Dario Goes From SNL to White House, Some Personal Agent News, Mongo Got Zucked | Lo Toney, Zack London, Anish Acharya, Evan Conrad, Gstaad Guy

John Coogan (0:00)

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Today is Monday, September 28th, 2026 We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology.

Jordi Hays (0:09)

The Fortress of Finance.

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The Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more.

Let's check in on the road to Christmas. How many days we got? I think it's 87 days until Christmas. 87 days until Christmas.

Jordi Hays (0:28)

And you can feel it in your bones.

John Coogan (0:29)

You can. You can.

Jordi Hays (0:30)

You can.

John Coogan (0:31)

You can. Well, thank you for tuning in to TBPN today. We have a great show. We have a bunch of great guests coming on. It's been too long. It has been too long.

Just a couple more sleeps, but good to have everyone here with us in the chat. Anyway, the most viral video I saw over the weekend was the parody of Dario Amadei on SNL. That felt like it really took over the timeline. Martín Casado said, honestly downplayed how ridiculous the rhetoric and broader situation is. It was a funny clip. There were a bunch of interesting nuance. I mean, first it's like, okay, clearly the AI rhetoric in the public discourse is getting to a new height, to the point where a lab leader of a private company can even be parodied on SNL because the audience understands who that is. So it's interesting to see that, okay, Dario has done enough on Oprah and CNN and NBC and ABC and all the major news networks to be relevant to the broader audience.

Because it only really works, there's a lot of people in tech that we know that wouldn't work as SNL punching bags, but he's made it.

Jordi Hays (1:46)

It says a lot that the sweater vest thing is iconic enough to be a part of a character.

John Coogan (1:53)

I wonder if he'll stick with that or switch it up. Because it's not his leather jacket yet. It's not his Hawaiian t-shirt yet, but there is such value into leaning into a consistent thing. But I don't know. We'll see.

The interesting wrinkle here is that while Dario is at the point where he is enough of a name that they can do this bit and make jokes, and it's relevant to the SNL audience. Obviously, it went way more viral on X than I think it probably did on YouTube. But when Michael Che is introducing the segment, he stumbles over Dario's name a little bit. He's reading it from the cue cards and he says, this is Dario and then he pauses. It seems like maybe Dario Amadei is not Foley a household name in the SNL writers room yet, in the sense that they're like, okay, who is this guy? Let's look him up. Okay, get him on the cue cards. I don't know. Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but it felt like this was certainly like a crossing the chasm moment, like the first time everyone gets to know Dario. But very, very funny, and it really illuminates a little bit of like the complexity of the discourse, the irony of saying, you know, somebody's got to save me from me, basically. But let's play a little bit of it.

See what you think.

John Coogan (3:12)

You know, thanks for having me, Michael. I may have been alarming in my recent interviews, but I want to assure you that if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me.

Lo Toney (3:26)

Dario, can you just explain how your company isn't going to kill us?

John Coogan (3:30)

So, so, so, so, so, so.

John Coogan (3:36)

Not the most flattering depiction.

SPEAKER_5 (3:37)

That's a really hard question.

John Coogan (3:39)

It shouldn't be.

SPEAKER_5 (3:41)

So, you know, come on, Dario. Come on, Dario, you can do this.

John Coogan (3:48)

Isn't that an explicit reference to like the ring? Like Gollum, like where the voice is in the head?

SPEAKER_6 (3:53)

I mean, isn't that? AI is the devil and I its maker.

John Coogan (3:56)

What?

John Coogan (3:56)

It seems like it, right?

John Coogan (3:57)

No, well, so, look.

John Coogan (4:00)

AI is the devil and I its maker.

John Coogan (4:02)

Sam Altman, myself, all major AI players, we have talked about this extensively, and we are all on the same page here. We do not condone what we are doing.

John Coogan (4:11)

Yeah, it's very, very tough to thread the needle on this messaging.

John Coogan (4:17)