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We have a great show for you today, folks. It's Friday. Friday, May 22nd. We had our Wall Street Journal stolen from us. We only have the Financial Times today, but we're making do because we have a digital subscription as well. And we're going to take you through America's ipo. Boom. So three key stories that broke since we last spoke a mere 21 hours ago. So since we podcast for three hours and then we come back 21 hours
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later, we do it again.
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We do it again. Yesterday, Politico reported that David sacks made an 11th hour appeal to President Trump to spike an executive order that would have created a voluntary program. Voluntary program for Frontier AI companies to submit their models to the government for review 90 days before new model releases. I wonder what the benefit of that is. Obviously, it's good to have red teaming going on, good to have benchmarking, good to have other eyes on the project. There's some sort of liability that happens with the round thing on the table. No one in the TVP audience has ever seen this. Can you describe what this is, this round shaped argument?
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I'm not exactly sure what we're looking at, but I saw them talking about this on ESPN and people are always saying, you guys are like SportsCenter for business.
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You should pick one of these up. This object.
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So I had to check it out. This artifact.
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Brown oval object.
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Yes.
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Cool. Well, it looks fun.
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Anyways. I was having a little bit of fun earlier, throwing this.
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Grilling the gong.
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Grilling the gong. The production team didn't like it because there's this, you know, $70,000 massive flat screen TV next to the gong, as well as multiple cameras and lights over there, but no accidents.
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Wow. Mandate of heaven over there.
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Right.
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So for his part, Trump explained the last minute cancel by telling reporters, quote, I didn't like certain aspects of it. I think it gets in the way of dash. We're leading China, we're leading everybody. And I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that. The presumed text of the EO was leaked today. You can read it through this link.
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Tyler, have you checked in with Les Wrong?
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Yeah. How are they feeling about this?
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Yeah, I mean, I assume they're not happy with this. This seems to be like anti safety.
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Do they want more review from. From independent nonprofits for profit companies that are run by people with good intentions or the government, like democratically elected?
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I mean, I assume at some level it's. It's gotta be the government.
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Right?
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Because if you're super AGI pilled. These things are nuclear weapons.
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Yeah.
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It needs to be the government. But I think on the way there, people are definitely like, is there anyone who.
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Is there anyone who says like, no, no, no, actually like nuclear weapons are super important, but they shouldn't be regulated by the government. Because I don't like the government. I would rather my megacorp owns them, controls them. If you look at the approval rates for different organizations, there are plenty of companies that are polling above the US government. Like, people love Disney. Disney adults, they say, give Disney a nuclear weapon, they already have the rights to build a nuclear power plant. You know this.
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I did not.
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Disney World has like, you know, legacy rights because when they set up epcot, which is an acronym which I should look up because what does it stand for? It stands for something really cool. This also bridges into one of our, one of our future segments stands for what does EPCOT stand for? Experimental prototype. Community of Tomorrow. The idea was to build an entire city. It was the praxis of the, of its time. Yeah. And so in 1966, Walt Disney conceived it as, in 1966 as a utopian fully functioning city. And I believe this might just be viral clickbait. But they have the permission to build a nuclear reactor to power the city of the community of tomorrow. Epcot. Yeah. And so I don't know, maybe, maybe there's some folks out there that say we can't trust the government, we can't trust the Democrats, we can't trust the Republicans with the nuclear weapons. Give them to Disney. I don't know.
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I trust Bob with the nuclear weapons.
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I would trust Bob. The new guy. We got to meet him. We got to get to know him.
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That's right, Bob.
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He can.
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I've shook his hand. Yeah, I trust him.
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I trust his hand on the button. Second story highlighted by Brandon Gorrell in the TVPN newsletter. The Gorillinator in the TVPN newsletterinator account posted yesterday.
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He's sitting here with noise canceling headphones. He doesn't know talking about him.
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He's going to find this out later when he watches these clips anyway. And a non account posted yesterday that Microsoft had canceled its internal clogged code Brandon, after token based billing made the cost untenable. This catalyzed a ton of commentary and discourse around X box. CEO Aaron Levy, for example, used this post to argue that token price optimization is set to become a prevailing trend in companies reliant on LLMs. Worth noting though, that there's a proposed community note on the post right now that denies Microsoft made the move because of a cost issue. They have the money to spend billions on tokens if they want, but instead they are trying to shift the developers to use their own Copilot cli, which I imagine they're going to build their own harness, their fork of clog harness.
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I heard someone refer to it as they want to make the engineers eat dog food.
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Yes, but what's the dog food made of? It could be made. They're dog fooding GPT 5.5 tokens. It could be made of Opus 4 cycles.
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I do, I do think it, I
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guess they will be using.
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Yeah, I mean I think the reason that Codex and Claude Code and Cursor and these other tools have gotten so good is because the engineers building them are using them all day long. And it's one thing to use those tools to build your coding tool, but being forced to constantly use the product that you're shipping is a tried and true way to build a great product.
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Yeah. The third story from Brandon Grill in the TPPN newsletter. The American semiconductor manufacturer Micron announced that they've begun manufacturing one Alpha Dram, the most advanced memory ever produced in the United States at its Manassas, Virginia headquarters or manufacturing plant. This move comes in the middle of the agent boom in AI which requires longer context windows and thus memory than back and forth LLMs which has led to an industry wide memory shortage. Micron has been an absolute. Has been on a tear. Let's see what they're doing.
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800, almost $850 billion market cap remarkable.
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It's up 2% today, 3% over the last five days and 246% over the last six months. What an absolute run for Micron. It's up almost 1000% over the past year. Really, really incredible performance from Micron.
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Just wow.
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Anyway, America's going through a mini. This is such a funny article by the Wall Street Journal. America's IPO mini boom. How is this a mini boom? You got three of the.
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Is this not a gigaboom?
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This is a gigaboom. So I don't know if we have the truth on this, but it also made it to the front page of the Wall of the Financial times. They said SpaceX, OpenAI and anthropic IPOs set to ignite Wall street trading Frenzy NASDAQ loosens RUL could dump rival stocks Trillionaire prospect for Musk the blockbuster listings of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are set to prompt an unprecedented wave of Buying and selling as new fast entry rules thrust the tech stocks straight into Wall street indices, the rules implemented this month by Nasdaq, mean billions of dollars of passive money will automatically flow to the three companies when they go public, driving their share prices higher and forcing investors to sell rival stocks. Elon Musk SpaceX initial public offering next month is expected to be the largest on record, firing the starting gun on what US bankers will hope will be a blockbuster year. With OpenAI filing its IPO paperwork as soon as this week and Anthropic planning to float its shares too as well, the trio is set to raise tens of billions of dollars at a time of relentless investor appetite for companies linked to AI. The SpaceX listing will cement Musk's control of two of America's most valuable companies, SpaceX and Tesla. It is. It is crazy. We're going to need a new term for the Mag 7 because Tesla has been in the Mag 7. It's been north of $1 trillion for a long time. But SpaceX is going to go out at a higher valuation, almost certainly. Where is Tesla trading at today? In terms of market cap, it's at 1.34. Hard to imagine SpaceX trading below that. So you're going to have his Mag 7 company will be lagging his non Mag 7 company. We're going to need new terms. We're going to need a bigger boat. But why did the Wall Street Journal call this a mini boat? I think it's just because it's so concentrated on these three companies. But we will dig in and see where it goes. So too bad SpaceX and others didn't go public sooner. Agree, but they are a tribute to the US capitalist system, says the Wall Street Journal. Today's AI investor euphoria recalls the heady.com days of the 1990s, and it's hard to tell how these bets will shake out. SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are rushing to go public to take advantage of the favorable market conditions. But amid the eulogies written about American capitalism, The latest mini IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of US markets that no other country can match. SpaceX fired the starting gun. They're using the same language as the Financial Times over there. The starting gun has been fired. It's unanimous across the mainstream Media. The Rocket Company, founded in 2002, is a global leader in space exploration. Overnight success. It is also spread into broadband, mobile, mobile, satellite, Internet and data center development. Anthropic recently agreed to pay SpaceX 1.25 billion a month to use its data centers to train models. That shows how competitors can enjoy symbiotic relationships. SpaceX says the company as a whole reported a $4.9 billion net loss last year, some of which stemmed from its X.com social media platform. Can that be that much? I have to imagine that the losses were not. I mean, I don't know how much Twitter was losing before they, before the take private. I know that the revenues cratered a bit, but there were also big layoffs and an 80% reduction in cost. The sum word there is maybe doing some of the lifting. I imagine that the losses were sort of spread over all sorts of investments. You're building a new, a new starship rocket which is set to launch today. 5:30 Central Time. Tune in the last one.
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A critical launch, is it? No, it's just because of the timing. With the S1 and the IPO, I
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don't know, lies on, I think, I think the market is valuing the launch capabilities and SpaceX and Starship in particular is like one small piece of the, of the puzzle. You know, it's important but you know
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people are going to be paying way more attention to this.
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Yeah, like the investor people will be excited about it. But I think even just the, you know, endless spamming Falcon Nines can get starLink to what, $20 billion run rate or something, $10 billion run rate. You can, you can clearly build a business off of the existing capability. Lots of excitement around Starship. There was a little bit of like spice in the timeline from, you know, everyday Astronaut because he was sort of like rooting for a scrub and everyone was like, oh, he's like against SpaceX? But he was like, no. I was like, I'm such a fan that I wanted to be there in person. I couldn't be there in person. So I was like, I hope that they scrub because I want to be there for this historic moment. So a little bit of like a misconception there. SpaceX said in its filing that it foresees 28.5 trillion. Yes. Trillion in market opportunities, including data centers in space. Is anything more bullish than the future just being enterprise software? Like you paint this massive picture. We're going to Mars. How are we going to make Money? Enterprise software. 22 trillion of enterprise software.
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We're going to be automating workflows for
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the enterprise, I guess forever. Mr. Musk in January was awarded 1 billion performance based restricted shares that will vest if his company, quote, establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants. Do robots count as inhabitants? Do agents count?
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Isn't that one human quality? One of the potential.
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You gotta get a million. This is why he's.
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Wasn't there a list of like five or six things and he just has to do like four?
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I don't know. I haven't dug into that particular one. I know. For Tesla, there were a whole bunch of different milestones, though. Humanoid robots was one of the stretch goals. But permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants. That's exciting. That's a good goal. Like, that feels. I don't know that like a whole lot of enterprise software and a million people living on Mars. That's a vision I can get behind. I'm into that. I like it. What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO?
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IP sub.10 billion, right?
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Was it Tesla's Tesla 1.7? Whoa, one point. 1.7 billion? Yeah. Are you.
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Is that a market cap for.
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You got 1000x? If you just were a day one
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IPO believer, I mean, that's how you build a retail army.
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So SpaceX, I mean, million people on Mars, we could be looking at 1.7 quad, potentially. Anything's possible. I don't know. You get a thousand X from here. If we get to Mars, that's a big, big, big opportunity.
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That is so crazy that you could buy an Elon company in the public markets at less than a $2 billion market cap.
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And many people did not. I owned a little bit of Tesla at some point, but there were so many moments when it was like so wildly disconnected from other car companies or other. It was never a Warren Buffet buy. There were always good reasons not to buy it.
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Instead of going to high school, I just bought the Tesla IPO using the money I made from mowing lawn.
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You should have just been a lawnmower who DCA'd into Tesla the whole time. Probably be pretty retired right now. I mean, there's a lot of people that did that. There's a lot of people. There's also a lot of people that put money down to buy cars and then they didn't buy the stock and they're like, ah, the car depreciated and I should have bought the stock. Anyway, let's check in with the starship launch. Because SpaceX postponed the launch of the newly redesigned starship. But hardly a headline if it's just a one day postponing, because these things happen all the time. But it's completely redesigned. It's 400ft tall and it stood on the launch pad at the company's Starbase complex outside Brownville, Texas. But engineers had to troubleshoot problems that kept cropping up to the end of the countdown for the flight, according to a SpaceX livestream. SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk later said in a social media post that a hydraulic pin on part of the launch tower didn't function correctly. The company could try the flight Friday if the problem is fixed overnight. So they worked all night and they fixed the hydraulic pin on the launch tower. Wow. Talk about complex. The test mission was set to be the first flight for Starship V3. This is the third version redesigned SpaceX vehicle intended to deploy bigger satellites and one day help the company potentially settle Mars and mine asteroid. Starship is bigger and more powerful than any rocket ever built. The company has sketched out a future in which starship flies thousands of times per year. Of course, the Mechazilla tower, that grabs it, the chopsticks, that's very key to being able to stack these quickly. You can't rebuild all the infrastructure. The reusability is key to flying regularly. The rocket has yet to fly any customer satellites after three years of intense tests that we know of. The real conspiracy theorists. There's conspiracy theorists that think space is fake. Nothing's happening. They're not actually going. The satellites don't exist. And then there's other conspiracy theorists that think, oh yeah, when they crash, they're actually deploying secret satellites. And there's more stuff in space than we think. So pick your tinfoil hat. Theory will let you be the judge of what's really going on. SpaceX's growth plans depend on Starship. According to its IPO prospectus. The document filed Wednesday listed Starship first among the risk factors facing the company. Interesting. Okay, so a little bit more credit for you because I was like, it's not that big a deal. I care more about the data centers.
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Yeah. Just in the optic, think about like the optics and some investors are super, you know. Yeah.
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It is interesting. Like, clearly if SpaceX is listing Starship as the first risk factor, it means like, oh yeah, like colossus, like we're going to be able to do that. Like that's not that hard. We can, we can build a big data center they have and there's less of a risk factor of like, we're not going to be able to monetize that or we're not, you know, because there is, there are a group of investors out there that are saying like, oh, token Prices will collapse. GPU depreciation. It'll get blocked. There'll be a data center ban. Like, they won't be able to ramp up their terrestrial efforts.
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Like a, you know, catastrophic, you know, explosion.
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Be dramatic. There would.
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That would be, you know, potentially an omen that certain people would maybe looking into, but maybe. I have full faith.
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They estimated in its IPO filing Wednesday that it has spent $15 billion developing Starship. Well, that makes a lot of sense why there's losses if you've been investing this.
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E.J. d. Saul.
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Yeah. What's going on with.
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Slid to Elon's dm.
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Oh, yeah.
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In the bid to land lead left the ipo with banks jockeying to get their name first on the deal. For SpaceX's IPO, Solomon worked with staffers to message Musk directly. He's like, all right, guys, help me out here. How do I send a message on X? According to people familiar with the matter. So he's putting in the work.
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He also had.
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David says, wow, this is how you work for the bag at Goldman Sachs.
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David Solomon also had a piece in the New York Times saying that the AI apocalypse, NYT was overrated. AI is a job creator. David Solomon says. He says, I'm the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The AI job apocalypse is overblown. We'll see what he's saying in a couple of months. Ken Griffin sort of flipped. Although Ken Griffin hasn't gone as far to say that there's a job apocalypse. He was just saying that the models went from, like, slop to usable. But he hasn't actually opined on whether or not that will change Citadel's hiring plans or his view of the American.
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He also specifically said he was very excited that all of his software engineers were more efficient because he said there's no, like, cap on how much software.
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I was there. I was writing Visual Basic. It was brutal. I would have loved Codex and cloud code. I would have been. I would have been working for one minute a day instead of an hour a day.
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You could have had codecs back then, just like a private, private instance of it.
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Yes.
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You would be currently time traveling back
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in time just to become the most productive intern of all time is elite.
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That's something you would actually do.
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It would be so much fun. Maybe that's what the future will hold. Intern simulator. You get to go into VR and simulate being the most elite intern with time travel technology.
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Anyway, we talk about the World's Fair.
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Yes, we need to talk about the World's Fair. Tyler, you Gave this a read. World's Fairs. Has someone tried to bring these back? This feels like a tech, new media. We need a World's Fair thing. I could see this being something that someone tries to revive, although it'd probably be a lot of screens these days. But at the World's Fair of old, there were a lot of cool technologies, a lot of hardware, a lot of interesting exhibits, and we'll go through. I don't know how much you've studied the World Fair in the past, but the Wall Street Journal has been reflecting on the United States of America at 250 years with a whole bunch of articles that look back and contextualize American history. And we'll go through this one on the World's Fair right now. So among the groundbreaking innovations unveiled at US hosted exhibitions were the telephone, the Ferris wheel, and the electric and electric lighting. Ferris really crushed it on the naming thing. You know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Thomas Edison invented lighting mostly. Those guys did not bake their name into the product nearly as well as Ferris because it's capital F. And I believe Ferris is the one who invented the Ferris wheel anyway. Before splashy Silicon Valley product launches in the annual Consumer Electronics show, the world showcased its latest in innovations at high profile World's Fairs. These exhibits, held every few years beginning in London in 1851, gave countries a public platform to showcase new technologies, products and ideas that were going to reshape daily life. For host countries and cities. The World's Fairs or expositions were an opportunity to own the World's Fairs.
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Tyler is sharing project. The person that invented the Ferris wheel's full name was George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. That's pretty elite. That's an elite George Washington.
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George Washington.
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There's nothing stopping you from naming your child George Washington and then just slapping your own last name at the end.
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Yes, yes.
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I mean my George Washington Cosgrove.
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John Tyler was the 10th president.
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Oh, true. Yeah, there you go.
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That's my name.
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There we go.
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Okay. So many of the big expos were commemorative, says Paul Greenhall, a British historian and author of two books on World's Fairs and expositions. But all of them ended up doing something else. They changed the shape of cities. Much like the Olympics today, World's Fairs were large scale planning efforts and economic investments as much as cultural events. Cities competing competed for the right to host them. Chicago was able to redefine its image from a gritty second city to a cultural and architectural hub after defeating New York in the bid for the 1893 exposition. Here's a look at the US hosted World's Fairs that left the deepest mark.
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So Philadelphia, starting in Philly, 1876. You're not going to believe what was shown, what was celebrated. We had two key technologies, telephones and catch up.
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One was disrupted much faster than the other.
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Yep.
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I would say that the telephone has basically disappeared. The smartphone, text messaging, telephone's not doing well. It's on its last.
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IPhone might have really made gained grounds.
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No, catch up is still even ranch
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kind of went on a run. Yeah, really.
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Mustard. Ultimately, it's a compliment, not a substitute. There are very few people that say, oh, I don't need the ketchup at all.
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Just the mustard.
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Just the mustard, please. Most people I don't know, I do
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think mustard is better than ketchup.
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Than ketchup. Interesting.
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Yeah, you can believe that. America's first officially sanctioned world's fair, the Centennial International Exhibition, arrived when the country was still defining its place among industrial nations. Unlike earlier European fairs built around single monumental halls, the Philadelphia event spread across a vast park with hundreds of structures. It was sort of like the Coachella of its time. Among the most notable exhibits were the telephone. It was initially greeted with skepticism, but the potential of the cool contraption quickly drew attention. Once people realized what had been invented, it became clear how important it was. The fair also showcased Thomas Edison's automatic telegraph, as well as machinery such as the typewriter. Imagine you just create the automatic telegraph and then you go to launch it and demo it and somebody invents the telephone. Really? Really, dude. And consumer packaged goods such as Heinz tomato ketchup. It normalized the idea that private companies, innovators, and even governments could present their work side by side. Model that amplified the country's entrepreneurial culture. I Love that. Chicago, 1893. You're not going to believe it. You're not going to believe the two technologies that are.
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We got to call balls and strikes here. A little bit more underwhelming.
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Yeah, but I don't know. I think tell people what was.
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Tell people what was.
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Two key inventions last time. Remember, we created telephones and catch up. Right. And so fast following this with the next fair, we create the.
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No, no, no, no. It's not. Fast following 1876, the telephone.
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Almost 20 years later.
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Almost 20 years later, they're like, take off. We're so early. Telephone's cooking. What do we got?
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The Ferris wheel and popcorn.
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Popcorn is good. Ketchup before popcorn. Pretty good. Pretty good, but yeah. Ferris wheel. Ferris wheel.
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Imagine the hundreds of People that came there to demo their inventions.
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If you're in telephones pivot to Ferris wheels. There's a whole. There's a whole industry. Oh, yeah, Ferris wheel. That'll destroy the telephone. You gotta get out on the Ferris wheel. It's the new thing.
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Well, it is sort of funny.
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Total stagnation on the phone.
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It is sort of funny that like in, like if you were to look back, if we had a World's Fair, you'd have like creatine gummies and like AGI.
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Exactly.
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So in 1893, they had the Ferris wheel and popcorn. And then you fast forward to today. It's like we found a way to put one of the micronutrients in steak into a candy shaped supplement. And we need you to eat four or five of these a day. Forever.
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2020 World's Fair. We have rockets that land and we also have all birds. All birds. What else came out? That was very silly. Bored apes. We've invented bored apes.
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Skims. Shapewear.
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Shapewear and GLP1s. Somewhat related. I don't know.
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Buffalo, New York, 1901. Okay, an electric city.
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This seems pretty elite. This is pretty huge. 1901.
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Though remembered mostly as the location where President William McKinley was shot, he died a week later. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was meant to showcase.
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He was shot.
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He was shot at the World Fair.
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That's crazy. Fact check that. Buffalo's Pan American Exposition was meant to showcase America's dominance and innovation in electrical power and infrastructure. The fair featured electric lighting and electric streetcars powered by hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls, reflecting a moment when electricity was beginning to move from novelty towards widespread utility.
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Okay, so this is 1901.
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1901.
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And remember, in 1876, we created the telephone. And you fast forward to the next event in St. Louis in 1904. You're not gonna believe what we remember. The 1904 World's Fair.
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In years. We created electricity and they're like, we got something better.
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What do we do? We now know this World's Fair as a snack food extravaganza.
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It's really just AGI and creatine gummies.
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It was sort of a Cambrian explosion of snacking.
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Yeah, I mean, this is the nature of our show. It's like cerebras and groons. Like, this is actually what happens in America. Brown.
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The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was among the largest ever staged and nearly obliterated the city's finances. Still, its pop culture influence endures. The exposition popularized a host of snack foods that would become Staples of American life, including ice cream cones, peanut butter. Oh, my. They went on an insane run right here. Ice cream cones, peanut butter, hot dogs, hamburgers, and cotton candy. Elite. While the foods weren't all invented for the fair, their widespread availability there, like, it's so funny. So people are coming there again to share their actual innovations. And then, like, snacks had just come online. And so you can imagine, like, it just turns into a snack comp, where everyone's just snacking like crazy. They're like, wait, we have hot. You can go to a hot dog stand, and then you can go get cotton candy in one place. You gotta be kidding me. Fast forward. 1962 Seattle Space Race. The space race.
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That's exciting.
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The World's fair. By the mid 20th century, the world's Fairs had become games of one upsmanship. I like that. And geopolitical rivalry feels like where we're at Today. Seattle's Century 21 Exposition took place in the shadow of the Cold War, following the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik and the world's first artificial earth satellite. The Soviets turned down an invitation. They turned down.
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Turn it down.
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Turn it down. The federal government became deeply involved. There was a sense that America needed to demonstrate technological leadership. The Space Needle was constructed for the fair.
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I recently saw the inside of the Space Needle because. Wait, no, that's not the Space Needle. It's the Toronto version of the Space Needle. Because didn't Drake film a music video inside of it?
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He iced it out.
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Oh, he did. He made it ice blue because he's Iceman or something. That's the name of the album. And inside, you can see all of the broadcasting equipment. And there's these huge radio dishes inside. It's very cool.
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Anyway, fast forward just a few years. Couple years.
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This one.
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You're not gonna believe what. You're not gonna believe what they created, what they announced at this World's Fair.
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64.
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They invent 1964. More than just under a hundred years since the telephone was invented. We invented punch cards, punch cards, which. Which feel like a kind of early version of enterprise software in some way.
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True.
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World's Fair, Flushing Meadows in New York City. Yes, visitors were dazzled by color television demonstration and the PicturePhone, an early video calling system.
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They had FaceTime. Yeah. This is sick.
B
This is crazy.
C
I can't believe.
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When I told Jordy 64 they invented FaceTime, he was like, did it use mirrors? And he thought it was just a periscope.
B
Just a mirror that you look at.
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No, no, no, it's like a series of mirrors that bounce my image across. Like, so you can be in the other room and you can see me and talk. No, no. They had full video calling, I guess at and T's PicturePhone, which added video to telephone calls.
C
Yeah. So it cost $16 for a three minute call. That's $121 today's money.
A
That's expensive. Yeah. $40 token maxing. I wonder if, I wonder if there were CEOs at the time who were like, we need. We need to be. If you're not. If you're making $10 a year and you're not spending $20 a year on your picture phone, you're not going to have.
B
I wonder if they were talking about Jevons Paradox.
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Yes, probably. I don't know.
B
The last officially sanctioned World's fair in the US was hosted in New Orleans in 1984. And it produced no truly defining technological debut.
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Stagnation Theory. Undefeated. Brutal. By that point of World's Fairs had largely migrated elsewhere to museums, television, theme parks and technology conference. As a result, the World's Fair concept gradually faded. Putting on an expo is a lost art, the author says, but when America needed it, no one did it better. Yeah, so there was a little push.
B
You could bring something like this back, but I feel like it would end up being like to attack conference, you
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know, I wanted to talk about the robotic legs, the exoskeletons. Would you rock these or would you be sitting it out? The Hypershell X Ultra S is an exoskeleton that the Wall Street Journal demoed.
B
Thousand watt hips.
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Thousand watt hips. You wear these and they help you hike and run up hills. I listen to too many shows with Paul Merlachi where he talks about the capability of an Iron man suit potentially just ripping you apart. And so I would be a little afraid, but I might give it a try.
B
Also imagine, you know, bad actor. Remember all the DJI drones had like a backdoor.
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Oh, yeah.
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Bad actor takes over your start dancing and then it makes you Michael Jackson badly in front of your peers.
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Potentially. Potentially.
B
Could be wildly embarrassing.
A
Also Catl. Catl, the Chinese EV battery giant is investing in Deepseek. Some big rounds going on. Also byd.
B
I was waking up, remember, remember? Oh, yeah.
A
This is what AI 2020. They predicted that BYD would get an F1 team.
B
That's right.
A
Which is what's happening. Which is what's happening. At least they're in talks. BYD is in talks with Christian Horner over entering F1. That would be pretty crazy. Does BYD have any gas powered ice engines? I don't know.
B
They're about to.
A
They're about to. Who knows what else is going on. Go have fun. We'll see you Tuesday. Have a good rest of your day. Have a great weekend. Leave us five stars on Apple, PodC and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tvpn.com it's been an honor and we will see you tomorrow Tuesday.
B
We love you.
A
Goodbye.
Episode: IPO Giga Boom, World’s Fairs of the Past | Diet TBPN
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Date: May 22, 2026
Runtime: ~33 minutes
(All times below are MM:SS)
In this episode, John Coogan and Jordi Hays cover the breaking tech and business news of the day—focusing on the current American IPO "gigaboom" led by companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, the importance of regulatory moves in AI, and reflections on the historic impact of World's Fairs in shaping American innovation. The hosts deliver a fast-paced, humorous, and insightful discussion, mixing sharp market analysis with analogies to past technological revolutions (and snacks).
Philadelphia 1876:
Chicago 1893:
Buffalo 1901:
St. Louis 1904:
Seattle 1962:
New York 1964:
New Orleans 1984:
The episode captures a pivotal moment in tech markets, juxtaposing today’s AI- and space-driven IPO boom with the long tradition of public innovation showcased at the World's Fair. Through witty banter and historical parallels, Coogan and Hays both celebrate and satirize America’s ongoing quest for the future—be it on Wall Street or the snack aisle.