Travis Kalanick Joins, Spotify CEO, Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks, xAI Rebuild, Apple Faces Slop Allegations

**Jordi Hays** (0:00)
You're watching TBPN.

**John Coogan** (0:01)
Today is Friday, March 13th, 2026 We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology.

**Jordi Hays** (0:07)
The fortress of finance.

**John Coogan** (0:08)
The capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place.

**Jordi Hays** (0:16)
Boy, is it good to be back.

**John Coogan** (0:18)
It's great to be back, but it's Friday the 13th, so you know what you gotta do. Salt over the left shoulder. Oh yeah? You know about this?

**Jordi Hays** (0:26)
I didn't, I didn't.

**John Coogan** (0:27)
Throwing salt over your left shoulder is good luck. It counteracts bad luck, Friday the 13th, obviously bad luck, but not anymore since we have salt thrown over our shoulder.

**Jordi Hays** (0:36)
Good hack.

**John Coogan** (0:36)
I was very interested in Patrick Hollison's post. We talked about this a little bit. He says, there's a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency. We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations, but not the others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There's even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors. We get it. You want a bunch of palace intrigue stories about Stripe. We get it, Patrick.
No, Stripe has not ever really been in the tumultuous drama of horse race. There's been investors who have talked about various valuations. But overall, the company has been smooth sailing for almost two decades. But I wanted to think about this more in the context of other countries startup ecosystems and also-

**Jordi Hays** (1:37)
Yeah, the closest they ever got to drama was around the bolt fast dynamic.

**John Coogan** (1:44)
That's right.

**Jordi Hays** (1:44)
Because they backed fast.

**John Coogan** (1:46)
Yeah, you're right. There was a little bit.

**Jordi Hays** (1:48)
Seemingly because they felt some competitive pressure there. They wanted the fast checkout provider to be running on stripe. Bolt was famously not. They had built their own payment rails.

**John Coogan** (2:02)
But I mean, the Cullison brothers are just so class. They're such class acts that they don't really wade around in the mud. They don't roll around in the slob farm. And it's a B2B company. So there's less just general viral intrigue around it.

**Jordi Hays** (2:17)
And even in that whole saga, you never saw a single comment.

**John Coogan** (2:21)
No, no, no, and they weren't taking shots at anyone. They were very classy. What do you think?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:25)
I mean, there was some controversy when the, you know, cheeky pint Elon interview came out and John Cullison, you know, how many Guinnesses were they drinking?

**John Coogan** (2:33)
Okay, okay. That was a bit of palace intrigue. How many cheeky pints are they drinking in the palace?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:38)
We're getting somewhere. I mean, John did come out on top of that, right?

**John Coogan** (2:40)
He did.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:41)
He did.

**John Coogan** (2:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He explained, he explained, so. But so years ago, I was talking to an American VC about New Zealand and I asked him about the startup community. The country was beautiful, he said. Highly developed, democratic, it consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy and well-governed societies. And he was spending a lot of time there. I was like, there's got to be some company that can break out and become a power law company. If you're going to be there spending a lot of time, you'll probably meet cool people, interesting people. Maybe there will be a great New Zealand company that comes out of this. And he was like, I'm not so sure because his assessment distilled down to something along the lines of, they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome. So what is tall poppy syndrome? Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked, or socially cut down because they stand above the others in the crowd. The metaphor should be obvious. When you cut the tallest flowers in a field, the surface appears even.

**Jordi Hays** (3:40)
Let's pull up Tyler for a second.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:43)
Why?

**John Coogan** (3:45)
What is that?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:46)
There we go.

**John Coogan** (3:47)
He's a tall poppy. He's getting cut. So anthropologists often call this leveling behavior, and it goes back to hunter-gatherer societies. Good hunters might be mocked or discouraged from bragging. Sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration. And there's nothing bad about a preference for humility. America has long been suspicious, and Americans have long been suspicious of the Lamborghini driving self-promotional Instagram course hustlers. And for good reason, those folks are usually selling overpriced junk food, basically. But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome does lead to lower startup formation. If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go out and hunt. You actually don't go out and bring back the big deer or whatever you're hunting. The bacon. Yeah, you don't bring home the bacon in the first place. You don't even trot because you're so worried about this tall poppy syndrome in your society. So you wind up with lower startup formation, fewer truly scaled companies, less like aggressive growth plans, and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain, and that's what's happened in a lot of developed, wealthy, stable countries that haven't created amazing new products, really bold entrepreneurship efforts. A lot of it's because of the tall poppy syndrome. So America's never had this problem. And I don't actually think we're that close to developing a crippling case of tall poppy syndrome any time soon, but it's worth understanding how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative in tech. So there's this unevenness that Patrick Collison identifies around internal drama, attention. It does not seem correlated with market cap at stake, or even how well known certain founders are at the time that something's happening that could be dramatic. So I was thinking back to Elon Musk in Tesla.