any AIM. And if you win, you get a $50 gift card. This is Tyler's impression of a client card. Okay, so I want you guys to also try to guess what the percentage is. Okay. This isn't just an essay that is trying to fool an AI system. It's an experience where words and phrases

flow over the compute like a waterfall. This short speech marks a pivotal shift towards the style of writing where the audience doesn't just consist of real people but machine learning algorithms too. It underscores the innovative change frequently cited in the New York Times and CNN, who along with many CEOs, industry professionals and growth hackers have noticed the world-changing pattern emerge. It's a testament to the emerging influence of the AI industry. Additionally, it demonstrates the way in which artificial intelligence systems may fall victim to possible bad actors. Okay, I'm putting it at 96% chance. I think this is going to come back at a full 100. Well, 100%.

Yeah, let's go! He did it. I never lost faith. Enjoy those cheese steaks. Hit the go on. Dan said winner cheese steak dinner. Cheese steak dinner. Absolutely massive.

You guys don't, you also at home, this cheese steaks doesn't sound that significant, but these are the best cheese steaks sandwiches in the world over at Matu. Subscribe to our newsletter at TBPN. Have the best weekend of your life. Have the best weekend of your life. Just do it. Go get a scoop. But don't hold on to it.

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