High Interest Rate Phenomenon, Driscoll's China Bet Backfires, Who Votes on AI Safety? | Stephen Colbert & Josh Kline, Jim VandeHei, Steve Menneto, Matthew Wilson, Rune Kvist, Tyler Bahl, James Cadwallader

Jordi Hays (0:00)

You're watching TBPN.

John Coogan (0:01)

Today is Tuesday, September 15th, 2026 We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

Jordi Hays (0:11)

It's been too long, John. It's great to be back.

John Coogan (0:13)

It's great to be back. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

Eric Gleiman had to issue an apology to...

Jordi Hays (0:27)

Absolutely nobody.

John Coogan (0:29)

No, no, you didn't see this?

Yeah, no, Eric Gleiman had to issue an apology to the United Kingdom, to the residents of the UK, because they've been waiting so long for ramp, and ramp expanded into the UK. But now he's going to have to issue an apology to me, because that's a pretty un-American thing to do, honestly. Let's keep our fintechs domestic, in my opinion. I don't know why we need to be going over there and doing business.

Jordi Hays (0:52)

International expansion.

John Coogan (0:53)

Yeah, not a fan of it. Not a fan. No. Congratulations to the whole team. Going global, taking over the world. Very exciting stuff.

Well, the top thing on my mind today is figuring out what's going on with interest rates, the high interest rate phenomenon. We had zero interest rate policy, ZERP, the ZERP era ended. Now we're in the HIRP. I don't think we should say that one. That doesn't sound very good. But the high interest rate policy is and the high interest rate phenomenons are upon us.

What's going on? It's very obvious what's going on. Take one look at the chart. It's the war. You can see the US attacks Iran in the beginning of 2026 Interest rates are low. We should pull up this chart from the Wall Street Journal. It gets more dramatic every time they show this chart. This one right here, Jordi.

Take a wild guess. What's driving interest rates? It is, of course, the war, which starts there, and then boom, up and to the right from then on. But there's other questions about what's going on. Is AI, is the buildout having an effect here? What else is going on within this data? Why is it happening? And does war always lead to higher interest rates? That was something that was on my mind, so I wanted to get into that. It's obviously bad for everyone. It's bad for the US government because they have to refinance debt and pay interest, and that puts stress on all the other things that the government wants to do with money, from healthcare, pensions, even funding the military. Like, if they're paying interest, they're not paying for other stuff. That's not good. Bad for the prospects of the American homebuyer. Interest rates are now above 7%, getting very unaffordable for lots of people. And also a lot of mortgages are rolling over, so the era of the 3% mortgage, less and less people still have those because people are either moving on to floating rate mortgages or moving out of interest locked periods. There's a whole bunch of dynamics there. And it's even bad for AI companies. So everyone hates those because the AI companies, of course, even though they have an ungodly amount of money, they need to raise more money to finance build out and finance data centers and finance expansion. And so not good for anyone. How do you get out of it? Maybe end the war, but there are other things at work.

This war is unique. I mean, it's not that war causes interest rates to go up. It's war causes energy shortages, which causes inflation and inflation bleeds into everything. So pain at the pump turns into, I need a raise for this. I need to raise prices on food. I need to raise prices on all sorts of things. Energy is of course a key input into everything. Why I am so against pacing the energy rollout. Like every year for the past like 10 years, the, I forget what it is, the IEA or something.

There is a body that forecasts energy buildout, specifically in solar. And they have gotten it wrong every year for 10 years. They have underestimated the growth of solar. You have seen this chart, right?

Jordi Hays (3:57)

The International Energy Agency.

John Coogan (3:59)

Is that it? Yeah. IEA. Yeah. So every year they will be like, okay, we had a great year last year.

We are going parabolic. We are up and to the right. But clearly we are not going to build more solar. People are going to get sick of this stuff. And then the next year we build even more solar than we predicted. And so you can look at this chart of the predictions and then how we blow them out. So that is something that we want to clearly keep working on because it will bring down inflation, bring down costs of basically everything. It will be very deflationary. And it will allow us to do all sorts of new things. But this war is specifically driving energy prices because of course oil transported through the Strait of Hormuz is a key pressure point for control of the conflict. And that drives up inflation, which hurts the value of treasury bonds, causing yields to spike. And so that's why they're above 5%. It's the first time, I believe, since 2007 that they've been this high. So not good. It doesn't always go this way, though. I wanted to understand, does war or war, even just war in the Middle East, does that always cause interest rates to spike? It makes sense. It's an expensive thing. It's a capital suck. It's depressing in many, many ways. There's a whole bunch of economic reasons why you could think that war would cause interest rates to spike, but does that always happen? So during Gulf War I, which I didn't realize this, but we have a son of a veteran on our team.